I came across an interview with Seth Godin on Wired. One of the key points in the article he makes is:
Wired: How do you put your tribe ahead of others in a land of too many choices and too many other things vying for attention?
SG: The leadership today is about 10 people bringing you 100 and 100 bringing you 1,000. When you have 1,000 true fans, as Kevin Kelly talks about, then they’re the people who are going to turn it into a movement. Not you. Your job is to take care of and feed and nurture those 1,000 people, and those people need to go to their network of people who know them and trust them, who eat dinner with them, and bring them in. It’s not for you to somehow beam your message to strangers and convert them, because you can’t convert strangers anymore. Not one major new consumer brand built in the last five years was built on the back of advertising. Google and Facebook, etc. are built because one person brought another one by the hand, not because someone bought ads on the Super Bowl.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, Seth has the right idea that tribes form with or without us. The key is to support the tribe and enable them to work for you.
One company that I think has done a great job of this is Campbell’s with their MVC program. David Allard and his team has done a great job bringing the tools to the tribe to make this campaign successful.
