TribalWorks

It is good to read Mary Maddever’s editorial in April’s Strategy Magazine.  The following line I think eloquently summarizes the editorial.

So when the budget for talking louder than the other guy dries up, it’s a good time to find new ways to make those lasting connections, and try something different.

Now of course, as frequent readers of this blog would know, there is more to it than just socializing.  In order to really make the connections, your whole organization must be geared towards it.  Coincidentally, in the editorial, Mary highlights an example within the article on the Nissan Cube.

In the Upfronts (p. 9) we have a fresh example of breaking new ground in the recession-budget-friendly, social-media-only launch of Nissan’s Cube. It involves giving away 50 cars to indie creative types - musicians, artists, skateboarders - via an online audition and voting process, which invites that community to lead the conversation on what the brand represents. And it’s working. Prior to the invite-only auditions, people jumped the gun and started declaring their Cube love online.

Capital C’s Tony Chapman, whose agency suggested the social launch, says, “This is the stuff people should be doing on their watch. So much depends on Canadian clients not phoning it in. When you get a client who can sell it through and stick their neck on the line in the success of it, they’ve got the world’s eyes on Canada. We’re saying ’stop advertising, start socializing.’”

CD Bennett Klein gives credit to Nissan for embracing the extreme creativity route and ponying up 50 cars. “If it means something to the community, it’s going to work.” He also says moving from “understanding to empathy” requires a little more interaction than sitting on the other side of the mirror, but has bigger insight payoffs.

However, in our previous post, we highlighted the key problem with not truly understanding and supporting the tribe.  No amount of social media can change the fact that the real tailgate opens sideways.

I am glad to see more attention is being brought forward on connecting with the tribe, but lets start to take it to the next level.

I read this interesting article about Marketing to the tribe.  One of the things that caught my attention was the following statement:

TOTO’s popularity continues unabated. Clearly, this has to do with more than just good taste and high prices. TOTO has gotten its brand tribe members to completely buy into its way of shopping.

In my opinion, this is the opposite to how a Tribal Strategy should be viewed.  All too often, people are looking for ways to somehow influence the tribe to change what they do or to buy into something.  Instead, the focus should be on how your brand can support the tribe.

In early posts I talked about the strong us vs. them dynamic within tribes.  The one post which demonstrated this was when I talked about Bills fans vs. CFL fans.

Here is why some Canadian Football League fans hate Rogers Communications…

Background:  For those of you who don’t know, Rogers Communications Inc (RCI) is one of Canada’s largest providers of cable, high-speed internet and cellular phones.  In addition, they own other properties such as the Toronto Blue Jays and the Rogers Centre. 

Here are a few reasons why many CFL fans hate RCI:

• For many years Ted Rogers (its late founder) was a strong proponent of bringing and NFL team (possibly relocating the Buffalo Bills) to Toronto.  
• RCI is no longer a CFL sponsor.  RCI was paying the CFL approximately $250,000 per year to sponsor their weekly/monthly/annual awards.  However, in June 2008, the CFL and RCI could not come to an agreement to renew their contract.  According to some reports, the CFL was looking at getting $750,000 per year while Rogers was only willing to pay $350,000.
• Rogers also signed a significant deal to bring the Buffalo Bills to Toronto for their Bills In Toronto series.
• The Toronto Argonauts play in the Rogers Centre - which many CFL fans detest as being a poor facility.
• Rogers also owns the Toronto Blue Jays - some CFL fans also view them as a threat (i.e. people will spend their entertainment dollar on the Jays instead of the Argonauts).

This ‘hate’ has resulted in some potentially real and economically damaging (for RCI) activities.  I stumbled upon some posts at the popular CFL fan site 13thman.com.  Here is a sample of some of the anti-RCI comments from a few people.

In support of the CFL, I’ve switched carriers from Rogers to Telus and have taken a hammer to my old phone.

I no longer pay for any Rogers services. Bell is no great hell either, but at least they’re not trying to harm the CFL. Hit Rogers where it hurts!

I guess it’s at times like this I wish I was with Rogers to I could dump them.

would everyone still be ok with the fact I want to name my son Roger though, as long as its not connected with the company.

too bad though, Rogers was a big supporter of the CFL back when I started watching in 03, what happened???

There you have it!

Looking at the three winners from this week’s Idol show, there was one thing that was common among all three - they had a differentiated personal story.

Danny Gokey, Michael Sarver and Alexis Grace each had their own unique story which the audience and voters could connect with.  In my opinion the performances of Anoop Desai, Tatiana Nicole Del Toro and Ricky Braddy were on par if not better than Danny or Michael’s (Alexis was in my mind the clear number one).

Each story connected with people differently and made these contestants feel more human than their counterparts.

Danny Gokey, 28 - Lost his wife just 4 weeks prior to the auditions

Michael Sarver, 27 - Works as a roughneck on a Texas oil rig and wants to provide more to his wife and two children

Alexis Grace, 21 - While her fiance is away overseas she takes care of her young daughter

The lesson for organizations is to try and have a believable and compelling story for your company, product or brand…you will be remembered for it.

It is no secret that companies are looking to cut budgets this year to offset the effect of the slow economy. However, is this sending the right message out? Gregory Will of PricewaterhouseCoopers says,

“One lesson from the survivors of the downturn of the early 1990s is not to slash marketing and advertising or research and development. Customers will always look for confident companies. If regular advertising or marketing stops suddenly, companies lose sales by not being front of mind and they undermine confidence. Advertising signals to the market that all is going well and there will be no issues.”

The best option for marketers going forward is to ensure that each dollar of ad spend is being used to effectively start a conversation with their most valuable consumers. Word-of-mouth could be the best promotional strategy in a time where consumers, wary of new products or services, are tightening purse strings.

A 2009 Reardon Smith Whittaker Agency Report showed that of 246 advertising agency executives, only 20% considered traditional media (TV, Print ads, Banners etc.) to be a good marketing choice going forward. 80% of the executives were interested in web, viral, mobile, SEO and Word-of-mouth for 2009. These are channels most frequented by today’s consumers, yet are highly underestimated for effectiveness in reach. Marketers need to keep up with their consumers in order to maintain their brand image – and the best way to do so is to give some control to their consumers over where the brand should go. However, marketing executives must realize that these advertising avenues are not ones that can be ‘bought’ – most often, they must be user-generated.

A tribal approach can generate buzz with little additional marketing spend in every one of the 5 areas outlined above. In addition, it ensures that a conversation between you and your consumers are taking place, and can help you gain valuable feedback to work with.

 Are you reaching your tribe?

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.

The advertising world has a little problem.  It is getting harder to get to grab the attention of people.

Advertisers and media companies need to look at multi-channel strategies to reach multi-tasking Canadians, according to a study by Ipsos Reid.

The study, entitled “Online Media: All Change,” found that nearly half of Canadians (44%) are watching TV or listening to the radio while surfing the net.

On average, online Canadians spend almost equal amounts of time watching TV and surfing the net—approximately 15 hours each week.

Advertisers and media companies must develop multi-channel strategies and standout creative to capture consumer attention, said Mark Laver, study author and associate vice-president of Ipsos Reid.

“When we’ve got people multi-tasking, I have to question if the advertising message is getting through at all,” he said. “From an ad perspective, you’ve really got to come through with some creative, unique advertising to capture people’s attention if they’re doing two things at once.”

Here lies the difference in philosophy between traditional marketing and the Tribal Approach.

While traditional marketing finds new and creative ways to interrupt a person, the Tribal Approach finds creative ways to support the person and the tribe.  Traditional marketing has a diminishing effect on the person.  For example, a TV ad may seem clever at first, but each subsequent time a viewer sees it, the effect is diminished.  

Likewise, the diminishing effect can occur through the life-cycle of a technology.  Internet advertising was very simple in the beginning; just banner ads.  People thought ‘Wow! That’s cool’.  But then people started to ignore them, thus advertisers brought in pop-up ads to grab the attention of the surfer.  However, soon people were annoyed by them.  In fact, an industry was created to find new ways to block these ads.  Shoshkeles (floating ad’s) were cool at first, but they too were a nuisance…and so it goes.

The modus operendi has become one of continually out duelling your competitor by coming out with more creative content while trying to develop innovative technologies.  While there is plenty of benefit to the advertising industry, there is something left to be desired by the consumers.

Advertisers, marketers and brand managers should instead focus on orchestrating the various tools around them to ensure they are doing what is best to support their consumers and the tribe.

Back before the internet was around Dagmar Kanzlerwould have assembled a protest, instead she is encouraging others to join a Facebook group demonstrating anger towards a 10-week old strike at York University in Toronto.

Ms. Kanzler is making a few points on behalf of the 50,000 York students whose classes were interrupted 10 weeks ago with no sign yet of when they will resume. She wants classes to resume as quickly as possible and a way found to complete the academic year without extending it to the summer. And, oh, she has something to say to parents who are contemplating sending their children to York.

“If I was talking to another parent face-to-face, I would say really think long and hard about York before deciding to send your kid there,” she said.

This is just another example of how an anti-tribe can form with the right (or wrong) conditions.  Facebook merely makes it easier for people to connect and share their anger.

Yahoo has announced that it will be rolling out its new social media features.

With the additions announced Monday, Yahoo’s roughly 275 million e-mail users will have the option of setting up their accounts so they can highlight communications from other people with whom they have formed an online connection.

The concept mirrors a premise that has turned privately held Facebook and News Corp.’s MySpace into two of the web’s hot spots for socializing over the past three years—a period that has coincided with a wrenching downturn at Yahoo.

Yahoo also is copying Facebook and MySpace by opening its e-mail service to applications created by outside programmers. In a test that started Monday among a small number of e-mail users, Yahoo began offering applications developed for finding photos stored in their mailboxes, transferring information to blogs, and sharing tips about movies.

The changes will turn Yahoo’s e-mail service into a “scrapbook for your life,” said John Kremer, a company vice-president. “We hope opening up Yahoo mail will have a game-changing influence on the industry.”

Yahoo has declined from a leader to a follower in the online services space.  They have been beaten by competitors, most notably Google, in almost all areas of their business.

It is still too early to say whether or not this new feature will pay off for shareholders.  But as discussed in our post on Social Media Sites - Should I Build or Rent? there are a few criteria which one can use to determine the likelihood of success.

In this case I think it made sense for OS to go ahead and build their own since they have become a key online rallying point for the sports gaming tribe:

• Operation Sports has been around for about 10 years and they have built up a substantial member base (There are almost 800 member online at this moment)
• OS focuses on a specific interest, thus they quickly became the number one destination for enthusiasts.
• The existing site already had very active discussion forums thus enabling them to more safely take this risk

 The key questions Yahoo should be asking are:

• Is the market too saturated with players such as Facebook, MySpace and boutique social networking sites for us to profitably get to critical mass?
• What is Yahoo’s proposition?  What can we do that no other site can do?
• Can Yahoo make it easy for people to find their tribes on our site and make it easy for them to interact?

Operation Sports is a leading online community dedicated to sports video game enthusiasts.  As a member of the community myself, I got an email announcing the launch of their own social media site called the OS Arena.

As soon as you login you’ll immediately gain access to:

• your own customizable trading card
• stats tracking and your own OVR (Overall Rating)
• your own blog
• friends lists
• video albums for all of your videos from EA Sports World, 2K Sports Community, Youtube etc.
• screenshot albums
• comments and messages on your chalkboard
• customizable backgrounds allowing you to give your Arena its own unique style
• your own unique address at operationsports.com/username/

And this is just the beginning. Over the coming months we will be adding exciting new features designed to expand your sports gaming experience.

This brings up the question about whether or not an organization should try to build its own social media site (as it is in this case) or tap into existing media such as Facebook or MySpace.  The answer is, it depends. 

In this case I think it made sense for OS to go ahead and build their own since they have become a key online rallying point for the sports gaming tribe:

• Operation Sports has been around for about 10 years and they have built up a substantial member base (There are almost 800 member online at this moment)
• OS focuses on a specific interest, thus they quickly became the number one destination for enthusiasts.
• The existing site already had very active discussion forums thus enabling them to more safely take this risk

A critical mistake many make is building the tool before understanding whether or not it is relevant for your tribe.  Often times using existing media may be more appropriate.  Ultimately, you truly need to understand your tribe before proceeding.