Can you remember back in the days, those younger years, before kids, before a house, early in your career?  I still can (I’m getting old but my memory is still mostly intact).  Those were the days when you moved a couple times a year – too a new university apartment, then home, then to a first job apartment, then a better one, and another better one.  Remember how much fun it was to move all of your stuff, especially the heavy, hand-me-down couch and the waterbed?  Sure, your back probably held out much better than it does now but I bet you always hoped you had a friend or two willing to help out, to lighten the load.

Image Credit - Ken_Mayer via Flickr

When it comes to investing in your brand’s community having friends to help lighten the load in times of crisis can be a welcome sight.  Yes, just like friends, you don’t invest in relationships solely for the purpose of having people around to help you when you need an extra set of hands.  However, friends sure are a blessing when the time does come.  For a brand, it’s important to start investing in your community now, not when you end up with a full blown, social-media-fueled crisis staring you down.

Like friends, your community gets to know you over time.  They develop a relationship with you (as a person, not a logo).  You both look for ways to help each other out, sometimes when asked, but often proactively – which of course makes it even more appreciated.  You develop mutual trust and understanding and an interest in each others lives.  You care about each others’ success.

And so when some great news does come up for a community member you want to share it.  Same goes when you have something cool to share as well.  And if your brand suffers a major crisis, your community will care and want to know what’s up.   They will want to know the facts and how can they help.  Because after all, that’s what friends are for.

Have you seen examples recently where a brand’s investment in their community could have helped them with some heavy lifting?

Customers have always talked amongst each other since the dawn of time.  But since the advent of social media the ease at which they can share has dramatically changed.  Customers are now publishers.  Customers not only consume traditional media but content from social media as well.  What customers want and expect from companies has changed.  But the question is: has your customer service approach changed to reflect this?

I was asked to submit a few words for an e-book on the subject by a good friend, Brent Leary. The book was part of an initiative by The Social Customer, a social network on social business run by the folks at Social Media Today.  Brent also invited quite a roster of folks to give their thoughts on the subject including: Chris Brogan, Julien Smith, Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, Frank Eliason, Kevin Ryan, and Scott Rogers to name a few.

The e-book is free and can be downloaded here.

Do you agree that business needs to adjust to serve the new social customer?

In the past your audience was a collection of single entities – segmented into target markets of your desire, seemingly group under your definition and under your infinite control. Every now and then you would turn on your ‘brand’ ship’s loudspeaker and yell out your commands.  You would expect people to then execute your ‘purchase’ orders.   Lots of them did in the beginning though less and less as time went on.

Photo credit - Murdockscott via Flickr

But a couple of years ago something happened.  Your comfortable world was invaded by a powerful disruptive technology.  Your world was attacked by social media.  Ahhhhhhh.  Your audiences suddenly became networked. They started to organize.   They developed collective conscious that helped them decide what was right and wrong, what being a good community member meant, and what values they cherished the most.  These networked audiences became (lots of screams now for dramatic effect) ‘communities’.   Ahhhhhhh.

But wait, the brand is strong and surely it can maintain it’s control.  It will resist.  And sadly, many do.

But being assimilated, unlike with the Borg, is what you should desire as a brand in this brave new socially connected world. An assimilated brand gets to keep its voice, but while playing by the rules set out by the community and knowing it’s only one voice amongst many.  Brands than join the collective and provide value to it through sharing, helping, listening, and collaborating. Alternatively, resisting or trying to keep/take-back control could trigger the collective to ignore your voice.   Even worst, the community could also just grow tired of your brand’s attitude and could decide to give up on you altogether, rejecting you and substituting your brand for a more participatory one.

Is the unknown scary for your brand?  It just might be.  But everyday that you resist you make yourself more and more an outsider with your connected audiences.  Don’t you think it’s time to engage?

Make it so.

Hey, what could be better way to kick off the new decade but with a new blog.  Well, perhaps you can think of a few other things to kick it off but I thought it was probably as good a time as any other.

Photo credit - Anita Jamal

Having time off is always good for clearing one’s mind and getting perspective.  As I’ve already posted over on my blog of the past 2 years – Tweetpr.com – the content had outstripped the name.  And I was also due for an overhaul in terms of look and social functionality so the new blog got treated to all the fixin’s.

Why the new name of Community Instinct?

The last two years for me has been a wonderful learning experience.  Social media has been a trigger mechanism of sorts.  While we often hear a lot of talked about the medium itself I personally see it as the spark which could very well shift the way business is done in the next decade.  Instead of the very mechanical controlling of the message, renting of eyeballs and ears, and blasting of mass messages to audiences who are paying less and less attention brands are starting to act, well, human.  Indeed, in the same way people related to other people, businesses are starting to see why collaborating, connecting and conversing is an investment in their communities.  Web 2.0 technologies have made it so easy for people to form tribes around what they are passionate about, regardless of where they live.  But these same technologies make it as easy for organizations to participate in the same way.

This blog will capture a journey.  It will be about the rediscovery of an instinct – that community is infinitely important to any organization and that, like any group of friends, community should be listened to, assisted, thanked, cared for and even challenged to help it grow.  Like we’ve done with many of our natural human instincts we’ve somehow evolved to rely more and more on just our thinking, processes and technology to make decisions.

It should be a fun path ahead.  I look forward to it.

Happy New Year!

Rachel Happe just wrote a great post Community is a Management Approach, not Just a Role.  It was partially based on some of the passionate discussion we had on the topic earlier in December when a bunch of us gottogether in Boston.  It’s something I’m very passionate about so I thought I would expand on the topic a bit further.  Please let me know what you think?

‘Community’ is a mindset that you either adopt or don’t when it comes to running a business.

Many successful businesses obviously understand and use the ‘customer’ mindset to drive everything they do.  The business, in that case, is focused solely on what the customer wants and needs and it drives the decision-making.  However, over the years this thinking has meant that everyone who’s not a customer gets a different approach.  Marketing has gradually moved their focus off of the ‘customer’ mindset and on to the ‘audience’ mindset.  And with the availability of mass media the approach of blasting one way messages to this ‘audience’ to try to convert them to ‘customers’ has been the predominant mode.  On the public relations side, we have the ‘media’ mindset and an approach to target them and so on.

In a non-interconnected world (or at least a manually connected one) all of these approaches seemed to work well enough.  But with the advent of social media the world began to change.  The ‘audience’ became aware of itself and everyone in it.  Customers became mixed in with the audience.  Media mixed with customers and the audience.  Everyone was conversing and learning from each other.  The walls came tumbling down.  Communities formed around subjects people were passionate about – including products, and including brands.

For me, this is the new world we live in.  Companies that continue to operate using the old mindsets are probably wondering why things just don’t seem to work like they used to.  It’s because they don’t.

And remember the new community principles where everyone communicates, learns, and shares with each other?  Well, companies need to adopt that approach as well.  This means living in the communities they serve, not visiting them when they want to or trying to buy their favor.  Companies need to adopt a ‘community’ mindset in how they approach everything they do.  It’s how the new world works and the old ways of doing things just don’t cut the mustard any longer.

What do you think?

I had an opportunity to explain start-up culture to a friend tonight.  And being one to never shy away from an analogy…

Joining a start-up is like joining a jazz trio for daily jam sessions.

(Image Credit – Fixed Image via Flickr)

So what’s a jazz jam session like?  I think of a bunch of deeply talented folks, each with their area of expertise, brought together in a room, playing off the energy of the community there and riffing off of each other.  They know their instruments well and often come to the table with years of jazz experience.  They improv and go with the flow.  The pace is snappy but confident.  There is potentially no rehearsal time.  Perfection is not the name of the game but instead, creating something cool together.  It’s about enjoying the time together and enjoying the imperfections that surface as signs of character.  I explain start-up culture like this because it’s often hard to convey to someone who’s not familiar with it.

If you come from a large enterprise culture then you might be more familiar with another musical style, more like a symphony orchestra.  Symphony orchestras are larger with many experts as well.  These experts practice and plan a lot because the idea of the symphony is playing in perfect sync, no mistakes, no improvising.  The beauty of a perfectly orchestrated symphony is simply music to our ears.  Symphony orchestras produce some amazing music, like jazz trios, but the processes to produce the music and the results are very, very different.

Let’s say you are joining a jazz trio (aka start-up) as a drummer or sax player.  The other jazz players generally don’t practice ahead for their nightly sessions.  They “be” the music and would look for the drummer to immediately pick up on this and just go with the flow.  Over the following week the new drummer would focus on fitting into the groove, the pace and the style of the existing players.  He or she may also start introducing new flavors of drumming to add their own feel and help the group grow in a new way.  Learning happens through doing and the doing starts day one because the group needs a drummer. If you were used to playing the drums in a symphony orchestra then this approach could completely throw you at first.

So imagine joining a symphony orchestra as the drum player instead.  You would practice lots in advance to get up to speed, perhaps getting recordings of the orchestra to play (plan out) on your own first.  You would also have lots of sheet music to go on for practicing.  Before you performed in front of the audience (community) you would invest a lot in planning/practice time, until you felt you met the requirements.

Both have require processes.  Both attract different types of musicians.  Some folks successfully cross over.  Some folks discover to their pleasure that they’ve been trapped in one style and when they try the other process/style they feel like they’ve truly come home.

So what type are you more aligned with?  Does the analogy work for you?

Yeah, sounds silly that I would even say this doesn’t it?  But a million times a day older generations continue to try to communicate with younger generations on channels they feel comfortable with and wonder why they don’t get a response in a timely manner, if ever.  Let’s take a look at some recent channel shifts in the past couple of decades:

• Teletype messages to Fax messages
• Fax messages to email messages
• Phone messages (on paper) to Voicemail
• Email messages to IM
• IM to IM within Facebook or Gmail
• Phone calls to Cell Phone calls
• Cell phone calls to Text Messaging
• Text Messaging to Twitter
• Letters to Emails
• Emails to Status updates
• In person communications to Online communications
• In person friendships to Online friendships
• Real-time communications to non-real-time communications
• One week response time to Same Day response time
• Same Day response time to Instant Response Time
• Respond during work hours to respond 24-7

If you are part of the GenX generation like me think of your grandmother and look at this list.  Chances are most grandmothers are still writing letters, prefer in-person visits and get togethers and have somewhat embraced the phone for special occasions.  They are stuck in the 50’s-60’s and darn happy to stay there. Your parents would be the influencers to drive them to embrace new communications channels.  Chances are they are definitely not interested in any of the stuff you use or your kids use.

Look at your parents and this list.  Chances are they are they have a cell phone for safety reasons only, have email (finally), like weekly phone calls at least for news about your life, like to have visits once and awhile, and have a fax machine at home if they run a small business.  They are happy to be in the late 80’s to mid 90’s.  We were the ones who got them set up on a computer, email, and probably even Facebook (so they could see what’s up with the grandkids.)  We probably even got them a cell phone.  We drove their new channel adoption.

How about you and your spouse?  I’m sure you are starting to see the trend.  Each younger generation tries to get their previous generation to adopt some of the channels they use.  Extrapolate that to each generation away from you and the number of channels you have to communicate on diminishes.  And with each restriction on channels the younger generation spends less time communicating with the older generations.  And with this lack of communication the older generation gets frustrated and wonders why the younger generation “never calls or writes”.  Ah, you know the drill.

So what to do about it.  Well, I think the first thing is embracing this fact and getting it out in the open.  Landing on communications channels that work requires regular, you guessed it, communications but on channel selection.

I know that if I want to reach the kids I need to embrace texting and Facebook.  Forget the phone, voicemail, email, in-person communications, etc…  Yes, it’s possible to reach them on the older channels but if you want instant response and regular communications you better adopt it.  Think about it, don’t you wish you parents checked emails hourly?

At the same time it’s not just a one way street either where the older generations must adapt or whither.  The younger generations must explain the options available to reach them and leave in a few of the familiar ones.  And they should explain the priority and urgency settings on each one of those channels.  Send me a letter and give me no phone number or email in it communicate back to you on then don’t expect a reply any time soon.

And lastly the younger generation needs to explain that mixed channel communications is also preferred as a alternative.  Both generations can express themselves in the channel they feel comfortable in but they need to provide alternative channel options for replies and be cool getting responses that way.  Yeah, it’s not what either party wants but it keeps things at least moving and it’s better than no communications at all.

What other advice would you give for bridging the channel divide?

Remember when you were a kid?  Remember how sounds seemed crisper, colors more vibrant, everything seemed new?  We were like a sponge, absorbing everything around us.  We had no missions and visions, goals and objectives, strategies and tactics.  We just were.  We were without “ego”.  So this got me thinking….

At the risk of getting all philosophical I wanted to take crack at why the discussion of social media and it’s adoption within companies is far beyond that of what most think.  I am often asked to speak on aspects of social media that approach social media more from the existing, predominant way of thinking about brand. I believe that social media is as much a new communications technology and two-way medium as it is a lightning rod for a massive shift in corporate culture.

I just finished a fascinating book by Eckhart Tolle that certainly made me stop and think about life.  I think many of the principles he touched on can be adapted to explain the transformative nature that social media possesses in today’s corporate world.  Heck, the line between work and life has been completely erased for many of us so why not apply some life thinking to the corporate world.

• Is how we think of Brand defined properly in context of social media and community?
• Has the definition become clouded, so much so that it has taken the majority of companies off on a path that perhaps no longer makes sense?
• What if we exploded the definition of Brand into multiple pieces and explored the meaning of each in a new context – with social media thrown into the mix?
• We are all certainly familiar with the term Brand Personality so what if we treated Brand as, well, a person and explored its essence as such?

So let me throw down a few definitions I’m playing with.  Will they make sense and can you think of others?  Let’s see.  Ok, here let’s kick it off with the lightning rod itself – social media:

Social Media – A new medium that interconnects the community in a powerful new way.  The interconnection abilities of this medium are so powerful that the strength of the Community has finally become stronger, in many cases, than many Brand Egos.  Corporate Bodies in touch with their Brand Soul are tapping into the Community by embracing Social Media.  By being connected to Community and Listening through the Social Media connection they are rediscovering who they really are – their Brand Soul, not their Brand Ego.  Sometimes this is quite the revelation.

The Brand Soul – This is the true essence of Brand.  Its interconnected through relationships with the Community and thus lives inside the Corporate Body as much as the Community.  Members of the Community are attracted or repelled by what they sense from the Brand Soul.  The Brand Ego thinks it can mask the Brand Soul and control what the Community (or what the Brand Soul prefers to call it – The Target Market) senses.  While this can work for a short time the Community is interconnected and eventually sees through this.

The Brand Ego – This is the mind of the Corporate Body.  In most companies the Brand Ego overshadows and dominates the Brand Soul, cluttering the essence of the Brand with lots of things it thinks up using strategies, plans, campaigns etc…  The Brand Ego thinks it controls the Brand and it can will what it thinks into existence.  The Brand Ego listens predominantly to itself for guidance because, after all, who would know more about the Brand than itself (or so it thinks).

The Corporate Body – often the Brand Ego thinks that the Corporate Body is indeed the brand because it is its physical representation.  Of course the Corporate Body is indeed just the body, not the brand.  The Corporate Body can cease to exist or completely change structurally but the Brand can live on embodied in the Community (this is of course determined by how interconnected the Brand was with the Community while it existed).

The Brand – The Brand is the id.  It is a mixture of the Brand Ego and the Brand Soul. The Brand always starts off as purely Brand Soul and very connected to the Community (even if the number of connections may be small at the time).  But as time goes on the Brand Ego develops inside the Corporate Body the Brand Ego tries to minimize the Brand Soul, often trying to think it right out of existence.  However some Corporate Bodies have come to realize this imbalance, often after connecting to the Community through Social Media, and have made changes to their Corporate Culture to attempt to become Brand Aware.

Corporate Culture – This is the approach to Business Life that all Corporate Bodies possess.  In most mature Corporate Bodies the Brand Ego has an iron grip on Corporate Culture.  The Brand Ego knows that Corporate Culture embodies many of the processes and belief systems of the Corporate Body and if it can maintain control of its destiny.  However, some Corporate Bodies have become Brand Aware and have begun to make changes to their Corporate Culture and to connect with the Community.  The step of becoming Brand Aware is the beginning of the end of Brand Ego.

Brand Aware – The dominance of Brand Ego thinking has shifted the definition of what being Brand Aware is.  Brand Egos talk about Brand Awareness instead and define it as the Target Market being aware that the Brand Ego exists.  Of course this feeds the ego of the Brand Ego especially when it compares itself with other Brand Egos.  However the true meaning of Brand Aware is when the Corporate Body is aware of Brand Soul’s existence and it’s interconnectedness with the Community. Corporate Bodies that are Brand Aware restructure their Corporate Cultures to focus on the Brand Soul and minimize and eventually eliminate the Brand Ego.

Ok, hopefully at this point you are starting to see the context of these definitions.  Anyone want to take a crack that the next definition?

The Community – How would you define Community in this context?

Can you think of any other definitions?

Ok, one of my favorite episodes of The Flintstones is where Fred fills in for look-alike and wealthy business tycoon, J.L. Gotrocks.  The episode has a famous scene where Fred is answering multiple phones frantically saying three lines – “Whose baby is that?”, “What’s your angle?” and “I’ll buy that.”  It was a classic scene that has been wonderously burned into my mind for more years than I care to state.

So why is that scene popping up in my head a lot more these days?  It’s certainly not because of “the answering of multiple phones” because I rarely use that device for communications.  What I am noticing these days is that my day is non-stop digital communications.  I probably send and receive close to 350+ emails, DM’s, tweets, FB emails, in a given day.  And I have a feeling that many of you are probably in the same boat.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the communication, networking, problem-solving, sharing, helping, brainstorming that it all brings.  It also brings the challenge of becoming all consuming in many ways.

I could look back on the early days of my career at the phone company when I used to go to “meetings” and spend an hour typing-printing-stuffing interoffice envelopes to send out a single message.  I remember 20 voicemails a day and actually having a phone on my desk that would ring.  Would I want to go back to that?  No way, but it often makes me wonder where we will be in 5 years extrapolating on the communication styles we have now.

Non-realtime communication messages do not stop when you sleep, go on vacation, attend a conference, or do one of those old fashion “meetings” – they just pool up behind the faucet waiting to spill out when you return.  I wonder where this will go.

• How will it scale when in many ways it doesn’t even scale now on an individual basis?
• What wonders will come along to change things yet again?
• Will we look back and laugh at this blog post in 5 years at the rediculously small number of 350+ as we brag about the 1000+ messages we consume and react to on a daily basis?

Do you feel like J.L. Gotrocks today?  What’s your plan for tomorrow?

I don’t think I could ever go back to old-skool-marketing (OSM).  No dice.  So why would I say this?  Well, here are five reasons I can think of:

1) Relationships – Community building means connecting with people, be they customers, prospects, fans, advocates, partners, influencers, you name it.  Unlike OSM you don’t have a wall between you and the people you want to reach and you don’t lob messages over the wall and hope you hit a target.  You look people in the eye (or virtual eye) and you connect in a real way.  You create real friendships.

2) Visible Momentum – With the ability to monitor and measure social media you can literally see the momentum of your efforts building, with who and exactly why.  And here is the kicker (and I love this part) so does the community.  That’s right if you have momentum the community also can see it and it often helps them determine who they might like to work with.  Of course this can go the opposite way if you don’t have something remarkable to offer a community.  I saw an interesting saying once “advertising is the tax companies pay for not having a remarkable product.”  And the other cool part about this is that a community keeps itself in check on momentum, meaning if the momentum is manufactured and not based on reality then the community figures that out.

3) Heartbeat (constant feedback) – With social media you can actually listen to the heartbeat of a community.  You can hear what ticks, whether what you offer actually causes them to skip a beat and  whether there are issues or product blockages to investigate and better understand (sorry I got carried away on the heart analogies    Frankly, I’m addicted to listening to this heartbeat.  When I went on vacation during March Break I turned listening off and left it off for the few days after I returned.  I felt completely out of touch, flying blind, out of sync.  I don’t think I could ever go back to communicating with a community (aka – old skool language translation – “target market”) without the ability to hear the rhythm.

4)  Ambient Connections – I love how the use of so many social networking tools (my favorites being Twitter, Linkedin, various Ning Networks and Facebook, in that order) allow me say hello to people I should get to know in my community.  Twitter is the best for this because a simple “follow” is not a big commitment. What it does is it allows people to quickly check out who you are, what you do and whether they’d be interested in learning more in an ambient way (as opposed to full-on formal introductions, meetings etc…)  A seed is simply planted.  Whether or not it grows depends on need, desire, common interests etc…

5) Maps and Pathways – Social networks have the ability to be mapped helping you can figure out who knows who.  With OSM, people are lumped together into segments based on demographics, pyschographics etc…  They are grouped based on characteristics.  Unfortunately this type of thinking ignores the amazing power of social systems.  Messages and ideas travel in pathways naturally based on who people know and what interests they share.  And while that might mean two people who get classified in the same “segment” may talk to each other what of the conversations that happen regardless of segments.  With social media you can see these pathways and you can map out how an idea may travel.  And even more amazing is that you can track and measure the message to see if your assumptions were right.

So those are my top 5 reasons I love online community building over old-skool-marketing.  What are yours?