pellacor.com

The conceptual framework I’ve used here which looks at the different types of human groups is from some work published in the Harvard Business Review I read this year, which I am sorry to say I can’t find online. But I thought I should come clean that the concepts are not my own (although I can’t remember the names of all the groups and have improvised)…

Also I am going to define marketing as the practise of precipitating change in the behaviour of groups of people.

Some marketers are beginning to understand the importance of human groups when it comes to marketing and communication. This is particularly so with social media because for the first time ever the relationship between humans have become visible to marketers. It’s now possible to see who is participating on public forums, count the relationships between friends and followers and even search globally for conversations about particular subjects.

These marketers seek to effectively communicate with different groups of people by looking at the types of groups humans belong to, each with different marketing and communication characteristics.

Three distinct types of human groups have emerged so far.

Tribes

A Tribe is a group that is united behind a leader and communication within Tribes is top down. Tribes don’t necessarily have strong bonds between members but can be used by marketers to drive behavioural change because members of Tribes respond to communication from the leader. In marketing this is known as celebrity endorsement.

Ethos

An Ethos is a group that is united by a shared ideology or cultural frame, and communication within these groups is achieved with common understanding and alignment to this shared experience. Of all the groups Ethos have the weakest link between members, and it can be hard for a marketers to drive behavioural change towards a business goal using Ethos groups alone. Nevertheless Ethos groups are used by marketers for things such as attitude branding.

Webs

A Web is built up of direct human relationships on a personal level and communication occurs within Webs at a one to one level. This personal level relationship has been difficult for marketers to manage because of the large numbers of relationships consumer businesses have and until recently most of customer webs contact for a consumer business has been managed by either customer service or sales departments and not the marketing department. This is a pity because Webs are the best group for effective marketing.

In modern marketing, particularly online, planning great strategies using Ethos, Tribes and Webs is like making reinforced concrete, each component brings certain characteristics so the overall result is solid. But because of the traditional limitations to seeing and understanding Webs, marketing strategies have been mainly focused on Ethos and Tribes.

So given the time of year and this conceptual framework let’s have a look at two of the best social media campaigns in New Zealand in 2009.

A quick question to the internet later and our two finalists are: the Airpoints Fairy, from Air New Zealand and the Blackout Campaign from the Creative Freedom Foundation.

Airpoints Fairy

The Airpoints Fairy is a twitter account run by the inspired team at Air New Zealand, the Airpoints Fairy hops madly about the internet granting wishes to Air New Zealand customers.

• The Airpoints Fairy is strong on Tribes, she has created a loyal following of supporters who have engaged with her directly and listen and respond to her communication.
• The Airpoints Fairy is also strong on Ethos, by using the concept of a fairy, Air New Zealand has mined a cultural seam that runs between Walt Disney and teeth.
• The Airpoints Fairy has been challenged with Webs, however, this is largely limited by the low Webs like bandwidth of the platform she uses, twitter. She has built Webs between herself and her followers, but has struggled creating and using Webs horizontally, between other people.

The Blackout Campaign

The Blackout Campaign sought to change the law around copyright in New Zealand and offered a low barrier way of gaining support: blackout online profile icons in support of copyright change.

• The Blackout Campaign was strong on tribes, by making the show of support easy and obvious the grass roots nature of the campaign was picked up quickly by leaders of various online Tribes who in turn converted their followers. Early adoption is prised among early adopters and our leaders led the way.
• The Blackout Campaign was strong on Ethos, black is a very important colour for New Zealanders and the blackout campaign mined a cultural seam that runs from the Haka to yachting.
• The Blackout Campaign was also strong on Webs. The fact that nearly every social media platform allows users to display an icon, usually a photo, on their profile meant that the blackout began on low latency networks such as twitter and then spread through higher latency networks like Facebook and blogs. People saw their friends black out their profile, found out why and the blackout spread on the basis of one on one relationships.

So is there a clear overall winner this year? If there is I am not the one to announce it, but I do look forward to the creative marketing campaigns mixing Ethos, Tribes and Webs in 2010.

When I first got back from London in 2005 I met with Mark Harris, then at the SSC, to introduce myself and begin the process of getting in touch with the local Wellington web community.

During the meeting I mentioned an anomaly to do with the naming of the government sub domain under the .nz domain. In the UK and Australia the government sub domain is .gov yet in New Zealand we went with .govt.

I asked Mark why?

He explained how in the very early days of the internet in New Zealand when the domain names system (DNS) was being agreed, one of the principles was that no sub domain should have the same name as a domain eg the domain .gov (used by US Government) could not be used as a sub domain.

What a stupid idea – I thought to myself, here we are staking our claim on a global platform and we decide to go it alone, uniquely. Think about all the confusion with people like me, who’ve just come back from a different country with a difference sub domain naming schema.

Mark was still talking so I refocused my attention.

It would be too expensive for us to backtrack now, Mark continued, that’s just the way it is. I told him I thought it was stupid and the conversation moved on.

Fast forward to last week and I was searching twitter for conversations about the New Zealand Government particularly surrounding the injurious name Gov2.0. Then it hit me.

What a good idea it was for New Zealand to go it alone by using the sub domain .govt so our local conversations are more easily discoverable on the global platform of the internet.

I called Mark to tell him I’d changed my mind.

Depending on how you measure these things, Manchester United is the most successful English Football Club of all time; they are tied for first place with (my beloved) Liverpool for overall number of championships wins (18) but have won 11 FA Cups to the Merseysider’s 7.

Manchester United is also famed for an attacking style of football, in which the team focuses more on scoring goals than they do on preventing them. This distinctive style causes two things to happen.

• By focusing on scoring goals, Manchester United win football games (soccer is, afterall, about scoring more goals than the opposition.)
• There are more goals in Games Manchester United play in, because they will let an opposition team score two goals if it means they score five.

This makes for exciting football to watch, a bigger gate and more money. This is a positive feedback loop and a reason why Manchester United is the most widely supported sports team on earth.

It isn’t about ignoring costs, Manchester United only very rarely push everyone forward, and only in very special circumstances. But the framework the team uses to assess where they are in the overall game is the number of goals they’ve scored rather than the number of goals they’ve let through.

How can we start to apply this kind of strategy for our own game plans?

The truth is most people already measure personal success on achievements not set backs, but professionally many are still stuck in measuring progress with the amount of time and/or dollars consumed, and not the value those costs have created.

If we can focus our work on what we’re delivering in terms of value and not just the costs we will create positive feedback loops which we can all enjoy.

Communication technology profoundly changes the nature of the relationship between strategic decision makers and the subject of those decisions, typically people, and it’s probably worth taking a few minutes to define those things with more accuracy.

An operational decision maker uses facts to makes decisions - a strategic decision maker makes decisions based on imperfect usually generalised and abstracted information.

• An operational decision maker maybe asked: “What’s two and three?” which they’ll happily decide is: five.
• A strategic decision maker maybe asked: “What’s one or two or three and two or three or four?” which causes a problem.

The strategic decision maker’s question cannot be answered accurately.

The strategic decision maker makes an assessment and decides: it’s possible to estimate the answer using an average so the question is: one and two and three, divided by three, and two and three and four, divided by three. They’ll glance at their watch, bill you another fifteen minutes, and answer: “five”.

The problem strategic decision makers have, however, is that the actual answer could be anywhere between three and seven, and, if, this variance represents the volume of food refugees get a day - it’s the difference between sustenance and starvation.

Another characteristic of strategic decision makers is that they are isolated from the impacts of their decisions. A bureaucrat working for the Red Cross in Geneva is a long way away from the distribution centre handing out food in Darfur.

(Not to give too much away, yet, but things begin to get tricky when you realise part of the reason strategic decision makers have imperfect information is their distance from the effects of the decision in the first place).

War, huh, yeah. What is it good for?

The classic case of the strategic decisions alienation from the effects of those decisions is the Great War, World War I, in which strategic decisions makers in Europe decided to send millions of people “over the top” to fruitless deaths.

Fortunately for us: the rise of independent mass media, particularly television, in the latter half of the 20th Century, opened up a channel which exposed strategic decision makers to the emotional effect of their decisions using the electoral process.

This channel, full of the brutal images of war, effectively ended US military operations in Vietnam and made the “administration” aware of the importance of opinion polls as well as elections in making strategic decisions.

Television, however, is a low bandwidth media and the content has a high importance threshold, so only the most critical content makes it onto tv. This is fine for subjects such as war whose images continue to haunt our nightly news, but doesn’t work so well for less significant strategic decisions, such as early childhood education.

Social media WTF?

Social media in this context, has limitless bandwidth and massively lowers the threshold to the feedback mechanism to strategic decision makers. This has profound implications particularly for political strategic decisions within the context of a modern western democracy.

I proposed to my long term girlfriend, Megan, on Friday night (October 16th 2009) in Molley Malones, the bar we met in on June 25th 2005. She accepted my proposal and we are planning our wedding for Autumn 2011, somewhere in the Otago Lakes district of New Zealand.

This is what I said.

Every one of the 1,574 days since we met in this bar I have felt overwhelmingly happy and unbelievably grateful to have you in my life.

I am thankful for you everyday.

I’d like to have many more days with you.

*down on one knee*

Megan Campbell will you marry me?

I have mentioned before I learned my trade within the field of corporate communications and this post looks at communication issues from an organisational, as opposed to an individual level.

About 2.5 billions years ago, in the opening stages of the evolution of life on earth, tiny single celled organism created a problem for themselves. Cyanobacteria, as these simple forms of life are called, evolved a process called oxygenic photosynthesis, which takes carbon dioxide and water and produces stored energy (in the form of hydrogen carbon bonds) and pure oxygen.

This caused a problem for early life on earth because oxygen is a very reactive substance and once these early organisms had produced sufficient concentration of oxygen, this waste product destroyed their simple unprotected structures and killed them.

This Great Oxygen Crisis, as it is known to science can be an allegory for our own problems relating to global warming - but if we look at this issue on a technology level we can use it’s lessons to understand other facets of the world today.

On the one hand photosynthesis was a great technological leap over the previous technology, but it also caused problems for other systems which hadn’t evolved the capability to deal with the by product of this new technology.

The good news is that this problem wasn’t insurmountable here on earth, as you may have gathered, but it took a great deal of time and effort for life to work through the issue of oxygen.

Once organisms had evolved ways of coping with high levels or oxygen within the atmosphere, however, they could use this oxygen to fuel much more complex biochemical reactions; reactions that our own biology depend on to this day.

Social media is like the Great Oxygen Crisis

There are parallels between the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis and social media. In this metaphor social structures such as organisations replace organisms and technology replace genes and their resultant proteins.

Information technology, like oxygenic photosynthesis, provides organisations with a great advantage:

• Oxygenic photosynthesis allows organisms to turn the abundant energy of the sun efficiently into storable and accessible energy.
• Information technology revolutionises the way organisations store and communicate information, particularly financial information, which is the lifeblood of an organisation.

Like the effect of oxygen on unprepared and vulnerable biological processes, social media eats away at the organisations that have created it. It is very hard from a corporate communications point of view to even understand social media, because it is made up of the interaction of individuals, a level of abstraction below an organisation.

Social media also gives individuals the same capability in terms of reach that until recently organisations had a monopoly on, which has the potential to damage the large and costly consumer brands organisations have spent decades building.

So what?

Life on earth struggled with the problem of an oxygenic atmosphere for millions of years, before evolving the mechanisms to cope and if this metaphor is valid, we may be able to use it to predict what will happen as organisations struggle to cope with social media.

Like it did for early life, it will take time for organisations to reconfigure themselves to cope in an environment full of social media, but once they have evolved ways to deal with this new form of “oxygen”, organisations are likely to explode in numbers and complexity, in forms we can’t even begin to imagine.

One final point

Some early organisms had the jump on others in dealing with oxygen as they were already exposed to an oxygenic environment prior to the Great Oxygen Crisis and these organisms already had the technology to deal with oxygen allowing them to flourish in the new environment.

Are there organisations that have already evolved the skills and structures to cope with the new social media environment?

Are you sick of the rat race? Do you want that new car? How about that holiday? How about attracting the beautiful people you have always dreamed of.

NOW is your chance!

Financial freedom is knocking at the door. Are you ready to answer?

This is the guaranteed way to win lotto using our soon to be patented quantum technology and when we say guaranteed, we mean it in a money back, if you don’t win we’ll pay you back double the difference.

YOU CAN’T LOSE!

All you need to do is decide which lottery you’d like to win, from over 50 of the large global multimillion dollar lottery draws, drop into our state of the art clinic on the evening of the draw and let our “make the money dream machine” go to work.

You get a few hours sleep and when you wake up your dreams will come true.

Our state of the art science is based on the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and uses the relative state formulation to create a wave-function collapse with quantum decoherence. Literally creating your dreams as you sleep!

This isn’t another one of those dubious get rich quick schemes you’ll find in other places on the internet - but a genuine and guaranteed way to make all the money you have ever dreamed of.

The cost of this service is $10,000 for each $1,000,000 in prize money you want to win - that’s right we offer a ten thousand percent return on investment, GUARANTEED!

WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR!

Still dubious - here’s how it works

Our scientists have developed a quantum state machine that uses the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics to achieve results. Our “make the money dream machine” is connected to the internet and has access to the results of 50 of the worlds largest lotteries.

When you first arrive in the clinic an hour before the draw is scheduled we enter your ticket numbers into the our “make the money dream machine”. You’ll then lie down in our “dreams come true capsule” with an intravenous line connected to our “make the money dream machine” You’ll then be given a strong anaesthetic which will put you quietly to sleep.

Once the draw has been made and the results fed to our “make the money dream machine” the machine sets to work cleaning up and removing all the many worlds copies of you which haven’t won the big prize so the only versions of you left in the multiverse are BIG LOTTERY WINNERS!

When you wake up, relaxed and rested, you will be ready for your new life.

Don’t delay – secure your financial freedom now!

I tweeted this week a point which I thought was important:

There’s a threat to cloud computing in the form of value add thick client service management (horizontal integration) eg ID management

Ben, and Mike responded, but I couldn’t seem to get my point across and trying to explain a view on the future of IT in under 140 characters is a challenge. So for the first time in a long time I have reverted to long form communication on the internet.

Welcome to my first real blog post for nearly a year. Here goes.

The number of services delivered via the web is increasing and this isn’t just an increase in the number of new web only services such as email or twitter but is also driven by services that are migrating onto the web from traditional channels such as invoices and account management features of suppliers like telecommunication, power and, dare I say it, even tax.

The motivations behind this channel shift on the side of businesses supplying these services is cost reduction – but there are a number of issues that need to be resolved, and the ramification of these decisions will have far reaching consequences for the future of the internet.

The cost versus the benefit

There are a couple of basic strategies to go about getting people to switch from costly channels such as mail or telephony to the cheaper web channel. The most inelegant strat is to not give them any choice, force them to make the shift, but I think this strategy misses the whole spirit of the web, so we won’t consider this as an option.

For individuals the decision to switch services from traditional channels to the web is a simple equation of cost v benefit. I call this the use cost and the use benefit equation.

• Use costs include all the things that prevent people from changing channel such as familiarity and comfort with the web, access to high speed internet connection and any relevant process inertia.
• Use benefits include all the things that encourage people to use the web channel and include such things as ease of use, a decrease in the time it takes to do tasks and any financial benefits that could be available.

Increasing the uptake of online services can be achieved by either increasing the use benefit or decreasing the use cost for the web channel. This simple picture is complicated by the cost v benefit equation being a subjective test that is different for each person individually.

Let’s imagine for a second we work at a large organisation which includes every citizen of the country as customers. We need to think about how we can either increase the benefit or decreasing the cost for customers to switch channels.

Reducing the use cost is about making the online channel easier to use than other channels. There is always going to be a base level of use cost online particularly the question of identity management as managing username and passwords can be a problem for some people.

Increasing the use value begins by looking at what customers value and a good place to start is with time. Nearly everyone is time poor and giving time to customers has been particularly successful for some organisations, particularly banks.

As more and more services work there way through this process and begin to service customers through the lower cost web channel identity management becomes a problem and for some organisations who may only service customers infrequently the use cost of managing identification may always outweigh any use value for their customers.

Solutions create themselves

There are two general solutions to this problem of insufficient use value for some services.

Horizontal online service integration
The first involves the integration of services at the service provider’s end so that a single username and password can be used for a number of different services. The Government Logon Service in New Zealand is a good example of this strategy in action.

It would be great to see private companies look at horizontal integration and public and private sector partnerships would be the icing on the cake here.

Local identity management
This solution would come about if organisations don’t deal with the problem through service integration and it becomes necessary for users to reduce the use costs themselves. This would create an opportunity for identity management to be provided by software developers most ominously by a particular operating system developer based in Redmond, WA who already have a near monopoly in their market.

This is the point of my tweet, cloud computing could be threatened by local identity management systems and we should be mindful of the implications of our actions in this area.

ISO have a working draft looking at providing a framework of standards for identity management (ISO/IEC CD 24760) this year and everything is up for grabs. What the standards will mean for identity management and how those affect the future remains uncertain. Significantly there is the possibility that this issue could be resolved in different ways in different countries, which will challenge the global nature of the web.

I spent the afternoon looking through the site at the posts and the comments and wanted to pull a few of my favourites together for the 10th Birthday Celebrations for Metafilter in Wellington.

But here’s to you – the Blue, peace and love to all who sail with you.

The first comment I made that was favorited

The 9-11 thread

My favorite Ask Me Question and answer

The last Wellington Meetup

I love the Len lye thread

Obits

Sir Edmund Hillary

HST

WINNER OF 4 Golden Globes including BEST PICTURE!
Nominated for 10 Academy Awards

Nominated for 11 BAFTA Film Awards

94% on ROTTEN TOMATOES

OXFAM NEW ZEALAND TRAILWALKERS ARE VERY PROUD TO PRESENT
What: Benefit Event
Where: Embassy Theater, Wellington
When: February 9, 2009 at 8pm
Proceeds from this event are going to Oxfam to help them fight poverty.

You are cordially invited to the sponsored Embassy theater event of the movie that has won over viewers and critics around the world, Slumdog Millionaire.

The uplifting film centers around a teen who grew up in the poverty-striken slums of Mumbai to become a contestant on the Indian version of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”. Althought his motivation for the competing on the show was primarily to reunite with the girl he loved and lost, he is arrested under suspicion of cheating. While being interrogated, events from his life history are shown which explain why he knows the answers.

Oxfam New Zealand is a charity organisation that is devoted to the elimination of poverty by working with local communities to tackle its root causes. Every year, Oxfam oversees a trailwalker event comprised of several 4-person teams that walk 100 kilometers through Taupo in 36 hours. Our team has been pacing the Wellington walkways over the past few months in preparation!

As if the physical challenge weren’t enough, our team also has a fundraising goal for the charity that spends 78 cents of every dollar on the programs aimed at ending poverty.

Our team is pleased to bring Wellington a feel-good event consisting of an Oscar favorite, a silent art auction and other festivities beginning at 8pm with the film screening promptly at 8:45.

Tickets to the event are $20 and can be prepaid with cash or bank transfer. While prepayment is ideal, some tickets will also be available at the door.

Please email Jess to get your ticket.

Also, let her know if you have preferred seats!

And please, feel free to phone a friend.