I had an interesting twitter exchange last week with Jim Storer, Sr. Director of Social Media Strategy at Mzinga, a white-label social networking platform and service provider vendor with some big-name customers. We were talking about a blog by Jake McKee, a community marketing consultant, entitled “Do You Pass the Bus Test”. Jake offers up some excellent advice on building redundancy into communities, so that if So-and-So-Star is “hit by a bus” or more likely, leaves your company, your community and its interactions continue.
Jim: reading “Do You Pass the Bus Test?” by @jakemckee – http://tinyurl.com/6a8haq – good info on building redundancy into your SM efforts.
Me: @jstorerj Interesting but in my experience community members engage with people/projects/products not companies. The fix is…?
Jim: @richsands agreed – the Q is how to support individuals becoming the face of the company and then deal with their eventual departure
Me: @jstorerj I think companies must accept that its not about them and it IS about the people… who they hire is who they are.
Jim: @richsands at the risk of sounding condescending, we have to get past the Cluetrain (as good as it was)… companies will not accept that
Not at all condescending, just surprising. That comment about getting past the Cluetrain stopped me on its tracks. 
In case you haven’t boarded the Cluetrain yet, it is a reference to “The Cluetrain Manifesto”, an influential book published in 2000 by Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Rick Levine. Almost 10 years ago, this book predicted much of today’s social media scene, and postulated that markets are conversations among real people, and that traditional corporate marketing mostly misses the boat… errr… the train.
Here’s the 95 tenets of the manifesto, summarized into a slideshow (thanks Michael Specht!). Quite amazing for 2000 when the web was mostly still static pages and a one-to-many, one-way broadcast, but in today’s twittering, blogging, wikified world of user-generated content, reviews, forums and social sites, it seems almost banal.
Who can quarrel with (most of) this, nowadays? I was so puzzled by Jim’s comment that I started questioning my own understanding of communities and 21st century marketing. Maybe I’ve been so cloistered in the open source world that I have failed to notice that everyone else has moved on. Maybe its ok for companies to just “community manage”, and let the external participants do the rest. Where is the sweet spot between controlled, corporate messaging and branding, and uncontrolled employee authenticity, and has the pendulum swung back toward control while I was otherwise engaged?
I was relieved to discover that the Cluetrain is still running, on time and to the best station stops, when I attended the MITX Marketing Technology event this past Tuesday, “The Building Blocks of Social Media“. While the panelists did not always agree on the technologies or best practices to implement them, they did concur that the biggest obstacle continues to be the organizational politics and inertia that prevent companies from engaging in a genuine conversation with the public. Critical to success: leadership from the top that empowers employees to engage in their own voices, cutting through barriers erected by control freaks who aren’t yet on the Cluetrain.
Outsourcing community management and interaction, as well as the technology and hosting, to a white-label social media service provider can quickly get something polished and useful out there. For many companies just getting started with social media, thats certainly a good thing. The Cluetrain Manifesto posits though, that ultimately, the public wants to engage a company’s passionate, human employees. I’m not sure that a third party’s moderators, without the context and knowledge of being on the inside, can ever really fulfill that need. It seems to me that the more clueful companies accept that active, two-way engagement with customers will happen through their employee “rock stars”. They create a working environment where new rock stars are easily discovered or hired, actively encouraged, and enthusiastically rewarded. For those companies, having a community leader “hit by a bus” is no big deal – there are others ready and willing to take up the mantle of leadership. Those same stars, if given latitude while they’re with you, and treated with respect when they leave, may remain some of the most ardent advocates of your company and its products.
That’s the danger of 140 characters in Twitter.
First of all, I agree with the tenets of The Cluetrain Manifesto, that should be clear by taking a look at my blog posts and/or listening to a conversation or two I’ve done via podcast. In fact, a couple months back I bought six copies and gave them to people on the Mzinga team as required reading. However, I do believe we need to find ROI in our social media endeavors to make them relevant to business. The CM doesn’t offer much in the way of prescriptive steps to ROI with SM, but is remains an excellent foundation for how people (the lifeblood of companies) can engage in the conversation. My tweet about the need to “get past the cluetrain” was meant to convey that (and only that). My bad.
The concept of ROI is especially important in the current economic climate and was foremost on the minds of nearly everyone I spoke to this week at the Forrester Consumer Forum in Dallas (btw, I cringe at the use of “consumer” in name of the event). They need to show demonstrable ROI to even have a chance of budgeting social media into their mix.
Back to my original tweet and some background. My colleague (and friend) Aaron Strout is leaving Mzinga join a new company in Austin. He’s been the public face of our organization in social media circles for the last year and I’m interested in how other companies deal with losing someone of this caliber, in this role. In an era of social media free agency, this is sure to become an important question that I thought Jake’s post did a good job of starting to answer.
Jim | @jstorerj
@Jim – I figured you actually were on the Cluetrain, based on the fact that you’ve got a clue (or two!). ROI is a slippery concept with SM I think. If every project you initiate has to tie directly to revenue, you’ll miss a lot of opportunities to build thought leadership and mindshare and help customers win with your product or service – whatever it might be. How do you measure the ROI of open sourcing a code base that your salespeople have been licensing – except as a negative number? Developer adoption that creates “opportunities to monetize in the future?” You might have to do it because you’re already competing with free. Or you might decide that making your platform ubiquitous and cross-selling something else is a better strategy. But you’re taking a flyer either way. Isn’t measuring SM with ROI an inherently conservative, risk-averse approach?
I met Aaron at the MITX event – he’s a super-sharp guy and will be hard to replace!
— rms | @richsands
Thanks for still digging Cluetrain.
A few thoughts.
One is that I thought we’d all “get past” Cluetrain nine years ago, the writers included. Yet, here we are.
I don’t think that’s because Cluetrain had a “social” message, or that “social media” is something Cluetrain predicted or even supports today. Funny, reading that slide show, there does in retrospect seem to be a social aspect to Cluetrain — the use of the second person plural “we,” for example.
For what it’s worth, I’ve never liked the term “social media,” and have never been that comfortable with “social” anything — even though “Markets are conversations” is my line. Maybe it’s the Libertarian in me, or maybe it’s remembering what we were trying to get across in the first place. And maybe it’s because I can’t stand Facebook, and don’t think there’s anything more social about Twitter and blogging than there has always been about telephony and mail (both e- and otherwise). For what it’s worth, I never liked “Web 2.0,” and said early on that it’s what we’d call the next crash.
Cluetrain was written between late 1998 and the end of August, 1999. The 95 theses were put up in the Spring of ‘99, and we wrote the book that summer. This was at the very height of the dot-com madness, and it was largely against that madness that we were ranting. More than one person has told me that Cluetrain’s book launch in January of ‘00 “caused” the dot-com crash that followed. I point this out not to take any credit (we don’t deserve any, and if I had known what would happen I would have sold what stock I had, instead of riding them all the way to the ground), but to emphasise the historic setting — one echoed in today’s “social” bubble and economic crash.
Cluetrain was, and remains, a call to get real. It urges everybody, and companies especially, to recognize the Net as a new space that belongs to nobody and supports everybody — not just sellers. This is why Chris Locke’s line, “we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it.” is so central to the whole thing. As Jakob Nielsen told me not long after the book came out, the authors “defected from marketing and sided with markets.” In the “Markets are Conversations” chapter, we talked about how markets are not just abstractions — bulls, bears, invisible hands, categories, demographics, appetites, regions and so on — but real places where people gather to do business and make culture. We wanted to point out that the Net is a real marketplace too: a setting, an environment, where everybody can participate. We wanted that space seen and respected.
Implicit in that, but not stated outright, is that every individual has power, and not just in aggregate. The “we” also means “each of us.” I think that’s fairly clear in David Weinberger’s chapter “The Longing”: http://cluetrain.com/book/longing.html . I also think it’s more than implicit in what we say about voice, which is profoundly personal, as well as collective.
What troubles me when I look back at Cluetrain is how far we have *not* come. We still look to improve the world from the sell side, and to fight the sell side with collective action. The individual is still just “the consumer.” And, much as so many of us hate that word, that’s what we still call ourselves. That flywheel has lost little mass.
Worse, even though Cluetrain was a rant against marketing, “conversation” and “conversational” are now high on the list of marketing’s favorite bullshit words. Yes, there are many terrific and truly conversational marketers, but the bullshit level around “conversation” is very high.
Anyway, we all move along. In my case I’ve taken on the challenge od inishing one thing Cluetrain started — by equipping individuals with tools that make them both independent of sellers and better able to engage with sellers. Maybe I should say we’re starting where Cluetrain finished a decade ago: with a challenge to fix something that’s been missing ever since industry won the industrial revolution a century and a half ago. That’s what ProjectVRM is about. The wiki is here: http://projectvrm.org. We have a very active community of developers and other interested folks. And we’ll see how it goes.
I’m old, but I’m still optimistic about seeing customer reach exceed sellers’ grasp, in my lifetime.
I am an old Cluetrain fan. I was already a newsgroup junkie when the book came out, and it helped me understand my personal experience in a much broader context.
I helped start a company (http://motivequest.com) based on the tenets of the Cluetrain. We listen to the conversation and analyze what is being said and why. We use this information to help companies give people what they want. I think what we are doing is giving people a megaphone so corporations can hear them.
One of my proudest moments at MotiveQuest is when one of the biggest companies in the world asked us whether or not they should build their own community. Our answer? “We don’t know, let’s take a look at what is already out there.”
We did the analysis and found that there was already a large, vibrant and passionate community organized around their product, and that they might not want to build their own.
Instead we recommended that they figure out how to become a useful member of this existing community. After all, the manufacturer has a the most important coin of the community realm – they have inside information.
So as a community member, they have something to contribute. The other thing we recommended is that they could help this community further their goals. Corporations have power in dimensions that communities don’t (money, for example) and every community has causes it cares deeply about. Could the corporation help further the aspirations of this community by supporting their causes.
This recommendation had to go all the way to the very top of the company (what a radical thought – to share information and resources with your most passionate fans) but it got approved and that is the path we are on.
TO’B
@rich – I agree it’s not easy (and sometimes unrealistic) to expect SM efforts to achieve ROI. However, there are a lot of examples of companies generating revenue and/or reducing costs by jumping on the Cluetrain. Media sites open up comments on articles and see dramatic increases in page views (and ad revenue). Software makers open support forums and see their costs in that area reduced. A hardware manufacturer opens an idea exchange and (arguably) create more brand affinity (that’s a soft one) and reduces market research costs.
Your example is a challenging one, no doubt. There are companies that have built a business model around a completely open source platform. Both Acquia and Raincity Studios are adding value elsewhere with the goal of building a thriving business based on Drupal… so it’s possible.
@Doc – Thanks for adding your thoughts here. Looking forward to learning more about ProjectVRM.
My comments are directed to the concept that Jim was fearful of (but thanks Doc for bring this post to my attention):
>> Jim: @richsands agreed – the Q is how to support individuals
>> becoming the face of the company and then deal with their
>> eventual departure
How sad.
In my 30+ years of experience at (and with) all levels of mostly privately held firms (but every once and awhile, with Wall Street traded firms), most employees are at least 10 times more loyal to the company than the inverse. Again, how sad.
For all my complaints about Novell (many, many moons ago), they got the certification right: it was held by the individual. Not the company who most often paid the bill.
What is wrong with American corporations? Many simply do not get it.
As Jim’s post proves:
>> we have to get past the Cluetrain (as good as it was)…
>> companies will not accept that
Then those companies can expect a lot more turnover as people discover its true corporate culture.
-ski
P.S. For some insight into turnover:
http://consultski.blogspot.com/2008/08/talent-vs-patents-vs-employee-turnover.html
P.P.S. Just because Jim Collins points out (correctly) that people are a firm’s greatest assets, does not mean that the company owns them.
@Doc, Thanks for your comments and the context you provide. Its fascinating to realize that you and your fellow authors were ranting against marketing, defecting from marketing, pronouncing marketing utterly bankrupt through an argument designed to irrefutably render it powerless. To destroy marketing completely and make it irrelevant. You achieved something far more powerful and consequential, however. You co-opted marketing.
Dude… YOU WON!
Sure there is a long way to go – no huge change in the very fabric of culture is going to happen in a day, or even a decade. I know you’d rather marketing just went away, but, as a marketing guy, I’d rather that BAD marketing went away. Marketing is actually noble – ok, I know I’m pushing it. But good marketing is actually about aligning a company’s offerings with what customers want. Cluetrain is a recipe for good marketing, and thats why marketing has adopted Cluetrain. Not what you expected, huh?
@Jeff, I agree that companies that have no loyalty to their employees well will see a lot of turnover – either because their employees get fed up, or because the company blows it and ends up doing a RIF. I think though that what Jim was referring to was companies that actually DO respect their employees – giving them the latitude to be the public face of the company. What happens when that public face leaves? Clueless companies will limit employees, fearing loss of control of their brand. Clueful companies recognize that a brand that is not humanized by real people representing it, won’t connect to customers in today’s post-Cluetrain world. They’ll deal with the departure of a leader by encouraging other leaders to step up.
If, as Jim tweeted, companies just can’t accept the full ramifications of Cluetrain, then as Doc said, we really haven’t come very far. I don’t believe that to be true, but I do think its true for the “late majority” and “laggards” that are only now coming to grips with Cluetrain, which is well into its mature phase. Perhaps it is true for those companies that Jim deals with in his role at a white-label SM service provider. The task is to help the laggards get over the hump, I think.
@Tom, I think one of the most interesting choices a company can make in jumping into the fray is whether to try to “capture” customers on their own branded site – which can tie to their CRM system, present cross-sell opportunities, etc. etc. – or go to where the customers are and forego the benefits of “capture”. You can tell where my bias is – who wants to be captured? But as Jim pointed out in his comment, ROI is vital to SM, especially in today’s economic climate. This is the current frontier of Cluetrain, I think. You have to BELIEVE that a genuine two-way conversation with customers where they are, on their terms, with customers in control will differentiate your company, such that customers will flock to you, buy your products, and give you unique insight into the market in return. If you must measure your SM efforts using classic ROI, and tie them to demonstrable revenue streams, you will miss the train. Of course its not that black and white, but I believe we’ll see a pattern emerging of companies that believe, and let go of the death grip on the handlebars discovering how much easier it is to steer.
[...] Yet this very act of personalizing the corporation raises all sorts of interesting issues, most especially who is involved in the conversations? In our (FBS’s) case, I’ve very much enjoyed engaging in discussions online. In that respect, I guess I am the social media director for FBS. Another approach is to try to hire a social media director. Regardless of who is involved in the conversation, however, the reality is that these are real people involved and that raises two inter-related questions: (1) if the person is successful in engaging in market conversations, is or should that success be transferrable to others in the organization; and (2) if not, how does a company prepare for the hit by the bus risk? [...]
The “hit by a bus” test really intrigues me in relation to these Cluetrain-type community engagements because at their core it involves people talking to people and, guess what?, people move companies, they retire, they even get “hit by a bus” sometimes. A company embracing this level of openness needs to factor these changes into their community model.
Rich says “…For those companies, having a community leader “hit by a bus” is no big deal – there are others ready and willing to take up the mantle of leadership. Those same stars, if given latitude while they’re with you, and treated with respect when they leave, may remain some of the most ardent advocates of your company and its products…”
I absolutely agree with your final point about the raving loony advocates. I’ve seen so many examples of this over the years.
I do feel that if the community leader gets “hit by a bus” that it won’t be as simple as somebody else just easily slotting into their place. No matter what you do there will be a gap. We see it time and time again with sports teams where the star leaves and the replacement, although extremely talented and maybe even better than the original star, just doesn’t make the immediate impact everybody would like. Things are different. It takes time for this new star to make an impact. It takes time for the team to adapt.
With community leaders who are the face of a company the same applies. There will be a loss. Things will be different. The organization can overcome it by not only having other “leaders ready to take up the mantle” but by having the progressive management relationships and support systems in place to adapt to this change. Remember: the only constant is change.
If you try to create a situation where these leaders can be seamlessly swapped in and out, it is no better than the bad old “command and control” world the Cluetrain railed against. Not only does the community interaction need to be an open an honest conversation, but so does the internal management approach.
KM
Hi,
I really like the “hit by the bus” test and agree companies need to really pay attention to what their employees are doing within this Cluetrain world. But I think you need to look at it in a broader context than just company “sanctioned” community manager roles. Every employee who is online is a public figure of that organisation, even ones who operate anaonymously, and companies must “deal with” the situtation of employees leaving. Old world companies issue press releases when an officer leaves to keep the markets and reglatory bodies happy. How do they handle these new public figures? I have seen several examples over the last few years where companies have let go an employee who is a public figure only to have it backfire on them. As they ignored the fact the employee was a public figure and try to let them disapear “queitly”, which of course the community saw through.
My feeling is companies need to allow for multiple community leaders, humanised succession planning anyone? This way if one decides to leave they have the bench strength for others to step up. As Kevin says this needs to be done in an open and honest approach.
Michael
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