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.