Network Silos to Brand Hubs

Online replicates offline behaviour in a profusion of activity. In some cases it’s a remix, real time conversation, sharing information, gossip, pictures and videos. Hell we have been borrowing each other’s books for decades. And, whilst its no different, it can be so different!

In their short online life, social networks are going through a metamorphose already. They are becoming ad networks driven not by the user experience but by shareholder value. Its flipped on its head in the last two years. We do forget they are businesses, exposed to the same pressures as older, more traditional corporate brands. There is not much light between how a company like Coca Cola or Shell operates and Twitter. Certainly Facebook next year when it goes for its IPO. To be brazen, Flickr is in a far better position to produce what we, as users, will want from future social networking. Facebook’s ‘changes’ last week resembled a facelift that Cher would have been more than happy with.

It’s hard to actually identify a social network now that has motivations of purely a social business model not just revenue and profit. There is nothing wrong with that, but whilst aggregation and syndication go on, these online networks are frankly changing functionality and still looking too linear, too narrow and too silo like.  Yet brands are racing to them as if they hold the key to future sustainability. Well they might hold the key but not if its for the wrong lock. Its gullibility at its frightening extreme.

In all this competition, some would say chaos, others would call it sophistication, we are ignoring a few vital elements that have been going on for years but, perhaps because it doesn’t fit an algorithm, are not being accomplished. These are the keys to social networking in the future:

1. Social capital has, since time began, sat at the centre of the cornerstones of leadership which in the future will centre on content, collaboration, community, collective intelligence. And we are missing, online, a huge element of social capital; brokerage (Burt) or bridging (Halpern.) Social capital is the advantage created by a person’s location in a structure of relationships. Klout and PeerIndex are starting to measure influence, reputation and trust through our use and engagement of social networks. But they are using the ‘closure’ approach entirely. That’s fine, its important to understand where people stand in a social structure especially a closed one. We have been running them for years in terms of teams, groups and customer databases.

However, these tools are quite blunt at present. Over time they will become sharper and we shouldn’t dismiss them. Still, we must not ignore the power of brokerage and look at ways we, as brands can use it to really build economic success in our organisations. If you look at the empirical research that has been carried out over the last 40 years, I see something so blindingly obvious, its scares me how naïve brands are being, tempted into innocent strategies by joining the silos of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn without thinking about how these repositories are dangerous, short term and deficient! You may as well hand over your database of customers lock, stock and barrel. Its like a squirrel hiding his nuts in another squirrels tree! (I have no idea where I got that analogy from but it kind of works!)

2. Own Communities: Brands need to embrace the changes that are happening in online networks by creating a social network around their own brand. Stop building websites and start building platforms that can enable and facilitate those conversations and have some degree of control. It doesn’t prevent brands from dipping into Facebook’s 650 million users to generate attention and attraction but they need to be driving consumers to an even better experience away from Facebook and the like. This is where closed networks and brokerage can work in harmony and so must algorithm and social. Then you can move to the next phase which is around self organising groups. Having in depth relationships with a smaller amount of customers who, on your behalf, advocate and amplify your message for you. Starbucks have around 24 million fans on Facebook. The true social engagement that I’m envisaging is impossible. The science doesn’t work like that.

3. Listening: When the blood is bubbling along a person’s or brands veins, the first thing that goes is listening. Consumers, users of social media are waking up to the depth of these changes, indeed they are the instigators. They will start to ignore adverts on Twitter, realise that LinkedIn is just a respository of CV’s and that Facebook couldn’t give a damn about privacy issues. They will want to share content where they are king, not feel they are trapped in a poor marriage where the partners despise each other, yet wallow in their dysfunction, afraid of what might happen when they part. People, of course, won’t leave Facebook, they will just become passive and non active, engaging somewhere else. People are increasingly wanting to understand the motivation of brands, social networks included. In fact, at the moment, we are not looking deep enough at the impacts from an individual and brand perspective. Its our culture of short termism kicking in again. Olivier Blanchard wrote a great piece this week about how social media agencies are negatively influencing this.

This is not all theory. Some of our clients have recognised the implications; that social media brings about change so much more substaintial than just channels and revenue. Building communities around their brands is their long term strategy. To back that up read anything Halpern or Burt have written. Plus my company have been experimenting with this for over a two years now in our Random and ThinkLAB communities, where we are scientifically using social scientist theory and empirical research by brokering structural holes through bringing people together who wouldn’t normally be associated with each other. It has done five things:

1. Encourages trade between customers. We love this element.
2. It improves everyone’s social capital. That builds reputation and credibility for all concerned.
3. It improves revenue, because people are engaging with your brands community in a different, more vibrant way than selling campaigns. This is very important for service orientated brands.
4. We believe that we have saved about £20k on research and development by observing behaviour, understanding needs, asking our customers about what we should be doing next, ie: empowering collective intelligence.
5. Innovation, some of the things we will be doing in 2012 have been initiated by the collective intelligence from the community we are building around the brand; that’s vision advantage.

What this all means is that brands can start to build hub’s around the ecosystem of their brand. Several communities of affinity which are then, from some creative, imaginative thinking mixed up to get new ideas, generate revenue and save money. We can’t do that on Facebook, we can sort of do it on Twitter but then you are reliant on them being around for years and evolving in the way you want to. You only have to look at how some supermarkets exploit their suppliers, social networks are going the same way, the look of the horizon has a very clear image.

Social neworking is being driven by the algorithm. Algorithm and social; different but equal! Facebook is probably the biggest ad network but it is far from being the most important social network in the world. That one is the one you are building on your own platform with your own community.