But what is missing from these crowds are leaders. Like any social network that you may join you have those that join and just lurk, those that maybe make a comment or contribute but then you have those who stand up, take some initiative and lead! And that’s what these social networks really need is more leaders!
That’s what Seth Godin’s new book Tribes is all about.
For example, the internet is a great place for Ukrainian Folk Dancers because now for the first time people who love Ukrainian Folk Dancing can ban together and create their own “Tribe”.
This is an important fact since traditional media is no longer working. There is just too much noise out there to shout at people. No consumer brand has been built on the back of traditional media for a while now. TV certainly isn’t working for the creation of new consumer or B2B brands.
Which means your only option is to define your brand in a way that is open to a dialog (no Command and Control branding please) and in a way that is narrow enough to start or tap into a “movement”.
Take for example …. Harley Davidson …. here is a consumer brand that also is a movement a Tribe. Take from the brand what you want and maybe even lead your own Tribe in your own area.
Seth recently held an event in NY to bring his own Tribe together. You can view his slides here and you can listen to the audio of his presentation here.
Some of the highlights from my notes were:
7 elements of leaders
- Challenge …. leaders challenge their tribe
- Culture …. leaders create a culture within the tribe
- Curiosity …. leaders open up a curiosity gap for outsiders
- Charisma …. being a leader gives you charisma
- Communicate …. leaders communicate
- Connect …. leaders connect others in the tribe
- Commit …. to the movement
5 things tribes want
- Connect …. they join to connect with others
- Create Meaning …. joining gives them purpose
- Make a difference …. joining allows them to make a difference
- Be Noticed …. they join to be noticed
- Matter …. they join because it matters to them
Marketing management is now Tribal leadership. Start doing things for people not to them. It’s an obligation and it up to you!

If you ever dreamed of adding community to your website without having the hassle of a major integration effort involving your IT department then LiveWorld’s newest product called LiveBar is for you.
LiveBar adds contextually relevant community to your site by adding a single line of Java script to your header tag just to those pages which adds community to those pages in seconds.
If you’ve got a site with lots of content, it probably doesn’t make sense to have community features on every page. But, it does make sense to add real-time conversation to sections with high traffic volume–for example, content areas about a current program, or hot topics. Using LiveBar, you can add conversational elements like comments and “shouts” (which are similar to Tweets) to just those sections, and enhance the experience for those users.
A&E, QVC, Tulane University are already pilot clients for LiveBar and other existing customers include …. Neutrogena, P&G, American Express, Kimberly-Clark HSBC, Kraft, Campbells and more –
Listen to Peter Friedman discuss how to do this and the best uses of this for your brand!

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About Peter
Peter founded LiveWorld, Inc. in April 1996. With 20 years experience in the executive offices of Fortune 500 companies, he connects strategic and operating strategies, as well as financial metrics, to community strategy. Peter sets the LiveWorld vision and directs overall operations. He is an executive sponsor for several of LiveWorld’s major accounts, working with clients to define how our services will directly support the client’s business objectives, as well as developing creative concepts for the programs. He is one of the few Internet executives to have launched and managed multiple online services on a global scale. His background is an unusual mix of creative, business, entrepreneurial, and corporate, but has always focused on bringing people together in successful collaboration. Prior to founding LiveWorld, Inc., he was the vice president and general manager of Apple Computer’s Internet/Online Services business unit. He oversaw the creation, launch, and growth of Apple’s online services, including AppleLink, Apple’s global online loyalty marketing and customer support community service, and eWorld, a consumer service based on AOL technology and Internet services such as Salon. During his 12-year tenure at Apple, his responsibilities also included managing Business Systems Marketing and product line management in Apple’s Macintosh division.
Peter holds a Bachelors degree in American History from Brown University, and a Master’s in Business Administration from The Harvard Business School.

Ascentium …. A model for the agency of the future
I spoke to the CMO, Romi Mahajan who explained Ascentium’s go-to-market strategy to me. They are the nexus of a digital marketing company mixed with a technology firm that does Microsoft CRM, Business Intelligence and Analytics to provide creative solutions for brand perception and instantiation.
No doubt very useful and very powerful when they come together (I read this as an agency mixed with a lead nurturing platform that can track ROI!). Not only do they build cool marketing campaigns but they can connect to your sales process. They in effect unify sales and marketing so that clients see that their campaign pay off …. thereby eliminating the normal tension between sales and marketing.
Romi was also a speaker on Agency 2.0 on how should agencies of the future be organized. Clearly I would think Ascentium is a model for agencies of the future.
Brickfish – Measuring Social Engagement
Brickfish offers an innovative way for brands to connect with their target audience online. They offer a launching pad for highly viral marketing campaigns that allow you to reach consumers where they live on the social web. They get them to listen to your message and interact with your brand, and more than that, they produce the results.
What does this mean …. as I understood it …. they make various viral marketing campaigns or social applications that can then be shared with friends who can customize them to post it to their blog or website via an iFrame. The iFrame technology allows Brickfish to measure where, when, who and how many times your messages were viewed.
Some examples are Coach engaged consumers to design a new tote. Nike asked consumers to share their inspirational athletic achievements. Kodak got consumers to share their Kodak moments to celebrate their new low-ink printer. All of these examples needed consumers to make customize the message and make it their own then spread it virally. Best off Brickfish is an all in one platform to do this.
HiveLive …. Platform for building unique communities
I spoke to the CEO John Kimbel and visited with HiveLive crew on the Expo floor and was very impressed. HiveLive has a very different take on Enterprise Communities. In short, what they do is act as a platform that aggregates all your types of media (both new media and social media) to create a very different type of experience than say a standard community. So that means they integrate things like blogs, podcasts, wikis, forums into a “Hive” (one could say mashup here). That can be customized to the experience you want to create for your users.
One of their customers is Serena Software. Their CMO, Rene Bonvanie is a forward-thinking marketer who’s been leading the community charge for quite some time now at places like SalesForce, SAP, BusinessObjects, and Oracle. Below is a video where he does a great job explaining Serena’s vision of a new model of community-powered marketing and how they’re using tools/technologies (like Facebook, HiveLive, and YouTube) to reinvent their business: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDsJE98NPbM
InsideView …. Smart marketing and sales tool
I was lucky enough to have breakfast with the CEO Umberto Milletti. Who started InsideView in 2005 because he saw that “business information was becoming more distributed over the web” though articles, interviews, various databases and then eventually social networks.
He viewed this as an opportunity to aggregate these sources of information to provide a composite view of a person or a company through the use of some proprietary Natural Language Processing.
All comes together in a mashup within your own CRM …. InsideView integrates with all of today’s most popular CRM systems namely Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, and recently announced Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, and Landslide.
InsideView also tells you who you are connected to in Facebook or LinkedIn. It’s a form of “Smarketing” as Umberto called it.
Over 200 companies use their application with hundreds of sales reps using the application. They sell per seat licenses but they also have a free version in the spirit of Web 2.0 with a limited version of the functionality. No doubt this is a company to watch in the coming years!
Wi5Connect …. Welcome to Social Learning 2.0
I spoke to Matthew Bowman, VP of Sales and Marketing, for Wi5Connect who explained what they did as a “different approach to learning that marries two technologies …. Social Networking and eLearning” into an easy to deliver SaaS solution.
Their new product LearnSocial is a revolutionary new way for businesses to train employees. Different than online learning, user manuals, or instructor lead training, LearnSocial is an online community that captures the power of social networks and fortifies with a state-of-the-art Learning Management System (LMS) platform. Finally, an effective learning tool that allows you to better engage, track the engagement, correlate progress to training, and measure ROI.
Matt called it “a way to combine the brain trust hidden in all levels of your own organization with the magic of your own corporate social network!”

But to fill this demand many new social network software’s and asp’s are being created to fill the business need. Recently Dotster introduced a new product for not only their clients but of clients beyond their control.
The idea that Social Networking is moving beyond the youth market to business isn’t new but the idea is how and what are people doing to get them to join and what content are they providing to keep them engaged.
Listen to Catherine’s ideas on how to get your own community going as well as keep them coming back for more.
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About Catherine
Catherine Brown, Director of Enterprise Social Networking, Dotster, Inc., has over 14 years experience in marketing and product promotions and has a successful track record at both large and small firms. At Calista, an IP Telephony start-up, she was part of an executive team that took the company to acquisition by Cisco. While at Cisco, she managed major product launches and million dollar promotional campaigns, worked on a company-wide website redesign and started a web analytics program. She has also been an entrepreneur. Catherine has a BA from Stanford, an MBA from UC Berkeley, and has lived in Europe and Latin America (she speaks both French and Spanish).

Several good books have been written about this topic by some really smart people. But when doing some data mining on my blog using a new tool called SM2 from Techrigy (special thanks to them for helping me get trained on this tool), I noted that the far reaching impact of my blog is found in the proverbial Long Tail. (see graphic below)
What this says is that the conversation about topics on my blog and where they are occurring is coming from the long tail. (Dang it, that Chris Anderson is right again!)
So what I think this means is that exclusively looking for reach with your social media initiatives by targeting a selected few influencers is a flawed concept (sorry Ed Keller from WOMMA). To me this graph says it needs to also contain a component that delivers adoption (i.e. Reach) through the Long Tail of bloggers out there.
The bottom line is Social Media is fluid so you might as well go with the flow!

While blogs and social media have become increasingly common – discussions occurring on message boards and within forums aren’t usually surfaced by traditional search engines. This kind of web content is multiplying rapidly and you are going to need something dedicated to getting to the content underneath.
So I interviewed Scott Germaise the director of product management for Twing to find out how we should be using this great new tool for your reputation monitoring efforts.

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About Scott
Scott is currently the Director of Product Management at Twing.com, a vertical search engine for searching and discovering communities. I’ve been in the online biz since the early days at Prodigy, was a co-founder and VP, Information Architecture at About.com, worked for or on other community sites such as ClubMom.com.

From a marketing and social media perspective several things about this company got my attention and my envy as a marketer.
First was the clear communications from the top down. The CEO Lars Dalgaard uses email to the entire company much like an internal blog at all hours of the day reporting back on things like successful client meetings and other interesting findings. Best of all it creates an open dialog with the entire company and builds an internal sense of community and esprit d’ corp.
Next was the sheer amount of new client wins that are coming out of this company. I monitor their RSS feed and every time I turn around they are pumping out press releases with another new client name in it. Kudos to the communications department and the sales team for making that happen!
But what really got my attention was how they unleashed their own internal community on rating and ranking each of the Presidential Candidates by 10 different competencies and published it on their public website. This is a fabulous example of demonstrating your product and its possibilities by connecting it to something that everyone is interested in.
So when last I checked here was the tally–
1) Budgets/Cost Controls …. Vote McCain
2) Communication …. Vote Obama
3) Decision Making/Judgement …. Vote Obama
4) Dependability …. Vote Obama
5) Global Perspective …. Vote McCain
6) Integrity/Ethics …. Vote Obama
7) Listening Skills …. Vote Obama Leadership …. Vote Obama
9) Managing Conflict …. Vote Obama
10) Planning …. Vote Obama
Overall Winner – Obama
Sorry Hillary but I guess you already knew that!