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One of my passions is the study of ethnography. Several years ago, I worked with one of the pioneers of ethnography, who earned his Ph.D in Anthropology at The University of Chicago. He was one of the first people to apply the science and art of ethnography to business and product management. One of the most innovative things he did was to develop the first pay-at-the pump gas station. He did this by watching people — not the unusual things about them, but the usual things about them. It was at that time the he learned to be the “Master of the Obvious” as he used to say.
Ethnography is all about community — language, communication, relationships, and meaning. Losing community could mean losing a company.
The Story of Tower Records
Tower USED to be about community around music, and enabling that community through stores that felt like they catered to your desire as a music fan. The Tower Records on Monument Boulevard in Concord, California was the place to hang out at when I was younger. At any point you’d find skate punks outside, hipsters and beatniks inside, awesome music playing and people geeking out in the video section about some anime. Then they moved it to a two story “Borders like” space, got bigger, which seemed to have sucked the living soul out of the experience. You don’t want escalators at Tower. No, the Tower lesson isn’t about the Internet destroying brick/mortar, its about loosing a sense of community.
It’s not about escalators either. I love Barnes & Noble — I buy my stuff at Amazon and at Barnes & Noble; what Barnes & Noble has that Amazon doesn’t is community. While I worked at Amazon, we used to talk about the Brick ‘n’ Mortar and the advantages and disadvantages and how Amazon could compete with them. One reason alway, always, always, rose to the top: Brick ‘n’ Mortar shops can provide a community. One of Amazon’s goals was to replicate what Brick ‘n’ Mortar shops were good at: Community.
So, Amazon focused a lot of work on its recommendation engine, its user-generated comments, feedback; Amazon introduced tags and focused on blogging — from authors, as well as from customers generating their own blogs on Amazon. All of this is their attempt at creating an online community, replicating real-world communities.
But, I still love going to Barnes & Noble. I love going there to read, to walk around, and to pretty much play. Yes, I love books; I love the atmosphere there. While the space there seems large, it feels small; it feels still like a community, which is why I love spending time at Barnes & Noble.
Going back to Tower Records: Tower Records fell, for the most part, because it lost its community.
Community Around Caffeine
Another place I love going to is Starbucks. No, I don’t drink coffee, but I love their spicy cider with caramel and their hot chocolate. Starbucks is an excellent company — I know one of the lead Supply Chain people there — so, I know the emphasis there is on logistics, purchasing, and supply chain excellence. Their Customer Service is also excellent, as is the community. Consider this irrational person’s coffee behavior, which, I think, is descriptive for millions of Americans who love Starbucks:
Consider my own non-rational behavior. At home, it costs me 40 cents to enjoy a big dose of caffeine in the morning. I put four tablespoons of a $10 bag of Starbucks coffee in a French press, pour in hot water, and, in a few minutes, I have three cups of joe. After the first cup, the coffee may not be so great or hot, but it’s drinkable. And the price is right.
Sucking two cups in the early morning, however, never prevents me from striding into one of the three Starbucks shops in my downtown Seattle building when I get to work. I’m greeted there warmly by several regular employees who know my drink — a double-tall, extra-hot latte with a single pump of sugar-free vanilla. They then swipe my Starbucks smart card (Athens Olympics edition). A few minutes later, I am sipping a $3.22 drink in the elevator en route to my 43rd floor office.
Now you can already see that several things in this scenario make no sense, and therein lies the beauty of the Starbucks business model.
Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, calls his chain the “3rd place of American Life”, because it is a place without the stresses of home or the office. To this extent, Starbucks is more about a community than about a drink. I believe this is why it can charge a $3.22 for coffee that they could get for $.99 at McDonald’s. Starbucks has a community that people want to pay a premium for — it’s a place where strangers remember what you regularly order, call you by sir, ma’m, or your real name, and they say “thank you, have a nice day” when you leave –precisely the kinds of things some people don’t get at home or at work. So, in order to participate in the community, people pay their dues, get a drink, and relax in the “3rd place of American life.”"There is a premium for a good customer experience”, is what Bezos always used to say to us. This mantra applies to Starbucks as well.
Yes, Even Chicken Can Be Social
KFC’s recent Rebrand of Colonel Sanders shows how even an old company and seemingly “uncool” company can make efforts to speak to its audience in a new way, and speak to a whole new audience in a way that the audience might better understand and positively respond to.
KFC’s recent “Face-from-Space” campaign was their attempt to speak to their audience, while attempting to speak to a whole new audience simultaneously. Their press release commemorating the Rebrand was funny, witty, and memorable. They’ve released a Rebrand video on Google Video and Youtube — the making of the “Face-from-Space” and there’s a lot of buzz on blogs, Digg and other linkdumps about their efforts. They are employing the virality of the web to recreate themselves — a Rebrand.
Yes, Even Microsoft
Jeremiah’s post on the IE 7 Product Release Party is a good one that illustrates that large — even chubby companies, can begin to change and respond to market conditions. Here’s his anatomy of IE7′s Social Media Product Release approach:
Microsoft is one of the model companies when it comes to harnessing social media to build community. They’ve figured out that customers are now in charge, they’ve learned to ‘let go’ to gain more and bring the community closer. Let’s break down why I consider their style so successful:
Product Development
- Involve your community in product development throughout product lifecycle using blogs, forums, and other communications
- Identify your passion community and hold an event (online/offline)
- Invite them to meet your product team for a casual conversation
- No demos, no pitches, no sells
Product Release
- IE Official Blog (Post by Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager)
- Official Press Release (notice how the style is so different than IE Blog?)
- Product Release on IE Official website
- Build Community: Microsoft’s Channel 9 Community Site
- Watch the Video Tour
- Engage in forums with development team, keep the experience interactive throughout product life cycle
Participate in the Conversations
- Lots of blog conversations on TechMeme around the globe.
- Not all of the conversations are IE friendly, but that’s real life.
- Continue to communicate and dialogue, bring customers close, listen.
While I habitually use Flock, and only use IE7 to make sure there’s cross-browser compatibility in my code, I have to give the IE7 team credit. In addition to this, the IE7 product team also sent the Firefox team a cake, celebrating the release of Firefox 2. They are reaching out, and their are giving up control, in order to build a community. Whether or not it will work, their efforts are admirable and I’m glad to see Microsoft approach business in a more, honest and straight-forward way.
Conclusion
Here are some basic principles around community and the social web that might be helpful to companies wanting that either want to build a community around their service or product, or to companies that wish to strengthen their current community efforts:
- Participation: Social Media encourages contributions and feedback from everyone who is interested. The concepts of “media” and “audience” is blurred.
- Openness: Social Media services are open to feedback and participiation. They encourage voting, feedback, comments, and sharing of information. There are rarely any barriers to accessing and making use of content.
- Conversation: Traditional media is about “broadcast”, or content transmitted or distributed to an audience. On the other hand, Social Media is about conversation, two-way or n-way dialogues.
- Community: Social Media allows communities to form quickly and communicate effectively around common interests; a political issue, photography, or a myriad of other interest.
- Connectedness: Most kinds of social media thrive on their connectedness, via links and combining different kids of media in one place.
- Consumption: Most Social Media is consumed via a technology called “RSS”, which stand for Really Simple Syndication. It’s “Push Technology, which means that when a content is available that you are personally interested in, it is pushed to you instead of you reaching out — visiting the website originating the content — to grab it.
Here are some common venues on which online communities are built upon:
- Blogs: Blogs are online journals, with entries appearing with the most recent first. Blogs allow for conversation and dialogue via comments, where anybody is allowed to comment on a post; trackbacks, which informs the poster that someone has linked to the post, and pings, which act similarly to trackbacks.
- Social Networks: These sites allow people to build their own personal profiles and share their content with friends and strangers. There are several verticals in this space: Linkedin is a social network in the job networking space, for example.
- Content Communities: These are ecosystems organized around a specific type of content. There are communities around photography (Flickr), bookmarks (del.icio.us), and vidoes (YouTube.com). The organization of the content is based on a traditional taxonomy, but also on “folksonomies”, which is a user-generated organizing mechanism, that involves “tagging” a piece of content with keywords that are descriptive of that content.
- Wikis: These sites allow anybody to add or edit information on them; a communal document or database is the result.
- Podcasts: Are Audio or Video files, published on the web that anybody can subscribe to.
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