February 8, 2010 by Robert Kozinets.

I can’t disclose the time, place, or people involved, and I’ve changed around the numbers, but I was recently at gathering where the social talk turned to business and the business was social media. The conversation went something like this:

“Joe”: Rob, my company is investing in social media like crazy now.

Me: Sounds good. What are you doing?

“Joe”: Well, aside from the Facebook fan-page and the PR firm we’ve hired to Tweet for us, we’re investing big in building online communities and forums from our web-sites. We’re building technical forums so people can help each other solve technical problems. It turns out that a call to our help lines costs us about ten dollars. When they solve it online themselves, that saves us the cost of a call. We’ve calculated our breakeven at saving a thousand calls a month.

“Anthony”: Do they really do that? Do they really just help each other out?

Me and Joe: You bet.

“Anthony”: Who are these people? Some technie geek guys who tinker around with stuff and still live in their mother’s basements [laughs]?

Joe [laughing]: Yeah, isn’t that amazing?

At that point, I get all reflective and brooding. I have heard variants of this particular conversation before. Many times, in fact.

What was that old definition of Web 2.0? “You do all the work, we keep all them money.” This is not the way social media was supposed to work.

Yes, we have known for a long time that people give freely and help each other in online and other types of communities. My research on on “virtual communities of consumption” may have been the first to note that online consumption communities function as a type of gift economy.

But it should be a far stretch from noticing that these networks offer assistance and help, to banking on that fact. Doing so is, in effect, using up or free-riding on a free resource and, even moreso, attempting to undermine the social logics of online communities by turning them into an economic resource. Yes, it’s very capitalist. But, like clear-cutting a thriving forest, it isn’t smart long-term management.

These notions, popular among consultants and business people alike, are going to come back and bite them.

Here is one way it will play out. There will be certain kinds of people, and certain kinds of advice, that may seep into those online communities. People will complain. Some of them will do the math. Some of these will get it right. The chatter will at some points be less about giving and more about taking.

Eventually, if the marketing or PR management-consumer relations are acrimonious enough and the offenses grevious and plentiful enough in scope, I believe, there will be organizing, activism, and perhaps regulation among community members. Consumers will request and perhaps be legally required to be paid for their labor, just like everyone else. The party will be over. It will have been crashed, corporate style. (Look familiar anyone?)

Or else they will just collectively agree to call your help lines. Get their friends and families to call. And call them a lot.

The other thing that sticks in my craw–and it is not unrelated to the first point- is the way these consumer community members are referred to in casual conversation by managers, consultants, and marketers. Online community members and technical contributors are referred to as lonely geeks who have nothing better to do with their time.

This phrasing reminds me so much of the way fans are regarded and refered to by many managers and marketers. The same alarming disrespect. The same infantilization. The same insulting, dismissive tone. The same sense that these people are okay to use and exploit because they are lower that us, not as good or as smart as us.

In my experience, those consumer often know the manager’s business better than the managers do. In fact, that’s why they make such excellent members of technical communities.

Those are the two dirty little secrets of online community. First, that it is being justified as a straight ROI play based on cheap labor power, where the company gets consumers to do something in the community for it for free or on the cheap. It can be tech support or other customer support. It could be innovation and coming up with or rating new ideas. It could be offering marketing or other feedback. The second secret is that some managers often refer to these consumers as socially backwards suckers, dupes, clever peons, and rubes.

A little later in our conversation, “Joe” said he was a bit surprised that very few consumers were joining up on his brand’s Facebook fan page, that almost none of the company’s many customers wanted to be known as fans of his company.

Well, go figure.

Posted in Economy and General Business Management, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Technology, Marketing Research, Marketing News & Insights, Communities and Tribes, Marketing Science | 2 Comments »

December 5, 2009 by Robert Kozinets.

I just finished reading an interesting new book (actually, new because it’s an updated 2009 version) about marketing research. The book is called More Guerrilla Marketing Research: Asking the Right People, the Right Questions, the Right Way, and Effectively Using the Answers to Make More Money by Robert J. Kaden, Gerald Linda, and Jay Conrad Levinson. Someone at Stray Dog Media sent me a free review copy, which was good of them (there.. my FTC disclosure guidelines have been satisfied). In sum, the book is a nice, succinct set of ideas and guideline for managers who want to understand why and how to employ marketing research, and how to understand it.

Most of the book covers the fundamentals of marketing research. Budgets, Research professionals. Research plans. Focus groups. Surveys. Questionnaires. Sampling. Applying the results of research into marketing practice.

It is a good, solid book for practitioners, particularly those in smaller ands medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that don’t have much exposure or understanding of marketing research. It explains very well why and how marketing research is vital for understanding, testing, and growing a business.

However, the book is quite weak when it comes to qualitative techniques beyond the old-style focus group, or explanation of newer techniques. Ethnography? It is not even mentioned. Depth interviews? Nope. Netnography? Are you kidding? They do mention “data mining” however, in a fairly cursory and introductory fashion. I was expecting a bit more innovation and forward-thinking from the “guerrilla” part of the marketing research. But the book is pretty old school and established. There’s not much surprising or new, or which challenges the marketing research status quo.

The part that I found most interesting, and which got me thinking the most, was the final chapter of the book, which they called “The Future of Marketing Research.” On p. 327, they quote the interestingly named “Doug User” (the perfect guy, it would seem, to conduct “User Research”) who is a Ph.D. and a senior VP with Widmeyer Research & Polling, who talks about how the “fragmentation” of consumer makes it hard to find and understand target audiences using “traditional” marketing research.

The answer according to the quote in the book is “new metrics and new methods: video blogs, online portals, emotional measurement, data harvesting, analysis of comments in online forums, and private online communities.”

This sounds like a bit of a techno-hodgepodge to me, but I think this is thinking that is moving in the right direction.

It started me wondering about the best and most informed usage and combination of newer methods for tracking market changes, diagnosing marketing problems, identifying opportunities, and staying on top of brand positioning challenges.

How might we think about mixing and matching social media marketing research and other marketing research techniques such as:

1. Ethnography
2. Netnography
3. Data mining such as social media and blog monitoring
4. Engineered or managed online brand communities
5. Social networked brand response groups
6. Online panels
7. Online focus groups
8. Online surveys
9. Crowdsourced information-providing contests
10. Brand wikis
11. Neurological and physiological scans (yikes! how did that get in there?)
    

How are these techniques similar, and how are they different? Where and with whom are each of them more effective, or less effective? How can they be combined for maximum effectiveness and minimum cost (i.e., for real efficiency)? How can they be used along with traditional techniques to maximize the delivery of time-sensitive information to where it is nedded for maximum impact?

Taking these ideas even further….When will marketing research become indistinguishable from or inextricably linked with marketing itself? When will both of these actions become interlinked with management itself (i.e., instead of managing sales figures, and motivating a sales force, managers would also need to manage brand mention and opinion figures, and motivate a word-of-mouth consumer force)? Where would those boundaries be? Where would research end? Who would perform this new blend of research, marketing, and motivational management? How would this Social Marketing Research interface with the company management, and with Enterprise 2.0?

I postulate here that some of the most successful managers of the coming decade will find their unique competitive advantages in the living, breathing, insight-laden answers to marketing/research questions such as these.

Posted in Economy and General Business Management, Social Media, Book Reviews, Qualitative Research Methods, Netnography, Marketing Research, Technology, Marketing News & Insights | 1 Comment »

October 26, 2009 by Robert Kozinets.

Schulich MBA Student Melissa Louis reviewed two short books for our Social Media Marketing class: Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us
and the Australian Mitchell Communication Group’s” While You Weren’t Watching.” They are together in this presentation.

Posted in Social Media Marketing, Book Reviews, Social Media, Economy and General Business Management, Word of Mouth Marketing, Conferences & Presentation, Communities and Tribes | No Comments »