May 18, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

Last week on May 8-9, 2008, I had the pleasure of attending the 3rd annual retreat of the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium in Cambridge, Massachusetts on the MIT campus. I’ve been involved with the C3 group since their inception as a “Consulting Researcher” (and affiliate faculty member in the department). C3 was founded with Principal Investigator Henry Jenkins’ vision of bringing companies and academics together in a forum that would make idea exchange easier. A number of great people from major corporations were involved this year, including people from Fidelity Investments, Yahoo!, MTV/Viacom, and Turner Broadcasting. Industry speakers included Brian Haven from Keith Clarkson from Xenophile Media, Matt Wolf from Double Twenty Productions, Forrester Research, and Judy Walklet from Communispace. And for me, it was a thrill to meet a who’s who of fan community researchers—people who were absolutely fundamental to my thesis work and who built the universe of fan studies. These included Nancy Baym, Lee Harrington, Jonathan Gray, and Jason Mittell. I also had the opportunity this year and in the past to meet some excellent new scholars in the area, whose work is sure to open up many exciting new avenues of opportunity and insight. This people include Kevin Sandler, Derek Johnson, Gail Derecho, Aswin Panathambekar, Geoff Long, Sam Ford, and Ivan Askwith. And of course it was genuine pleasure to see my friend the esteemed marketing anthropologist and consumer culture icon, Grant McCracken, whose contributions are always elegantly-phrased and thoroughly thought-provoking.

I was asked to give a few opening remarks for the session on Friday morning entitled “Understanding and Managing Audiences as Communities.” I wrote a few notes to present to the group, some of which made it into my opening spiel, some of which I fit into later responses and ideas, and some of which remained as scribbles on paper until I typed them into the computer today. For what they are worth, I am happy to share them with you here:

I began this work in 1995 with a proposition that sounded more than a little bit strange at the time: that we could learn a lot about brand loyalty by studying the consumption of fan communities. It’s perhaps even stranger, but I never saw media brands and other brands as all that different at all.

I was young and naïve—an academic newbie. And I was relying on little more than faith and a few solid pieces of evidence that I’d noticed and held onto as a long-term members of early online communities on CompuServe and then Mosaic and Netscape. But I believe in my heart of hears that the same sorts of passionate communities that gathered for Star Trek, Star Wars, and Green Day would tell us a lot about the kinds of passionate following that could be inspired for Sony, Nike, and Campbell’s Soup.

Essential to my understanding was an early etymologizing of online communities that split out two fundamental motivational orientations in order to segment members’ styles. Those two orientations were how connected the community members were to the consumption activity and how identified they were with the community itself. This yielded a classic MBA 2 X 2 matrix with 4 ideals types: the tourist, the mingler, the devotee, and the insider. It has been found to be useful and explanatory—it serves as the cornerstone of most textbooks’ approaches to the types of online community that exist. In a coming soon blog, I plan to post an updated, complete, and completely revised version of the paper in which I introduced this typology, which will be celebrating its tenth anniversary next year.

In the ensuing years, the notion that people can be “fans” of a grand, and that online communities composed of these brand, product and categories fans has ceased sounding quite so weird, and begun diffusing into marketing awareness, led by several stark realizations about the storied, mediated, mythic natures of brands.

I barely even differentiate between media fans and brand and product fans anymore. Was the Cadbury gorilla a media phenomenon, or a CPG (consumer packaged goods) marketing one? What about Dove and The Evolution of Beauty and its entire Real Beauty campaign? Coca Cola in Second Life? Is that media, fandom, community, product, brand? Or all of them intermixed? There are so many different types of enthusiastic, expressive, lifestyle communities online to study: cooking classes on YouTube, shoe design forums on Niketalk, fashion communities, book communities, technology communities. Are they media, community, consumption, or fan phenomenon? The answer is yes. They partake in all of these elements.

So since 1995, I’ve been developing and expanding the technique that I call “netnography”—a systematic approach to conducting ethnography over the Internet. I’m pleased to find that it has been widely adopted. I’m now adapting it for use in rich new media like blogs, and vlogs, and for different types of social experience like SNS.

Last year, Bernard Cova, Avi Shankar, and I released a volume called Consumer Tribes that looks at this communal phenomenon through the anthropological lens of the tribal, a view that has been influenced by the postmodern philosopher Michel Maffesoli—who we tapped for a new chapter that appears in our book. In the introductory chapter to that book we wrote that there are inherent cultural tensions that the tribal movement (what I’ve been calling “etribes”) seek to negotiate, these are “tensions between consumption and production, between primitivism and postmodernism, between the commercial and the communal, nature and culture, past and present, oppression and liberation, conformity and transcendence.” We’ve found that tribes seek to hybridize and combine these elements in many serious and playful ways.

Four of the different style and activity modes that we found online communities (or, more generally, consumer tribes) using as they developed in the 21st century were: activation and plundering (which were different approaches to the appropriation of commercial marketplace cultural elements), and double agent or entrepreneurs (which were different approaches to how they regulate the flow of power and resources that comes with as combined consumer/producer role). This last role of the entrepreneurial tribes is extremely interesting to me. I believe it is the area of much growth in coming years as consumer will use the networking power of the Internet to gather into powerful social groups that will seek to contribute to the current social and moral issues that concern them, issues that include:” business ethics, the degradation of the environment, multicultural relations, wealth and technology sharing, and education.

Recently, we’ve seen a number of books written by people from the media industry decrying the rise of online communities and fundamentally misapprehending their nature. I’m going to review one of those books in an upcoming blog entry, but I’ll summarize here by saying that in general these books tend to see blogs, vlogs, YouTube, and the rise of Internet New Journalism and New Media creation as a serious threat to traditional media, traditional media being transplanted by a weak, poorly-made, dumbed-down alternative with crummy production values. A dilution of quality and a serious confusion of the standards of quality that results in, say, Reality TV replacing “real” quality TV.

In my estimation, we actually know very little about this phenomenon of online communities, online media creation, and online-inspired shifts in popular taste. That is why we need collaborations like this one—the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium’s blending of corporate interest and sponsorship with that of relevant academics from around the world—to continue and intensity. We need to get grad students working with companies in projects that help them hone their learning, and contribute to companies’ changing needs. We need companies to think closer about the role, availability, and presence of quality academic work. We need companies to inspire more of the types of questions that academics work on. Companies need to look at some of the wider social effects of these changes, and conceptualize how they are changing communities and society as they act. Academics need to turn to more topical, current, socially relevant questions, moving from abstract theory to actionable premises. Rather than leaving thinking about the implementation issues to others, academics needs to explore the “so what” questions themselves—investigating and answering what managers are supposed to do with their research results.

Some of the areas in online communities that we still know very little about, and which need a lot of further investigation are:

• The different types of communities
• The role of incentives in communities (when is it corrosive? When is it helpful?)
• How big communities are different from smaller ones
• What is the flow of social, cultural, and economic capital across different communities?
• What is the life cycle of communities (they are a dynamic form)?
• How are online communities as a phenomenon, and their dynamism., changing over time (the form of the form itself is changing)?
• What is the relationship between communities as one form of network to other forms of communal reaching out—for example, people post their profiles on an SNS page, then link to their blog, and the blog cite an entry they noticed or made on a bulletin board, and the board post is about their YouTube video….we know very little about this type of communal flow of interrelations, some of which is captured in new social aggregators like Friendfeed

So there is a lot to do. I want to open up this discussion by saying that this is a very energizing time to be studying this phenomenon of online community. There has never been more action, activity, and opportunity in it, both as a phenomenon that is evolving, growing and changing, and in the world of business and academia.

Posted in Conferences & Presentation, Netnography, Fandom, Entertainment Marketing, Communities and Tribes | No Comments »

April 16, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

I love blogging. It is so incredibly interesting to be a part of the phenomenon you are studying and thinking about. It’s very ethnographic, being an anthropologist who writes about this technological revolution by participating from within it.

So yesterday “Mable” from Costco called me back at about 5:30pm. Working late, those Costco folks do. If you haven’t been following my little Coscto saga, “Mable” is “Trudy’s” supervisor in the Coscto.ca web-site customer service center, and she called me the day after I posted a pretty long and detailed blog about the customer service experience I had at Costco when I tried to get a set of missing screws.

Mable and I had a long talk about the experience. It was never confrontational, but quite enlightening for me. Mable made it clear to me that she would have called me had I been more persistent. I apparently waited too long between messages to request her. And apparently if I had used harsher language I probably could have reached her. There seems to be a sort of “freak out factor” that comes into the calculation. So if the customer is totally insanely angry then they reach a supervisor pretty fast. Or I could have just called them, she pointed out. Which is certainly true. And yes, I wasn’t freaking out, just annoyed. I don’t know if I could feel good about freaking out over a set of screws for my chair when there are so many more important and awful things happening in the world right now.

I talked to Mable about the fact that this wasn’t personal, and she did tell me again that Trudy was upset by the blog post. I asked her to apologize to Trudy. This really was never about anyone in particular.

In writing my blog, I’m still learning about the appropriate tone to take. Blogging is a new kind of freedom. Unlike my other writing, I’m not sending it out for reviews and revisions. I think it, I write it, and off it goes. And I guess that when I included people’s first names, and when I included nasty, biting side comments, that this was crossing over into a sort of cruelty that I feel uncomfortable in reading and think was wrong. I’m still just learning and I make mistakes.

I’ve gone back and edited those posts. I’ve tried to make them more humane and compassionate to the people like Trudy and Mable on the front lines. First, I’ve anonymized the first names of the people I corresponded with. Probably should have done that from the start. I’ve also added some material that can help all of us to empathize with the people who perform this difficult and under-appreciated work. I didn’t do this because anyone asked me to, but because I think that it is the right thing to do. I didn’t soften the stance against shutting customers out or acting like there is no transparency when there actually is. I just made it clearer where the problem is: not with the people, but with the system. But the way the system is set up we need to complain to the people in order to affect the system. Only people can change the system that they’re in.

Very Marxian-ideological, isn’t it?

The problems with the system became clear as I was talking to Mable. It was clear that emails were responded to by emails. Even if the customer requested a phone call (unless they were freaking out requesting…). It was clear that one person’s case file stayed with the person, and that emails sent to them stayed with them when they went on holidays and didn’t get answered by anyone else. It was clear that Coscto was acting as a middleman for other companies, and directing them to ship products from its Coscto.ca web-site, and they had little control over those companies and the way they responded to later customer service requests. Costco and its service people didn’t want to be held accountable because the company whose responsibility it was to send me the screws was not doing it.

I talked a lot about the kind of system that Mable was working within. I knew that it would be impossible for her to change it. She would need to talk to people higher up in Costco. Or have them read my blog. Respond to it. Post on it. It’s easy to do.

As I say in the post, this isn’t about Coscto. It’s about accountability and transparency in a new age of consumer-to-consumer communications. It was good to have that conversation, where I shared how I felt as a customer at one end, and she told me about what it was like to live within the constraints of being a service employee at the other end. I think we ended the conversation learning a bit about each others’ worlds. The walls had really come down. We were speaking person to person now, and the conversation had been prompted by this service incident and the blog, but it went beyond it.

Mable told me that Costco was going to be sending me a $25 gift card in the mail for my troubles. That’s very nice of them and a great gesture to help restore some faith. I’m going to match that and donate a corresponding $50 to Aid Darfur to keep things in perspective. This was a silly little set of screws. An inconveniently disassembled chair. There are much bigger problems in the world. But it’s also important to run our businesses well, and to service each other well as a set of organizations, as a society, as a community.

Posted in Netnography, Communities and Tribes, Marketing News & Insights | 2 Comments »

March 20, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

What’s this weird picture up here?

I had a great discussion a couple of days ago with Lois Kelly. Lois Kelly is a thinker, blogger, author and consultant who works in the area of online community as well. She’s written a book called “Beyond Buzz” which was just awarded a gold prize in the 2008 Axiom Business Book Awards in the Advertising/Marketing/Public Relations category. She also and has her own excellent blog called bloghound.

We were talking about the changed in customer relationships that have happened over the last decade or so, as technology has empowered more and more consumers, allowed them to organize with one another, and given them a voice where the didn’t have one before. I started free-associating and I came up with the metaphor that consumers were like business’s “mute slaves” for decades. Obedient and silent recipients of marketing. And then, gradually, but apparently suddenly from the company’s managers point of view, they were overcoming their muteness, starting to talk back, to resist, to assert their power.

And that’s sort of scary to most marketing and brand managers who really don’t know how to handle these changes, under what Lois aptly called their “command-and-control” mode of interaction.

After the conversation, I was thinking about that classic movie, Planet of the Apes. The feral woman that Charlton Heston encounters, and who later becomes his bunkmate is named “Nova.” As in ready to go nova. Ready to burst. She’s wild-haired and matted, mute: an obvious animal. Heston/Taylor keeps trying to civilize her, teach her to speak, starting with her own name.

In the second movie, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, his linguistic lessons finally pay off and Nova finds her vocal chords. Of course this is a very symbolic act. The whole idea of finding voice is all about organizing, overcoming oppression, becoming resistant as a group of community. The great social theorist Albert O. Hirschman even used the term “voice” to refer to a special kind of social resistance.

Consumers as company’s long-time mute slaves. For a long time companies just put out their products, moved their advertising through the mass market, got them on the shelves and the consumers obediently bought the goods. They behaved. They were at a comfortable distance. When we wanted to hear them, we paid them a few bucks, brought them into a focus group, hid behind the one-way glass and they obediently spoke.

“Talk, Nova, talk.”

Then we could turn off the volume, walk out of the room, and the voice was gone. Nice, neat, clean. But now they were actually teaching each other to speak, they were sharpening their tools and skills, they were making fun of our brands, they were making their own parody ads, they were finding our emails, they were reaching out to us, starting to knock on our doors. It’s not Planet of the Apes. Oh no. Oh no, it’s Night of the Living Dead. Our brains, they’re out to ear our brains.

So much of what is happening with many companies sordid attempts to cope with newly empowered consumers fits into this strange metaphor. Companies are using legal means to try to gag consumers, to put the muffle back on, to shut them up, get them to stop, turn them back into the obedient slaves of the good old days. Remove the threat. Stop the conversation. Make them listen. Make them behave.

So maybe that mute slave metaphor has some deeper roots to it after all. Or maybe I was just watching too much weird stuff about Eliot Spitzer. Who knows?

Posted in Netnography, Technology, Word of Mouth Marketing, Communities and Tribes | 5 Comments »