Where is Everybody? Social changes mean companies are losing control of their Brands, Communities and Staff

I've been thinking about this subject a lot recently, and posted some initial thoughts on the Internet World 2009 site.

The social land-grab is seeing many companies loosing control of their brands and communities as these enter the social spaces such as Facebook and Linkedin Groups, Ning communities and the Twitter sphere. A quick search on many brands will bring up high rankings for these domains and user generated communities, meaning that these are the places people will go to evaluate the brands.

It also means that the millions of dollars companies are investing in promoting their websites via search engines is becoming an increasingly speculative process.

Is it Irreversible?

What is amazing is that most companies don’t seem to be doing anything to reverse this wholesale move of customer relationships from the traditional direct channels through to 3rd party communications spaces. Companies are losing out in particular to their own staff are ad-hock setting up social spaces around the target markets for their companies, and where the ownership lies with the individual and not the company they work for.

The web is a beautiful thing in that it allows for greatly improved self-service and 24/7/365 service times. What it also does is reduce the level of intimacy between companies and their clients. Most organisations have invested heavily in improving their online revenue generation and servicing, however little has been done to improve loyalty or engage better with their communities.

Where’s the Loyalty

A simple scenario is a person who regularly buys airline tickets. A decade ago a regular buyer might have gone to the airline’s booking office, met their regular customer service representative and been advised on the best ticket / package to get. A few years ago the person might simply have phoned up, had the advice, and paid by credit card, they would still have experienced personal service and a human touch. Now the person does everything faster and more easily online, without any human interaction. The problem with this is that it means that there is much less to bind the person to the organisation on a personal level. People now simply look for the best price / availability fit and typically go with that. Customer service ’on the ground’ might help, but Ryanair has proven that it doesn’t affect buying decisions as much as it should.

Companies must engage to rebuild loyalty, and that involves being ’out there’ in the social spaces and virtual cross roads. It involves helping their community and being responsive to issues as they are raised. It also means that companies should do something about providing the community services required by the customers. You can’t force the creation of a community, but you can facilitate it and help it to develop and re-build lost contact.

Who's Making Money from your Community?

One of the great things about being on the eBusiness frontline is that I get to meet some great people. One person we've recently started working with is a top musician and DJ who has two million followers on MySpace, his videos have been seen hundreds of millions of times on YouTube and he's yet to see a penny of revenue from either site.

To make matters worse, he's now in the situation where the site owners are selling his back-catalogue through a 3rd party on via his profile page, and are in effect promoting material that he gets minimal royalties for at the expense of his more recent materials.

The fact is that if you don't have ownership of the platform which the community is running on then you have minimal ability to generate revenues from the community. Not only that but you run the risk of 3rd parties and even competitors taking ownership of your community or changing the terms of your engagement at any stage.

For a start-up it's particularly dangerous since ownership of a Facebook or LinkedIn community has minimal value, even though it might be the largest grouping in existence.

The fact is that many social media sites strictly forbid the selling of communites or accounts in their terms and conditions. This in turn puts a major question mark on the long-term return on investment in building up communities on these sites.

Are Individuals Benefiting at the Expense of Companies?

Yes.

A simple scenario is two senior sales professionals. One builds up his sales contacts and monitors everything through the company controlled CRM, uses the company telephone and computer and then one day loses his job through no fault of his / her own. That person, unless they’ve been very careful, and possibly working against the terms of their contract, will have a very hard time to piece together their professional profile, contacts, relationships and status.

The second sales person builds up their client acquisition network through Linked-In (or similar), sets up numerous interest groups, syncs everything with Plaxo, does status updates via numerous Twitter accounts, and manages much of their activity through their own personal iPhone or Blackberry. You now have someone who can move seamlessly between companies, often with the considerable ownership of the customer relationship in a way that was previously not possible.

But that needn’t be a bad thing if companies are able to leverage their ’enabled employees’ and social networks.

The fact is that the process of loyalty switching from brands to individuals is going to speed up. The tools and networks which were previously only available to companies, often exclusively large companies, are now in the hands of individuals, and no longer in the hands of those employing them.

What can Companies do to Regain Ownership of their Communities

The first thing companies need to do is to take ownership of the platform that they're developing their communities on. These need to be self-contained and managed around their brand, or as independent brands sponsored by the company. It's worth noting that my company Emojo makes such a platform (Affino) so there is a certain bias here.

A good community site requires great moderation, good infrastructure, good media, good content, effective promotion and much more. It should have the infrastructure in place to allow for the growth of a social marketplace where community members can do business.

The Social Networks and Social Media Hubs should then be used as feeder sites for these commercial community hubs.

Commercial Communities require Constant Engagement

A constant evolution is required to respond to the needs of the community. It typically takes one to two years to evolve a site to the level where the community has settled down and the tools broadly meet their requirements. In practice these requirements vary extensively from one community to another and a lot of granularity is required to get the mix right. For example one community might want powerful media management whilst the another might prefer minimal (but fast) image uploads and nothing more.

Community members quickly become disengaged once the community moderators and leaders become inactive so continuity, recognition and rewards are all important. This means companies must invest in building up in-house community teams if they are going to succeed online.

Companies which get this right will be the brand and thought leaders of tomorrow. Those who don't will see a gradual diminishing of their brand and will be sidelined from their communities over time.