Over the last year, I have helped a dozen brands change how they think about 360 degree marketing by encouraging them to ask themselves three simple questions –
1. Who are our evangelists and what are their passions?
2. What are the values embedded in our brand?
3. How can we connect our brand values with our evangelists’ passions?
Often, online lifestyle- or cause-based communities hosted by the brand are a good way to transform customers and citizens into evangelist. However, brand managers and even other social media folks are often confused about the difference between social networks and communities.
Basically, social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook represent our existing relationships. Communities like Dell Go Green and Royal Challengers Bangalore represent our passions. Communities can be connected with social networks via APIs, RSS feeds, widgets or social outposts like Facebook Pages or LinkedIn Groups.
In a series of well-written posts, Lithium‘s Michael Wu (@michael8wu) does a great job of outlining the difference between social networks and communities and the role each plays into building weak ties, converting weak ties into strong ties, and maintaining strong ties.
In the first post, he outlines the differences between social networks and communities –
Social Networks are:
1. Held together by pre-established interpersonal relationships between individuals. So you know everyone that is directly connected to you.
2. Each person has one social network. But a person can have different social graphs depending on what relationship we want to focus on.
3. They have a network structure.Communities are:
1. Held together by some common interests of a large group of people. Although there may be pre-existing interpersonal relationship between members of a community, it is not required.
2. Any one person may be part of many communities.
3. They have overlapping and nested structure.
In the second post, he explains that we form weak ties via shared communities and shared connections in our social networks.
In the third post, he argues that communities around shared passions are the key to converting weak ties into strong ties.
In the fourth post, he argues that social networks are the key to maintaining strong ties.
So, we need both focused communities and broad social networks and we need to connect them together as tightly as possible.
I have been evangelizing this hybrid approach for over a year now and it’s nice to see that others are now beginning to see the value in knitting together communities and social networks.
