Tribalization of Business?Really??!! Are we going a few hundred years back in time?
It really appears so. Social media is here to stay and becoming more mainstream each day, and smart businesses better adjust to this new reality....
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2 comments:
Thank you for posting about the study, which was co-sponsored by my organization (Beeline Labs) as well as the Society for New Communications Research.
I think that you are not quite capturing the essence of what we are trying to say when you say that "new avenue for businesses to rethink strategies and reach customers in an increasingly flat world."
First off, this is not about reaching customers, as the most important conversations that happen in the marketplace are no longer those that happen between your organization and your prospects and customers, but rather those that happen among them. So in social media, its not about new strategies to reach customers, its about developing content differently so it travels around the networks that count.
Second of all, I would contend that in social media the world is far from flat - it's actually pretty spiky around tribes with shared passions, shared pains, or shared sense of duty.
Francois Gossieaux
http://www.emergencemarketing.com
http://www.beelinelabs.com
http://www.cmotwo.com
Dear Francois, thanks for your thoughtful comments, we appreciate your feedback. Our reading of this study was the highlighting of the tension between social media experts who have a keen sense of the future and the regular business world, which is still dealing with existing paradigms.
We do agree that in social media, dialogues are happening external to the organizations, and among networks that are not controlled by the enterprise in the traditional manner, and the new charge for a company is to actively get involved in these interactions. But ultimately, the bottom line has to be connecting with existing or latent customers to create revenues and eventually shareholder value.
To your second point, we would argue that social media is another aspect of the flattening world, small businesses are equally competitive with larger businesses on the internet, and large scale is not such a competitive advantage as it is in the traditional paradigm. Social media spikes do exist, but isn’t that going away as social media penetrates deeper into businesses? Your study does show that there is continuance of deep rooted older thinking, and as you repeat this in a year or two, the findings would be quite different.
Again, thanks for your response, we are glad to dialogue with our readers.
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