Published in partnership with Firefly

In the early days of social media and web 2.0, brands and marketers were fascinated and scared at the same time by how the new web was enabling direct access to consumers.  Brands discovered the power of reaching millions of customers on a one-to-one basis, while marketers helped them deal with unsolicited feedback on issues related to their product/service; or in fact, anything that could help the brand increase its social proximity to the prospective client.

Still, what we now know is this

• People (and people behind brands) can’t socialise with millions of people at the same time.  According to Dunbar, we as individuals can’t actually develop relationships with more than 150 people at a given time.
• Humans have an irrepressible desire to differentiate and socialise with like-minded people sharing a passion or an objective.
• Engagement/socialisation happens mostly while sharing content, and different people in the ecosystem started to play different roles like content writing and content distribution (what Forrester calls Mass Mavens and Mass Connectors)
• Bloggers play a key role in the eco-system both as Mavens and Connectors,(see this Yahoo! Study on the role of bloggers in Twitter).

The net is that the social Internet is far from being flat, but reveals itself more as a network of tribes with their own rules, slang, symbols and influencers.

“Community is the new demographics” (as Jaffe Juice puts it). “One size fits all” programmes, whether they entail listening, engagement, or a “Facebook fan page with millions of people sharing nothing but a like” clearly fail to grasp the diversity of these tribes and communities.

To really understand communities, we have to look at them in context.

 Here below is a visual example from the UK “Mums” Community in eCairn.

Each node represents one UK mummy blogger; arrows between nodes represent links (direct reference or blogroll) and the colour is automatically assigned based on the discovery of clusters of nodes.

Different clusters make up the UK Mums community, as shown above:  a core red cluster is mainly talking about parenting and general mum topics; the green cluster is more focussed on food;, others (navy blue) are into books/writing or (purple) fashion.

That said, it is still difficult to discern the motivation for people to connect in a separated group, like the yellow cluster.

So, what is it they talk about? Here is a mining of last week’s conversations:

Besides the usual suspects, you will notice “Father’s Day” and “Three word gallery”. The latter, which refers to a contest in which mums have to come up with creative, three-word-long taglines for photos, strikes me as a particularly good example of how social the Internet has become.

And who are these mums? Here are a few of them…

The most influential mum in the UK:

The most vocal mum on the topic of vouchers and coupons:

Another point worth noting is the absence of “coupon” or “voucher” among the top expressions.  Using US moms as a benchmark, it is clear that vouchers/coupons do not have the same importance on both sides of the Atlantic.

As you can see from this example, engaging with social media is far more complex than just replying to anyone who mentions a brand name or a topic.

And I guess this is excellent news for marketing professionals!

All Mommy bloggers aren’t the same, though.  The only thing they have in common are kids and a passion for blogging/Twitter/Facebook.  Some cover fashion and style, some home and family, and some are very commercial with coupons and special offers. It’s a bit of a jungle from outside.

We’ve researched this tribe often and I wanted to illustrate how to go about finding relevant mommy bloggers  in this tribe.

Challenge: One of my customers is a large home improvement chain. They want to target mommies who are interested in deco.

As I enter the Mommy Tribe using eCairn Conversation™, I see that there are 4 well-defined clusters (red, blue, purple and orange).  Clusters are a visual representation of the interconnectedness within a tribe, some are more connected to each other than to the rest, just like in this post.

We are going to do something similar to Dominique’s presentation at Mediabistro on ‘how to find influencers’.  My goal is to find mommy influencers who talk about deco and understand what they are talking about.  I extracted the multi-word expressions and we can see what each cluster is talking about.

The orange cluster is centered around mommies who are sharing their experience with ‘Jewels’ and family values.

The purple cluster is focused on tweeting, creative things for children to do such as painting, photography, and imagination.

The light blue cluster focuses on mommies who want to decorate their homes, and create projects.  Many of the keywords revolve around renovation, inspiration and are very visual. This is the cluster I would like to look at for my customer.

Good, we got a few hints on the structure of this tribe in order to:

• Customize the approach for each group. Clearly, sending a discount offer to the blue group is doomed to fail.
• Develop different activity depending on the level of influence. Don’t send a lame pitch to the biggest influencers; they get so many. Instead, think about something that they would be happy to write about because it’s relevant to their readers. Invite them to an event, create a custom program where they can contribute and show their contribution afterwards in their blog.

I would suggest to the home improvement agency to:

• Send a special coupon/offer for home deco to the mommies talking about “coupons”
• Create a virtual room where the client can invite select deco mommy bloggers to decorate it and have a contest to pick the best one in different categories such as “most glamorous”, ” most stylish”, “most eco-friendly” and so on.

Be sure to check out the Mommy Tribe and more at Social GPS: FREE influencer list and community maps for social media marketers.

Targeting in social media can become very tricky if you go passed the talks and demos where everything looks easy and you really try to do it.

We advocate and have implemented a two steps process:
(note that before engaging into any social media program, you’ve to be clear on your strategy and your positioning)

1) Identify your target community (where your target customers hang out)

2) Listen, search, engage and influence within 1)

Let’s look at some real case examples we stumbled upon in the last few weeks.

Green campaign for non Green Moms

I recently discussed with a top green blogger the issue of positioning.

At one point in time she had to  promote a “green/healthy” behavior towards Mom’s . As we discussed, it became clear that it was kind of counterproductive to spend time buzzing  in green blogs.  Most of people reading these blogs  are already highly knowledgeable about what you want to promote and sold on it.  What the real target is, is the “regular” mom’s blog – may have to segment further-   and you want to focus within this space on the few conversations that express concerns about climate change, healthy food a.s.o.

Mobile Social Networking

Another client example is on mobile social networking. The objective is clearly to promote mobility in blogs talking about technology for social networking.

You just can’t go to your favorite blog search or social monitoring solution and engineer the few keywords that will bring back the conversations IN social networking blogs that talk ABOUT mobile.

You go for the mobile keywords and you will be swamp by conversations (surely interesting) about mobile issues in general.

Cosmetic Blogs

One of our client also recently wanted to do some reporting around skin care issues in the cosmetic blogs.

After a first quick search, we realize that the cosmetic community was more complex than what we thought it was. Actually there are several communities interested in cosmetics.  In France as an example, you’ve got a fairly active community that talk about “bio/ hand made cosmetics”, next to a less vocal community that actually discuss and comment on luxury/exclusive cosmetic & skin care products.

To get anything meaningful out of this chaos , we had to map these two community and then dive into the conversations that talk about skin care issues.

This was the only way to get to the level of precision like: what are the issues around skin care for the bloggers that are  versed in luxury cosmetics.

From a 10 000 miles views, these perceptions (the signal we wanted to monitor) were buried into the huge number of discussions in “bio blogs” around the same topic.

As a friend of mine told me, when you search, 2/3 of the time should be spent on the question, the rest on the response.

(image from freefoto.com)