Ho To Create A Tribe With Social Media

Is your social media strategy creating a tribe? Let’s use one of my clients as an example of what I mean.

These guys work in the B2B world and are doing well. They have a diverse market with very distinct and different segments.

My client knows that their business is about relationships and the power of referral marketing. It how they have got where they are, yet as they have grown, it’s effectiveness has slipped. They know they need to build a better customer relationship and want to turn their customer base into a tribe.

How do you create a tribe using social media?

So let’s say assume we are looking at about a 1000 clients in total with about 2-3 decision makers in the process across four very distinct and different market segments. The question they are asking me is:

How do we create a social media strategy to improve our customer relationships?

Reality One: In South Africa we have a population of about 50 million people (you can add on another 10 million illegal immigrants).

• Of this total population we have about 88 000 twitter users (source: Alistair Fairweather).
• We have about 2.6 million active monthly Facebook users – where about 1 million of these are active every week. 12% of these users are graduates (source: Alistair Fairweather).
• LinkedIn has about 145000 over the age of 24 (source: Mike Saunders)

Reality Two (client reality): Of these 1000 accounts the key people we are dealing primarily with are graduates: biologists, chemists etc.

Will social media work?

To a limited degree. There is certainly some form of value that can be gained out of the technological platforms that exist. We can take it a step further and set up a blog or create what we call an interactive learning environment (ILE).

An ILE is essentially a membership system where we can engage the different clients, share knowledge and build a better relationship. This would have to be well thought as many of these clients compete with each other. They don’t want to share info.

So, while this target market is techno savvy, techno is only going to get me so far. I still need to create a tribe.

Social rather than techno

While this target market may not be huge social media users, their decision making process has changed thanks to the technology. How they evaluate and make decisions is different to how the same group of people would have made a decision 5, 10 even 20 years ago.

A short while ago I wrote a post on how well do you understand your social propellers. The premise is very simple: We all have different groups that we connect with. Our family are different to our work colleagues, who are different from our high school mates, who are different from the friends we made during our gap year, who are different from our sports buddies. And so on.

Yet so often we tend to market to these groups as a homogeneous group. We assume that technology will connect these groups. Not so.

Social (tribal) behaviour rather than technological behaviour

There is no one size fits all, one standard, approach here. We communicate with each group differently; we say different things through different technology. And this is certainly the case if we look at my client example above.

As a takeout here, a summary of my thoughts where each group – or tribe:

• is different and not equal
• socialises in different ways
• communicates in a different way
• makes decisions based on different criteria
• can be organic, easy flowing and unstructured — or — deliberate, structured, and hierarchical
• technology enables the group rather than defines it.