When I was back in my academic thesis writing days my two Academic idols in Social Media Marketing were Susan Fournier and Danah Boyd. Danah has the biggest online bookshelf of online social networking academic papers. If you can understand academic jargon, that link is like pure gold, you will even see my ol' thesis get a mention. ;)
Anyways, Susan Fournier wrote my favourite paper, she cracked the idea of Brand Relationships. In a nut shell, we have relationships with products and brands similar to how we perceive our relationship with people.
Fournier has come back again and written a cracking article on Brand Communities in Harvard Business Review. Get ready to have your mind blown. Here is a taste, I am going to get a few more blog post out of her article.
Spot on, I think that Facebook Fanpages act more as badges rather than communities. I do not see that much conversing going on, it is more about just associating with those brands.
5 comments:
JC - thanks for the Susan Fournier tip - I will have to go off & read the article.
My gut response to the table is "yes and".
Pools are often made up of hubs & networks. They only appear pools to outsiders.
if a web doesn't form from a hub then the hub dies. You often get schisms & spin-off groups if the central figure wants to suppress P2P interaction.
The stuff in bold is key and it could be phrased as "what is the nature of the bond people share?"
Which immediately plugs into Granovetter's strong/weak ties...
This makes perfect sense - relationships are relationships, funny that we rarely think in these terms. I think all of the industry jargon (consumers, target, USP, etc) do a lot to try to separate the fact that we are communicating with people.
A nice reminder. And great visual btw, how awesomely odd!
Matt, I think there is more to it. How I interpreted it is, that there are three different types of Communities and that not all communities are hubs, you need to understand what type of community you have.
Hey Libby, glad you liked the graphs, I cannot take the credit though, they are Fourniers. You're right at the end of the day it is just about communication which is the basis of relationships.
I can see a pool forming around Prius owners, hilariously satirized by South Park.
Driving a Prius, I gotta say that better than the fuel economy, the reliability and great features, is the smug sense of self-satisfaction! It says "I care about the environment, I don't care about tailgaters". At red lights Prius drivers nod to each other like members of a secret fraternity. We all get a personally signed photo of Al Gore snuggling a polar bear to hang above our carbon neutral electric fireplace.
To me this is much like the pool cultivated by Apple. But there is no actual network that I know of, only common values. I've never seen advertising for the Prius, it must be good PR and subtle brand placement. Not to mention good timing...
Haha Returnon, it is funny that about not being a community who interact but more keep the same values.
I know that you kind of get that feeling with Air Max 90s, when you see someone else in them you kind of nod and know. Same I think is seen with fixie bikes and heaps of other products.
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