Modern tribes
From email to Skype, there are a lot of ways to communicate online. Steve Cassidy sticks in his Babel fish and explores how to engage with clients on their preferred platforms
How to engage with clients on their platforms.
How to communicate in the era of communication? Things used to be simple, with not much more than half a dozen ways of talking to your customers. You could respond to criticism within a month or two by issuing press releases. You could buy some adverts – on TV, if you were adventurous. You might have an open day, or have heavy requirements for product documentation.
Not any longer. Your reputation is now in the hands of people whose response time is measured in hours, and whose consumption of information is indiscriminate: truth or lies, never mind – all they want is impact, and if you help with that then they are pleased to include you in their story. What’s more, the old scattergun approaches no longer reach very far: humanity has divided and redivided into tribes, and you have to have something to say about each grouping, so that you don’t spend too much time chasing tribes who are either never going to talk about you, or never going to like you, no matter what.
Reading that last bit back, it strikes me as a tad over-emotional for a business advice piece. However, that’s actually relevant here because the divides between tribes, and the internal heat on any communication platform, are all about emotions. These cut both ways: you can find that displaying a pride and readiness to call out the fools in one tribe actually improves your connection with other tribes. In 2019, refusing to deal with a tribe can be a valid outcome to an
investigation into your brand and how it’s handled by the market.
There’s also the “royal courtier” problem. The French monarchy built the Palace of Versailles to keep their courtiers all in one place, meaning they could at least exercise some control over the gossip. These days we call those people “trolls” or “social justice warriors” and there’s no neat way to overcome the truth: very often these people will just be scrabbling for a handle with which to wind you up. I’m sure that a common reaction from this group to our observations here will be that I have stereotyped, and that’s inherently bad. My counterargument, though, is that if you are a database person then the idea of a complex and uncontrolled mass of data exhibiting emergent properties is entirely accepted. Once that mass of data is an ongoing conversation, however, it becomes special and different and open to accusation. For those who want to play games like that, please do crack on – but I won’t be listening.
Staying rational
Emotions come first: it’s a much more emotive topic than it first appears. Being drawn into a bad communication is damaging, as is your own reaction to the process of communicating successfully. This includes the way of thinking about the attributes of a given tribe or communications medium. It makes no sense to simply claim that you like blogs and hate Twitter as a personal reaction: the modern rules of business demand that you have something to say about all of them. We have tried to reflect this approach in our summary of the tribes – as well as desperately trying to hang on to a measured technical appraisal amidst the storm of emotion.
Picking criteria
We have used a set of seven criteria in our list of tribes. These are by no means the only possible analysis points – others might be more relevant to you and your audience (suppose, to take a thin-ice example, “Your reputation is now in the hands of people whose response time is measured in hours” that you were a rap music label with a rich spread of obscene lyrics: knowing that an online tribe was made up of religious campaigners would be hugely important to you, and of no interest at all to a business making toothbrushes). Going through the process of drawing up the criteria is almost as useful as the filling in of the answers – if you like, the criteria are introspective and the answers outward-looking.