The tribes

The spoken word tribe Representative platforms

Skype, WhatsApp, voicemail, customer voice menu.

Other platforms

Traditional landline telephony.

Senses?

Audio and some webcam streams.

Meme multiplier?

Very low capability.

Terse/prolix verdict

Both terse and very slow, due to voice limitations. (Prolix means tediously lengthy.)

Business risk: medium

A lack of a voice response frustrates separately from the original issue, so risk to you can be high.

Best response

Voice users are a declining group these days: their demand for human contact in business has been swept away by the preferences of a new generation. At the same time, the voice-controlled search or shopping engine is becoming a huge part of retail computing – but it doesn’t have the two-way interactivity that the voice tribe demands. They can’t get a voice API at a taxi booking service to make them a promise or get them a refund, so they don’t use that platform.

The videoconferencing tribe Representative platforms

Cisco Webex, GotoMeeting, LifeSize.

Other platforms

Google Hangout. Tandberg, Polycom.

Senses?

Audio, video, occasionally some shared documents.

Meme multiplier?

Very low capability.

Terse/prolix verdict

Feels prolix but actually information transfer is slow. Send an email!

Business risk: very low

Being bored senseless isn’t strictly a “risk”.

Best response

Actually having an agenda and pre-call materials. Videoconferencing makes use of computer technology to deliver messages in as un-computery a way as possible. While lots of the consumer market point-to-point chat and videocall software looks like it overlaps, working on Skype will not confer any advantage when you go to your new job and find they are using Skype for Business. Luckily, the point-to-point nature of the tech radically limits meme spread or runaway gossip, while doing nothing at all to lift the mindnumbing tedium.

The social media tribe Representative platform

Facebook.

Other platforms

Yahoo Groups, Orkut (not English speaking), YouTube vloggers.

Senses?

Visual (still/video), text, audio (rare).

Meme multiplier?

Vast and uncontrollable.

Terse/prolix verdict

Making friends means they can follow a long campaign dressed up as short notes, over weeks or months.

Business risk: the highest

Lies take hold and won’t go away. The reasons are still not understood, even by the inventors.

Best response

Continuous telling of your own story. Not allowing the fabricators and detractors to own the agenda: have something to say about yourself or your business every week at the very least, with a clear boundary between personal account identity and company-branded communications. Learn how to recast your information in the format clearly preferred by the inattentive reader – although glib stereotypes such as that are a trap lying in wait for the unwary because

some topics sustain considerable complexity in social media. Users are not tolerant of mealymouthed corporate speak and will take that as proof of guilt, rather than a measured, customerfacing response. Do not try to match high-volume output blow for blow – taking a deep breath and walking away is an important part of that agendarejection technique. Give your audience some credit for being on your side: trying to head off or discredit the loudest and nastiest voice of criticism is a good way to annoy otherwise disinterested customers. Always remind people that other channels of communication can be used – the limitations to format and conversation help to move those more difficult topics to more private contexts, such as email.

The Twitter tribe

Representative platform Well, Twitter. Senses? Reading, some stills and video formats. Meme multiplier?

Uncontrolled and possibly uncontrollable. Saved only by a short working memory. Terse/prolix verdict

Terse in the extreme. Business risk

Enormous, although not to absolutely every type of business. Best response

Probably silence. Part of the imposition on your business of any digital tribe is that their choice of arena is the right and best place to communicate, and they may not be right. Furthermore, they may not deny you the right to copy their decision, and in turn pick your environment. Without doubt, as discussed in many research papers and books, Twitter can have a toxic and damaging effect on what would otherwise be a reasonable conversation. It’s something about the brevity and off-thecuff responses that takes simple cries for help and makes them into grand and terrifying accusations. The rapidity of transmission is also a massive risk to those who might benefit from pausing to draw a breath, sitting back and thinking what to say.

The email tribe

Representative platforms Gmail, Office 365, Outlook. Other platforms FastMail, GMX, Yahoo, Virgin. Senses?

Reading, writing, attachments and links extend the concept. Meme multiplier?

Progressive. Emails can start out private and then later “go global”. Terse/prolix verdict

Mostly prolix. The habit of including the whole conversation thread in a two-word reply is an emailer sin. Business risk

High to very high: emails are the predominant means of transmission of malware and other intruders. Best response

Make good use of filtering software. Some businesses use automatic responders; others use handshaking procedures to validate an approved correspondent, with passwords sent by SMS or spoken over the phone before the gateway will allow any messages through. The chances are high that anyone who is abusing your brand over email has no knowledge or valid complaint of any kind – it’s just another attempt at getting you to click on a link with a bad payload at the other end. Assuming you establish that the emails are genuine (which should be your first step), the limiting factors in email are about managing that long thread history. You have to remember that the “forest fire” logic of Twitter is inverted when it comes to email – the messages stick around. For years, in some cases: I have mails from the 1990s. Thinking about how your business might have to respond to emails from that long ago is a difficult call when dealing with obstreperous or even manipulative correspondents. This is where the IT preference for one communication method over another shades into the tricky business of customer handling. While in my line of work the occasional firing of a client is thought to be good for the soul, and probably also for the client, there are sectors where putting a foot wrong can have consequences and emails are a favourite for this – just ask Hillary Clinton.

The chat room tribe

Representative platforms Facebook

Other platforms Messenger, Google Hangouts.

Slack, Discord, IRC, the Dark Web, Microsoft Senses? Teams.

Primarily reading, with some options for voice. Meme multiplier?

Phenomenally powerful. Partly due to the closed in-joke cultures that multiple person chat software thrives on, and partly because of its roots in hacker counterculture. More likely to be an issue around staff in chat rooms leaking data out than customers using them in preference to usual service or feedback mechanisms. Terse/prolix

Somewhat hard to pin this down as chat itself is quite terse, but on the other hand, Slack in particular counts as a document management platform. Business risk

Surprisingly high given that the risk arises from insiders leaking out, not outsiders battering at your doors. Best response

Go private! If you think you have a public chat room issue, don’t try to squash the millennial preference for platforms like this. Give them one of their own, owned and operated by you. This will theoretically keep them out of public chat rooms and their hothouse insider culture, and maybe even give you a bit of that for your business.

“Twitter can have a toxic and damaging effect on what would otherwise be a reasonable conversation”