SNCR Symposium – Online Communities and the Natural Human Urge to ‘Help Out’
November 15th, 2008 by Tim Allik
 SNCR Senior Fellow Francois Gossieaux, left, with Deloitte’s Ed Moran presenting at the SNCR Symposium in Cambridge. |
What motivates people when it comes to joining and participating in online communities? Francois Gossieaux believes that it’s due to an instinctive reflex embedded in our brains.
“People want to help other people and be helped,” said Gossieaux of Beeline Labs, a senior fellow with the Society for New Communications Research.
Helping people help each other is good for business.
Gossieaux made the case in a presentation at the SNCR Symposium in Cambridge, Mass. on Friday. The presentation was based on a study produced in tandem with Deloitte and SNCR that examined how more than 140 organizations are employing online communities.
In Gossieaux’s view, people operate in either a “social framework” or a “market framework.”
“Within a social framework, if a neighbor asks you to move a couch you’ll do it because it gives you the warm fuzzies.” A market framework, on the other hand, is “cold, calculated.”
Gossieaux says the research he’s done with Deloitte’s Ed Moran (co-presenter at the SNCR event) suggests that online communities built using a social framework are more robust, more sustainable, and more apt to scale dramatically.
Gossieaux illustrated the two models with two examples: Walmart’s Elevenmoms initiative and scissors maker Fiskars’ Fisckateers community. The Walmart project offers a $6,000 prize to the blogger who produces and uploads the most compelling video to Walmart’s YouTube channels. In contrast, Fisckateers is a community of scrapbook aficionados whose sole motivation seems to be to help one another.
While Gossieaux believes that each of these projects is a success from a marketing perspective, the Fisckateers community will outlast the marketing campaign, a situation that isn’t likely with the Walmart effort.
Gossieaux’s conclusion: tapping into peoples’ passions and desire to help each other – not paying them – is the best way to build online communities.
Altruism, it turns out, is a good business model (when it comes to web community building, at least).
Sometimes the nice guys win after all.
This entry was posted on Saturday, November 15th, 2008 at 7:10 pm and is filed under Events, PR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
November 16th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Great meeting you at SNCR. I was also impressed with the insights in Francois’ study, especially the suggestion that a marketing campaign requires constant input, but a movement takes on alife of its own.
I wonder what will happen to the Yes We Can movement, now that Obama has been elected, and the Obama transition team is moving away from some of the openness that characterized its campaign’s social media.
Protesters across the country mobilized last week to rally against Prop 8 and similar legislation that forbids gay marriage. Many of these rallies features “Yes We Can” as chants and visible themes.
Will the “Yes We Can” movement expand and enlarge into something else, as its originators “manage” it less?
November 16th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Hi Beth, it was a pleasure meeting you as well. The SNCR symposium is unique among social media events because the research is deep, it’s real and the findings are truly informative.
There is quite a bit of speculation swirling around the blogopshere about how Obama might leverage his own online community in the future, as president. He’ll certainly be in uncharted territory (again), but there is a lot of potential (again).
Obama has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt the power of online communities when it comes to political movements. Politically active people involved in issues like Proposition 8 will certainly find and contribute to existing online communities or build new ones.
I think this is democracy reborn, and I celebrate the new participatory politics we’re witnessing today via the web.