Microformats - social software - brands
What I've written about lately: tagging,microformats, branding, complexity theory meet spiderman, and the pathology of business bullshit, yak, yak, yak is all happing now.
From management-issues by Michael Bayler - Understanding the tribal dynamic " First of all, look around at the tribal activity, the shared meaning that are all around you. Understand that this energy is a resource into which you can plug your brand, to light it up like a huge Xmas tree, to supercharge it in fact."
Mike suggests to, "Think beehive …"
Think about this little metaphor for a while. When you've finished, you'll understand precisely how brands need to align with tribes.
Why do bees matter here?
- Because we like honey, we don't know how to make it, and we can only get it from bees.
- Because when bees get pissed off, they sting: this can also happen in bee teams, if you manage to piss off the whole hive.
- Because we realise that bees can and do communicate very effectively among themselves, but we don't yet know how to join in. How do we need to behave then?
- To get honey, we can only broadly influence bee-haviour, mostly by enabling the beehive and doing it on the bees' own terms, using our very limited understanding of what makes bees happy.
- Most important of all, when bees go about bee business, they carry bee-type messages to and from the hive ...
- ... and this is the behaviour brands want to learn to influence, within and between tribes."
Suddenly your brand is being watched, tagged, re-purposed or ignored. Of course, there will be winners and losers, the question is, how do I implement a program?
In another post Mike writes about, Tribes and Trust - "The Touchstone
Come through the Looking Glass with me,
into the near-future. Meet Yasmin." Mike spins a great story about Yasmin and the power of a cell phone.
"The impact of The Touchstone?
Simple. Shoppers are empowered, with every purchase they make, to vote with their wallets for or against the commercial success of every corporation in the world.
Supported by the auditing and benchmarking capabilities of NGO's, each one handling a different element of corporate trust, environment, food quality, accounting, welfare and so on, consumers simply select the values and standards they wish to reflect and support in all their purchases, configuring The Touchstone to automatically exclude or query those brands that fall below the appropriate benchmarks.
A number of services cluster around the core proposition, and more are added each year.
Yasmin's family, for example, have configured the service to refer in real time to the various databases that carry their individual medical records – including all mild or severe food allergies and current medications, their health targets, the monthly budgets for groceries, entertainment and so on, the household diary, their travel and social plans."