While Exploring the Harley Owners Group (HOG) in the Brand Asset Management class at school the discussion moved towards the creation of communities around brands,with communities being defined as dynamic socially-structured groups sharing:

• An ethos and set of values
• A moral responsibility and obligation to the group
• Hierarchies of membership with understood advancement processes
• Rules and behavioral norms with sanctions and rewards
• Common language, rites, rituals & symbols
• Agreement about who the group “are not” as well as who they “are”

In the case of Harley Owners Group, the particular use of Posse Rides was being explored. The point being that there is a brand persona associated with Harley which is reinforced by the Posse Rides, creating a group of die-hard influences, free PR and above all a sense of hierarchy in the HOG community where participation in the Posse Ride is the right of passage into the riding elite.

The picture looks just so perfect right now.

The discussion then moved on to the next point: pondering that technology had nothing to do with community creation.  Hence all the noise we keep hearing that online social media is not what makes communities. This part didn’t sit well with me.

Lets look at the HOG, their bikes and the posse ride.Why are they a community? What makes someone aspire to be a member?

The HOG community is based one a basic “aspirational promise”: that once you join us you can share the persona of a rebel, an outlaw, the forever-free, macho biker. In order to have that aspiration though, a consumer needs to have been exposed to Harley’s outlaw history inspired by the likes of the Hells Angels.  The Posse ride and similar events act as tools for the same. ( edit: as pointed by @brigzay the bikes themselves are the tools/media for community interaction. see comments)

There are a few problems here:
Firstly, the Harley riding macho outlaw persona is not an aspirational persona for the millennial generation.The demographics of current Harley users are blatantly obvious, with a clear trend in the wrong direction.  Secondly, the Hell’s Angels are ancient
history.  The youth might like the outlaw persona but they probably associate it more with “hackers” who broke into Twitter than with Harley riders.

What can technology and the Social Web do for Harley?

Technology can create new tools for participating in the HOG culture and can introduce a whole new generation to the outlaw culture.  One of the many things that Harley could try is to be engaged in MMO games. That is where the youth lives and where they express their rebellion.  Why not act as the agent in that safe expression of rebellion?  MMO games share characteristics with real-world communities.  Just like a Posse ride is a tool for keeping the aspirational outlaws among the baby boomers and Gen X, engaged with the Harley Brand, the MMO game (or any social-network-based rebellious activity) can act as a tool to engage Gen Y or the millennial generation.

MMO games are just one of the many possible places that could happen …

disclaimer: Brand Asset Management is probably the second best marketing class I have attended at Kelley, the best would be Marketing Strategy .

Outlined below is a 5 step process to evaluate the communication needs of the company and how social media could change or improve the current paradigms. This process is from the perspective of an internal consultant, who has a sound understanding of the companies vision and strategy. (This is a work-in-progress model, so all comments and criticism are welcome.)

1. Based on the vision and strategy, Identify key entities/groups that interact/or should interact with each other ( e.g. prospects, consumers, Sales force, Mkt , Competion, Regulators, Govt.)
2. Define the optimal mode of interaction between those entities (e.g. listening, responding, interaction, broadcast)
3. Identify a communication paradigm that best facilitates the interaction
   

   matching social tools to communication needs

4. Evaluate existing tools on the basis on these paradigms. ( the example below is an evaluation exercise for the career services department at a business school)
   

   Identifying communication needs and areas for improvement

5. Propose changes and new solutions or else congratulate the company on a comprehensive communication strategy!

Once again, this is a work-in-progress model, so all comments and criticism are welcome!

Have you noticed the language being used on twitter ? Just have a look at random posts corporate executives, who presumably are using the most appropriate and decent form of Twitter-English ie. Twinglish :

jeffBooth “shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world” – Jack Welch. New blog post on why I agree. http://tinyurl.com/cfha22
gweston: There so few companies we trust absolutely? I trust Costco, Southwest Discount Tire? Isn’t “Trust” the best strategy for all businesses?
Padmasree Good article, like the analysis. Prefer gender neutral terms NOT “top young guns and older bulls” Come on @vwadhwa http://j.mp/h2BDi

A few points to note:

• To the point- practical use of language
• No flowery intros. No “good news-bad news-good news” formatting
• Minor grammatical mistakes are OK !
• Bullet point talk is trendy

So here is my point, the 140 char limit is a cultural leveler. First language or not everyone has to fit their thoughts into 140 char. This makes internationals (Europeans, Chinese, Indians), who are in the habit of writing long-winded sentences – cut back . On the other hand it also prevents native English speakers come straight to the content. It does not give them a chance to begin with ” I like the work you have done here . Vere interesting, but can redo the whole thing because ……” . In Twinglish you would have to go  staright ” We will need to redo … because…”

This gives English an engineering approach . I think this is a trend for the better, but you might disagree.

With all the hullabaloo around Social media Marketing and its ROI. A facet of this paradigm shift in communication tools is being ignored. I am talking about microbloging tools for internal knowledge sharing, no not just twitter. In-fact not twitter at all.
The paradigm of communication, where “whats on ur mind” or “what are u working on” or “what do u need help with”, can be made self evident to a whole legion on individuals who are empathetic towards you, is simply amazing. (if your employees are not empathetic to each others needs, then you have a bigger problem at hand.)

Having worked in knowledge based industries like software development and Automotive design, I realize the importance of being able to ask for help passively and receive it at the right time. All those who have gone through the onerous process of post -project harvest meetings, must share my pain? You must have questioned the fact – will anyone ever be able to reach this document that I am creating ?. The motive behind these Knowledge management practices was noble. But was it accomplished ? Were we ever able to leverage the past experience of another employee sitting at another campus ?

This is where tools like Yammer, status.net (open source) , Identi.ca (based on status.net) come in the picture. Here are more if u want to explore. Say for instance, your organization is in a closed microbloging environment like Yammer , i.e. all ur yams (tweets) are only visible to people within your organization. Now you wanted to know if there is there is anyone in the organization who has implemented a open source CRM tool. Will you send out an email to everyone ? Will you rummage through a repository of harvested projects ? I would rather just Yam “hey, working on an open source CRM project. need help!” . And I guess within , even the largest of organizations- your degrees of separation from the right person would not b more than 2. ( yes I know I need to substantiate wild claims. But it seems sensible enough.)

To really substantiate these ideas I would love to talk to an organization that might have implemented internal micro-bloging tools. let me know if you know of one, either in the comments or @gagantweet (twitter).

The web has always been hailed as the great leveler, as it allows equal access to information. But information has greater relevance if available at the right place and the right time. Shortening this gap between information-need and answers is the goal of  search tools, which fall into the following categories:

Search Engines: It all started with Archie Veronica and Jughead in the pre-web days, reaching their present form in Google, Bing and ask. Their basic function being the ability to crawl, index and search the web. In other words a an “algorithm” decides what matches our queries and presents the results.

Decision engine (specialty search or activity based search): Although Bing would want to call itself a decision engine, the real decision engines are, specialty search sites like expedia, priceline or amazon. A user goes to these sites to to make a decision or perform a certain task. The UI is designed for specific interactions, as against a generic interaction paradigm in the case popular search engines.

Knowledge engines: Websites like Wolfram Alpha, can provide complex answers to knowledge based questions , instead of just links  to website.

Social engine / Help engine: Real time help engines like Vaark , malaho and Yahoo anwers take search to the next level. Instead of connecting people to information, they connect people with others who have knowledge about the subject. This is more true about serveries like aardVark which gather information on people’s expertise and learn with time.

This is not to say that the relevance of search engines is less, but now their role has been restricted to stuff that is not real time and information that we expect to be common enough to be documented somewhere. But as social engines learn and build on accumulated interactions, the paradigm for searching information would surely change.  People would have the choice to ask real people or ask a web repository.

Where would Wikipedia fit ? Would it be an answer engine or a social engine ?