Chapter One: Hi! I'm a PC. Hi! Name is Mac, Big Mac.
Loyalty, one of my strengths I'd like to use it during interviews. It's catchy, and it has lots of good qualities associated with it. What does that mean, let me expand upon it; I didn't change apartments for 10 years, I never cheated on my girlfriend, I always prefer McDonald's over Burger King (some don't understand why, I simply answer "BK don't have Big Mac") I have worked with several bands from the beginning to their end. I watched "Lost" to the end despite it got crappier and crappier. I am a proud PC owner, and don't intend to change it.
Let's not sidetrack, can you see the pattern here? Small hints; McDonald's, PC, Lost, etc. These are things we consume, choices we intentionally make over their competitors BK, Mac, Heroes(?!!). These connect us, bind us, and create a sympathy for the others that make the same choices we make. Given proper platform, we choose to converse with the ones that are like us. Oh wait, I think we found the secret to the popularity of Facebook "Like" button. Meh, I'm sure someone already knew it anyway. However in terms of being more formal, I believe brand communities are people who intentionally make consumption choices and find the comfort around the people who make the same choice. It is in other words it is people's selective perception of brands and others who has the same perception.
Chapter Two: Lords of Kobol
The origins of the word, tribe, goes back to first people. According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs a person being needs safety as they find the survival conditions. That safety comes from being a society, physically being together against mammoth attacks, wolf packs, dinosaurs or other tribes. Well besides the fact that they just found a new tribe in Amazon untouched by humanity and technology, the existence of tribe concept is shifting towards more civilized means. More technological means.
Similar to brand communities, tribes are set of people gathered around something because they share the same interest, same desire, same passion, same hate, same contribution. The main difference from the brand community is that there may not necessarily be a product they choose to support or buy or talk about. It can be an earthquake (this example is gonna go on and on and on) or a music band, or a TV show, as long as it is common with the group.In addition another difference I see between brand communities and tribes is tribes are more interconnected, have more common grounds and more to interact.
As mentioned in both of the TED talks, what is essential is a leader, for a tribe to survive, to compete, to accomplish things. On the other hand, a brand community is driven by the management and marketing departments of companies, people are attracted to the brand image, and it is one-to many communication. However tribes have many-to many communication which is regulated but encouraged by the leader.
Chapter Three: OK what was I gonna say?
I love giving presentations, it is another strength of me, I can say confidently. I am good at preparing slides, I like talking a lot, and being on the spotlight comes natural to me.
But you know what I am not good at, remembering things. This is why I need to keep the conversation going, extract meanings out of the context. If I keep silent, I forget. And so does the community.
In my presentation about NPOs, I kept repeating the importance of young population and how they are eager to keep online conversation going. In the example of Greenpeace and their catchy slogan used in Turkey "How many inches is yours?" reached out to many people about the illegal fishing in Mediterranean Sea. This is a great strategy by Greenpeace because they realized the potential in young Facebook and Twitter users. They saw how rapid the social fire catches on, and how quickly messages rotate.
Another example from Turkey would be a very recent event, about a book. This book was against the government and trying to expose dirty stuff that has been made in years. Government started a witch hunt and intruded printing houses, newspapers, houses, anything that can be tied to that book.
Just like China, the firewall cannot protect the attacks coming from the inside, a Turkish group created a website, put a clock counter on it and announced that the book will be available on that website in 3 days.
Eventually the book became available, they shut down servers, other websites popped up, e-mails started rotating, Twitter got filled with links for the book from people's personal websites. They created the spark, but "we", people with freewill, networking tools and interest spread the fire.
This is the clear demonstration of how non-profit-organizations can use the same potential and online networking channels to influence someone and spread their message to the people.
They can listen, assess the interests of their communities, setting up a facebook fan page would not suffice, they should put content and start a conversation. They should use realistic indicators other than how many friends do they have, but instead how many retweets they got or how many people posted something on the organization's wall on Facebook.
There is a huge potential for NPOs in the online social platform, with proper analysis and evaluation, and most importantly proper strategy, they "will" be able to be heard and raise donations.
Above entry is related to the question: What is a brand community? What are tribes? How can not-for-profit organizations use web 2.0 social media tools to build brand communities? According to the assigned readings and short videos, what other benefits are there to not-for-profit organizations that choose to use social media?
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