How many tribes are you a member of?
I am currently reading Seth Godin’s book on Tribes and its got me thinking.
I have joined many tribes without knowing and some tribes with knowing. I am a member of….the apple tribe, the gen Y tribe, the Geneva ex-pat tribe, the 2 many DJs band tribe & the thesis tribe….to name but a few.
Seth describes the difference between a crowd and a tribe as the ability to communicate up, down, with each other and with the outside. Social Media makes it easier for us all to be tribe leaders and some people like Penelope Trunk, Jamie Varon & Matt Chevy have done it very well.
But what makes a tribe last? If you asked Seth he would probably say – the leader and the dialogue – which links to the point that Kevin Roberts made on the role of social media in building lovemarks.One of the best examples of such a tribe is Apple- where the Leader, Jobs, communicated directly with the tribe to announce new products – result – record sales and lovemark status.
To build the tribe and the lovemark, the leader needs to maintain the dialogue – in the social media world, through blogging, tweeting, commenting and encouraging comments on their blogs - and I am interested to see where some of these social media tribal leaders go, will the tribes grow or move to the next leader? Jamie Varon has tweeted about losing her blog motivation (0.2 posts a day) and twitter followers…is this a sign that she is losing her tribe? Carlos Miceli and the CookieMonster on the other hand are posting once a day and racking up tweets and comments by the hour….how will their tribes grow and grow?
Which tribes are you are member of? Do you lead a tribe? Did you know you did? Do you want to?
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Leading a ‘tribe’ as you call it is hard work. Back when I used to run Center Holds It (A soccer blog) I did it for fun, and quickly it became something much larger than I ever envisioned. It is tough when you feel trapped and forced to write a blog post, as those generally come off as unnatural and are devoid of any meaning or true ‘you’ content.
GenY wants more, more, more, now, now, now. Blogs that do not post daily are considered out of the loop, and not up to date. Your followers want more, and it is tough to always give that to them.
I told Carlos this when he posted on transparency…’A wise man speaks because he has something to say, a fool speaks because he has to say something’