allaboutadvocacy.com

Gridlock or Groundswell?

The name of the game today is community.

Whether your mission is to grow a brand or strengthen a corporate reputation, an increasingly important goal is not just communicating or marketing to an audience. But developing the relationships and conversations that create a true community. Stronger community means stronger advocacy, research continues to demonstrate. Which leads, ultimately, to stronger future growth.

Well, like Yogi Berra said, the future ain’t what it used to be…

The nature of community–where, how and why we connect and relate to one another in society or don’t for that matter–is changing. Dramatically. And not necessarily for the better, according to the authors of the recent book The Big Sort. Who see in three decade’s worth of data signs that America is no longer the national melting pot it once was. But a group of increasingly like-minded, self-selecting individual communities. Homogeneous as much in the lifestyles we choose to pursue as in the political beliefs we hold. The result, they argue, makes cultural understanding harder and politics more bitter. Familiar taste?

Says Big Sort author Bill Bishop, as quoted recently in the The Economist:

“We now live in a giant feedback loop… hearing our own thoughts about what’s right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the newspapers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we hear and the neighbourhoods we live in.”

Now, our interest in the ideas raised in the Big Sort is not about politics, though the implications are concerning enough. But in how communities of customers and consumers can be forged around brands and businesses–where advocacy can be fostered and flourish–despite our increasingly fragmented society here in the U.S and potentially abroad.

This difference in focus, however, doesn’t change the bigger picture all that much we find. The world of consumers, like that of politics, is becoming dramatically different and fragmented, too. If not altogether older and more risk-averse, according to Advertising Age’s The Changing Face of the U.S. Consumer. The article by Peter Francese, who founded American Demographics, provides an in-depth look into the key demographic trends, many of which point to a “big sort” not just between neighbors and geographies, confirming what Bishop found. But between generations and what we could call mindsets:

The online youthful and mostly wireless consumer inhabits a world far apart from the older consumer who subscribes to a newspaper and uses a telephone directory. The college-educated consumer with a white-collar job in a wired office has much less in common and much less interaction with the high-school-educated, blue-collar worker than in the past. Their product and brand preferences can diverge just as widely as their views on issues such as free trade, gay marriage and global warming… It’s hard to overstate the attitudinal gulf between a Prius-owning, environmentally aware consumer and the driver of an [SUV] who thinks global warming is just a bogus scheme to take away his or her 3-ton tank.

A key tenet of advocacy often discussed on these pages and with our clients is how people are increasingly looking to each other for news, information and recommendations today (see: Dox populi for a discussion on this trend in healthcare). This fundamentally changes how we must communicate and engage. Works like the Big Sort and by Peter Francese show that demography does appear to be destiny. We’re melding less in America and splintering more. Making national politics, on the one hand, look a lot like Humpty Dumpty with a bad case of cement poisoning.

But is that the case when it comes to building communities that build everything from simple connections to deeper knowledge and stronger brands? Books like Forrester’s Groundswell make a powerful case for how social media is not about technology (follow someone like Jeremiah Owyang for a few laps around Twitter and you’ll soon see why). But about people — like-minded people who are reaching across traditional barriers to create powerful communities and networks in growing numbers. Putting the shattered shell of society back together again. Or creating an altogether new kind of Phoenix as some might argue.

The challenge, of course, is that it’s not all one thing or the other. There’s both gridlock and groundswell out there in abundant quantities. Since the most powerful communities–and by extension advocacy–involve both the offline and the online world (see: Now that you’re blogging, don’t forget face-to-face), our challenge is to chart the smartest course between.

Image credit: www.adage.com