I’m sharing this thought in-process: how do we identify community needs and satisfy those needs as brands/organizations?

Two attributes of communities seem absolutely essential to addressing their needs (the names aren’t quite right yet):

1. Findability on-line: how easy is it to search for and target members of a community and the digital centers of gravity for that community’s activities
2. Maturity of community identity & cohesion: how strong is the group’s identity (meaning how useful is it in defining individual identity), how tightly connected are the members of this community – is it a community or a dispersed crowd

In the diagram, I’ve plotted the rough trajectory of three types of communities. These are over-simplifications, to be sure, but I’m trying to demonstrate the maturation of different types of communities and how that maturation differentiates their needs:

1. Media Property Fan Communities: as an example, consider fans of Lost. These fans belonged to other communities before the show began, but were not declared Lost fans until the program aired. Moreover, as we use our fandom to define our identity online, in many digital networks it’s easy to spot fans of the program (b/c they joined a group or clicked ‘Like’) but in the early stages of the fan community, it was difficult to communicate with all Lost fans unless you were the producers themselves – the community needed time to develop connections.
2. Traditional Movements: or, put another way, grassroots movements pre-digital or without digital tools in early development. Perhaps early members of the movement have very few digital behaviors or participate in relatively few digital platforms. But as participation and awareness grows, the community may ultimately consist of members with more digital behaviors.
3. Modern Movements: Perhaps I’m over simplifying by plotting this progression at a 45-degree angle and of course very few communities would progress exactly so – but the Obama campaign, as an example, would seem to have developed in very  much this way. Please debate in the comments.

In addition to plotting the progression of communities along these two dimensions, I’ve begun considering marketing activities that take advantage of inflection points along the development of a community:

• Provide digital tools to grow and coordinate group: Groups that are forming without digital tools/behaviors and offline from digital platforms are typically regionally focused movements – to leapfrog borders and demographics, outside organizations/brands can use their digital pulpits to increase awareness of the nascent community (in the way niche music/art communities are used/propelled by brands) or by actually building/licensing tools to facilitate digital communications between members.
• Provide opportunities for cooperation and collaboration: At this point, community members need to be connected in more meaningful ways – and these connections can be made and strengthened through collaboration and cooperation. But to be honest, this type of activity, at this point in the community, has a higher success rate if begun by the media property or the fans themselves.
• Market spreadable products and content: Only when community members are both findable and tightly connected should an outside brand or organization begin to develop and deploy products and content for that community (you should also ask yourself if you’re targeting an actual community or a disconnected cluster of communities).

We can at times foolishly suppose that people always go to see movies that they want to like, whereas we should be honest that there is at times a pleasure in disliking. Such viewers may offer a catalogue of things they disliked about the movie after they’ve watched it, but they watch because it’s enjoyable to create that catalogue. A bad acting performance, a silly bit of dialogue, and offensive character – these all become pleasurable. I’m not talking about camp – though that is of course another way that one might enjoy the film – or about relishing badness; I’m talking about the pleasures of knowing that one can distinguish good from bad.

Certainly, just as fandom can have a pronounced performative element to it, so too is anti-fandom often heavily performative. The pleasures of fandom can often come from the communal discussions that follow, not simply from the experience of watching alone, and many fans would quickly disavow a beloved text if they weren’t allowed a community around it. So too with anti-fandom, where many of these people hating Avatar are only too keen to pronounce their hatred, and to engage in discussions with others about how crappy it is. In doing so, they aim to perform a level of sophistication, to themselves and to others, but they are also making a pitch to community – they know that there are communities that will dislike Avatar, and the anti-fandom provides the password into said communities.

Exploring anti-fandom best exposes the core of fandom itself – we use our affinities, love or hate, to construct our identities, and we verse ourselves in the text/film/game/brand to collect those passwords into fan communities.

Walking out of Avatar, I searched my brain for the absolute best arrangement of words to describe my disgust (and showcase my verbal prowess) to Twitter.

Well, Lost fans just swayed the most powerful man in the world. How’s that for power?

Fans came together on Twitter and Facebook to state their case – and according to White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, they were heard.

Of course, the real challenge for brands and networks is in monetizing this kind of power… any ideas?

Lost season 6 begins Tuesday, February 6th.

Gawker posted the video with the following text,

A good refresher for devotees, but novices will be, well, completely lost. Good, this final season is only for full-fledged fans! Is it February 2 yet?

Which reminded me of this extract from my post, fans: lead users,

In Fanning the Audience’s Flame, (Ford, Jenkins, and others) the team writes that fans are often lead users for media properties and that “lead users are valuable to understand because their tastes anticipate untapped potentials within the marketplace.” (p 23) The team explains how fans and their efforts have helped science fiction programs like Lost which work on long and complex narrative threads sustain themselves when sci-fi was once entirely episodic.

As we ramp up for the sixth and final season, the activities of the Lost fan community (of which I consider myself a member) will either demonstrate an incredible ability at amplifying conversation, tune-in, ancillary revenue, and recruitment… or not. It’s an important time to be watching and studying fan behaviors and their affect on cult media properties.

By the way, season three of Mad Men starts today.

In the 8 months since I published the report, I’ve been rather obsessed with fan culture and have done my best to dive deep into Henry’s research (and the research of many other brilliant people). If you’d like to learn more yourself, here’s a quick roundup of my previous posts. I’ve also had the pleasure of working with a cable network to create a fan based strategy for their digital marketing team, a strategy based on the 30 years of fan research that came well before me. It was a blast, and I look forward to working with that team in the future to refine the model.

I’ve come to believe that the whole Mad Men on Twitter incident may have been small in the annals of fan expression, but it was a critical moment in time for digital marketers to take notice, be curious, and perhaps learn something. Some have learned, and some haven’t. When Paul Isakson gave up the @don_draper account to AMC, I had hoped that the network or its digital agency would have done something with it besides let it sit idle for 8 months. Instead of engaging fans during the off-season with the account, on a platform that is obviously ripe for tv fan expression, they’ve done absolutely nothing at all with it (an update: now you can help Paul man the account). But to be fair, I was happy to see the art of Dyna Moe used (she was much beloved by fans for her illustrations) in marketing this new season.

I’m excited for this new season. The writing and acting behind Mad Men never disappoints. Be sure to tune into AMC tonight at 10PM/9C.

Oh, and keep an eye on Bud Melman. I hear he’s got something up his sleeve.

I’m quite late to this one, but thanks to Jinal Shah for pointing it out to me. We Are Wizards, released in 2008, chronicles the expansive and deep fan culture of Harry Potter and the Rowling universe. I’ll be watching this later tonight, and hopefully the new film sometime this weekend.

Two posts on fans today, the first from Seth Godin, asks “how big is the gap between customer and die-hard fan? In other words, between engaging and loving, between attending and craving?” (alright that one might be less about fans, and more in the normal Seth vein of saying ‘you could go status-quo, or you could be super awesome fantastic’)

The second post, from MediaPost, really hits the goomba on the head:

What makes top brands so valuable? It’s not just that they sell a lot of volume. The most valuable consumer brands are successful because of the relationships they form with their customers.

And while ‘relationship’ is the promise of the social Web, most brands have missed the boat when it comes to their social marketing initiatives. Instead of investing in relationships, brands have largely invested in a token presence on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. It’s no wonder they haven’t seen an ROI.

….

It’s clear why this matters to brands and should matter to you: your biggest fans are your most valuable and authentic social marketing vehicle. If you invest in a true relationship with them, you’ll be able to move and react quickly to their ever-changing needs, and even ask them for help. It doesn’t take much to keep them happy – just creating a special and honored place and engaging in honest dialogue. When you invite them in, you unleash their willingness and desire to recruit other fans that will gush and rave online with them.

Well said.

Henry Jenkins
http://www.henryjenkins.org/

Nancy Baym
http://www.onlinefandom.com/

Grant McCracken
http://www.cultureby.com/

Jason Mittell
http://justtv.wordpress.com/

Joshua Green
http://weightandmass.wordpress.com/

Dr. TV
http://drtelevision.blogspot.com/

The Extratextuals
http://www.extratextual.tv/

Craig Jacobsen
http://www.diegeticexports.blogspot.com/

C3 Blog
http://www.convergenceculture.org/weblog/

Created by Jaron Pitts, this fan made trailer includes cuts from almost 30 films and some nicely done after effects. Uploaded only four days ago, the video currently has over 100k views, 1400 ratings (currently 5/5 stars), and 800 comments.

When is a fan made trailer so successful that it demonstrates an unfulfilled demand? When should it spark DC Comics to release a Green Lantern movie or animated feature, and when should they bring in fans like Jaron to advise in production and distribution? These are the questions that major studios should be grappling with, and by monitoring these fan creations, they could make educated and profitable decisions.

You see those trending topics on Twitter? Those are fans talking about things they love, to their friends, and anyone else that will listen.

Oprah mentions Twitter and registrations surge. That’s not the power of Twitter, that’s the power of Oprah’s fan community. CNN and Ashton go at it for new followers. Again, that wasn’t Twitter, it wasn’t a virus, it was fans acting on a leader’s nudge, and to connect to each other to share information and social currency.

You don’t scan your tweets every day because of Twitter either. You’re looking for people you know, friends, and also people you’re a fan of. Twitter can connect anyone: you to Ashton, Ashton to your third grade english teacher, and so on. Twitter is a bit of technology that better enables what fans want and need to do: connect with each other, express their fandom/define their identity, gather information, and feel more connected to what they love.

Fandom makes or breaks technology. Meetup.com took off because fans of beanie babies needed a place to swap and collect. Friendster cracked down on fakesters and it reduced a way fans could engage. Facebook is the center of a brand’s digital world because users can now ‘fan’ things.

Still think focusing on fans is too narrow? Or do you mean, ‘we just don’t have any fans?’ Those are two separate things: one is bullshit, the other is fixable. One is kidding yourself, the other is killing yourself (or at least resigning yourself to a slow extinction, better hope for no meteor showers). Brands should be out there courting and supporting these vocal fan communities. They’re right there, they aren’t hiding; in fact they’re doing very much the opposite.