‘Buzz’ – the word that defines social media is lifted from the world of social insects. But, while we freely employ metaphors from the hive to human interaction, how much are we actually learning from the commonality of nature’s communities to online social networks?
As enterprises engage in the Social world, the needed, core and essential new skill is community management. Ants are the masters of community. Evolution, over 120 million years, has forged a social model so well-formed, so chiseled by the struggle of living and dying, so vibrant, that ants dominate and shape the terroir of several continents. A single mega-nest (located in Hokkaido, Japan) contains 300 million members, the population of the United States. Ant communities are so successful that their global bio-mass is on a par with humans.
Edward O. Wilson is the Einstein of our time – the man whose genius will most shape the world ahead. Wilson doesn’t focus on bees, the well-spring of most social metaphors. His life-long study of ants led to a synthesis of animal social behavior: the science of socio-biology. Today, his insights into biological behavior are powerfully informing our understanding of all things human.
So, what have Wilson and fellow social biologists discovered about ant communities that’s useful to us, as we struggle to form and manage brand-based social networks?
Wilson’s Learning:
Ant communities are all about castes. Caste specialization shapes community life. Generalizing different behavior from numerous species, an ant colony typically includes seven or so castes. Castes are not the same as the roles or tasks needed to make an ant colony work. Socio-biologists have identified several dozen discrete roles within the life of the community, but ant specialization has found a balance between the theoretically possible sub-division of work and the benefits of simplicity. This is an important lesson as we organize enterprise communities. We need specialization: fundamentally different relationships to the community matching the different capabilities of community members. But, the value of specialization has limits. Communities function best when constituted of a small number of recognizable, well-defined Castes. As Wilson says, “Ant species have been remarkably constrained in their elaboration of castes”.
Lesson #1: Member specialization: yes, over-specialization: no.
Ant specialization is genetic. Caste membership is obvious at casual glance. Literally born to and shaped by their role, a soldier ant, for example, is 10x bigger than a worker. But, how do we identify who is who in an enterprise community? UX designers use Personas to segregate Users within an experiential domain into Types. Those who have most closely studied enterprise communities have identified, both anecdotally and statistically, a set of core Personas common to all functioning social networks.
The best thinker around community Personas is Marc Smith, former sociologist for Microsoft’s community and now the principal of Connected Action. Marc’s analytics reveal that, just as in the ant world, different people adopt different functions to maintain the health and vitality of an online community.
Smith’s Learning:
Marc’s NodeXL software examines posting activities within a brand community and maps inter-relationships. The graphic map of Purdue University’s community is shown above. The human pictures highlight key people at the center of the “buzz”.
This particular blog isn’t about Marc’s excellent science. Suffice it to say that his statistical research loosely identifies a small set of distinct, well-formed Types (Personas) essential to a functioning community.
What leaps out about these Community Personas is the precise mapping to Wilson’s description of Ant Castes.
Lesson #2: The people in your community are not alike. They can be grouped into Castes/Persona, and each Caste should be managed and cultivated differently.
Ant communities have two central Castes beyond the core “workers”. A good model of online social communities requires adding a Human equivalent for each.
An ant colony is centered on the queen. Quite precisely, the colony is born with the queen and dies with the queen. All activities of the community derive from and surround the queen. The equivalent Persona in the social networking world is the Brand Experience Manager. The Brand is the raison d’etre of the community, and the Experience Manager is the personification of the Brand’s objectives.
Lesson #3: An online community should be centered on the goals of the Experience Manager precisely as the macro-organism of the ant colony is centered on the goals of the queen.
This is an important metaphor because while ant instinct never goes awry, (any and all sacrifice is endured to protect the queen and promulgate her DNA ), online communities often become detached from their fundamental obligation.
The seventh caste is the males. These “outliers” are not true members of the female community. They serve one function: to enable the community to extend itself and grow. They are, in many ways, analogous to the “connectors” or “influencers” who determine what succeeds in the blogsphere by spreading word and manufacturing buzz .
The goal of the Persona vs. Caste comparison is not academic. I’ve freely adapted both Smith’s & Wilson’s research to enable fit; obviously no real science is intended. However, recognizing that a community rests on multiple pillars of activity, that these pillars are constructed by different Types, and that there must be a “natural” working balance between the pillars of activity is essential to success. The Caste Paradigm provides a crystal clear metaphor for community management.
This Caste Paradigm can help us avoid the three down-falls for enterprise networks, which we’ll discuss in future posts:
a.) How do we bootstrap a community to viability? Socio-biologists discovered that 98% of queens fail to nurse their colony thru the critical first 90 days of existence. Nature’s techniques for early stage survival are worth studying.
b.) What are the natural “life cycles” of a member’s relationship to a community? How, in other words, should you work to evolve the depth and nature of people’s participation in the network? Wilson’s work shows that an ant’s mission evolves as it ages, and the patterns of change within castes are quite relevant to online communities.
c.) How can we keep the Community in balance and reinforcing over time? How does an Experience Manager do what the Queen does to insure an online community has the right proportion of individuals in each Caste/Persona?
Ants have answers.
(Mark Angel is EVP and CTO KANA)