Last week, a client told me that they don't allow employees to access YouTube at work. "Do your employees carry cellphones?" I asked. The answer was yes, of course. Well then, most of them already have access to YouTube - right in their pockets.

The fact is, resistance to social network access at work is futile.

The Economist, in a special report on social networking, notes that a survey of 1,400 chief information officers conducted last year by the recruitment firm Robert Half Technology found that only one-tenth of them gave employees full access to such networks during the day, and that many were blocking Facebook and Twitter altogether.

Here are five reasons companies should allow social networking:

1. Resistance is futile.
   Workers increasingly have internet access on their smartphones. By the year 2013, 43% of global mobile internet users (607.5 million people worldwide) will be accessing social networks from their mobile devices, according to a new report from eMarketer.
2. Don't assume people won't find other ways to waste time.
   Executives' biggest concern? That social networking would lead to "notworking" instead of working. As the Economist report notes, "This assumes that people would actually work rather than find some other way to pass the time they have to spare."
3. Social networks can actually make workers more productive.
   Three out of four of the 895 experts interviewed for the recent Pew Internet report "The Future of the Internet IV" said that use of the internet enhances and augments human intelligence, and two-thirds said use of the internet has improved reading, writing and rendering of knowledge, according to Janna Anderson, study co-author.
4. You'll miss great ideas.
   Great ideas can come from any level of a company. Using social networks internally (wikis, blogs, forums, even IM) fosters collaboration and allows workers at all levels to contribute ideas.

   Experts emerge from within a company when collaboration is encouraged, and along with them come some of the best ideas that would otherwise be lost. Because people can comment on information, companies often learn of internal expertise they didn't know about already.

   In most big companies, instead of collaborating, marketing competes with sales, advertising competes with PR, and so on, creating silos that prevent fresh ideas from being heard.

   I've consulted for companies where the marketing directs of divisions had never even met their counterparts in other divisions, let alone collaborated with them. As a result, they often were working on similar projects without sharing knowledge or resources. This wastes money and squanders ideas that could be helpful company-wide.

5. Employees are much more trustworthy than companies think.
   Managers worry that employees will leak confidential information or speak poorly of the company. Most people have much more common sense than to jeopardize their jobs with wanton comments in social networks, especially these days.

   If you can't trust your employees, you have one of two problems: You are hiring the wrong people or you are not properly training the people you hire.

   People who want to say something negative will find a way, with or without access to social networks, during business hours. However, negative feedback can also provide an early warning that changes need to be made, either in policy or employees.

All in all, companies have more to gain than to lose by allowing employee access to social networks. My bet is that it'll take another two years for most companies to figure that out.

Not all members of cults are the victims of mind control. Few are socially inept or psychologically flawed. In fact, most cult members tend to be well educated and come from stable and loving family backgrounds. They tend to be "normal" like you or me or your neighbor. I wanted to find out why and how people can become so committed. And I wanted to apply the insight from the most intense form of belonging (cults, such as Krishna) to lesser and newer forms (brand cults, such as Apple, and online communities.)

That was six years ago, and those insights were published in a book: The Culting of Brands: turn your customers into true believers. Since then, brand communities have mushroomed. And so have the technologies that are enabling them. So now I think it's time for a review: How well are brand communities being built? What strategies are being used? How well or poorly are companies using social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter? And why should marketers even bother to create brand communities?

Why go to the trouble of creating networks of passionate consumers? Well, partly because your consumer will insist you do. Engaging directly with them is the new normal. The ubiquity of social-networking tools has created an expectation of accessibility not just from friends and colleagues but from companies too. We're now in a culture that celebrates and enables constant contact and responsiveness from everyone, like it or not.

But the real reason to go beyond conventional broadcast media, and even beyond constant engagement to the Holy Grail of community, is to create commitment in an environment that predisposes people to capriciousness.

In commodity markets, or ones where leapfrogging product innovation is the norm (most), anything that can create stickiness--and its sibling, word-of-mouth--should be embraced. And high-functioning communities of any kind tend to create commitment and recruitment.

What is "community" anyway?

Someone who should know--Chris Hughes, the co-founder of Facebook--tells me that community is one of the most meaningless words in our language: "I think the word is overused, particularly on the Web. Everywhere you go someone's trying to build a community. And I think we don't pause long enough to think about what community is exactly and what we're doing."

I agree, and I've found real confusion during my conversations with brand people about whether they're creating fans, followers or community members. Being a fan or follower is not the same as being a member of a community. Membership delivers a whole higher degree of commitment. It also demands a whole other level of engagement from participants and, consequently, a deeper appreciation by the community leader of their responsibilities. As Hughes said in our conversation: "I think that the deeper the connection goes and the more that people understand one another and what values they have or what goal they share, then the closer you get to a true community."

To help understand the responsibilities of a community leader or enabler, here's a list of the key "ingredients" of a real cult--or community.

Community checklist:

--Does it satisfy a real need? Do its members learn more, have more fun, get more done or get support?

--Does is have a clearly articulated purpose?

--Is it clear about who belongs and who doesn't?

--Is there interaction between members?

--Are there enduring relationships formed between members that go beyond the original reason for connecting?

--Do they contribute, do they participate, do they work together to achieve the common purpose? Being an audience is not a community.

--Do they feel responsibility for each other and the community at large?

--Are there roles, responsibilities and jobs performed by the membership?

--Is it self-policing? Do people censure or eject unruly or unreasonable members?

--Are there guidelines, rules, or norms of behavior?

The deeper the connection goes and the more that people understand one another and what values they have or what goal they share; then the closer you get to a true community.

Can something as pedestrian as a product or service ever hope to have a real community? I mean, come on, it's only soap powder/a pen/a box of electronics/a mutual fund/carbonated sugar water. Can they really satisfy the profound need to belong and catalyze these core behaviors?

It's not hard imagining a community centered around a product that is complex, that can deliver rich experiences or create strong identification with distinctive design ... such as a car (the Mini or the old Beetle, for example), a computer (Apple), a motor bike (Harley-Davidson) or sports shoe (Vans). It's tougher imagining a community centered on a prosaic product, such as a pen, a car part or a mutual fund.

It's tough, but not impossible. In fact, it's a real test of a community-enabler. Because you can't rely on the inherent qualities of the product itself, you have to employ alternative strategies and--if done right--they can be the bones of a strong community. These strategies are outlined below, with brand examples. But first the strategy for the lucky brand manager.

Community Strategy No. 1: Enable people who are passionate about your product to form community.

This is for the lucky ones. If you have a product like Smart Car that is unique, has a distinctive design and can deliver a rich product experience, then you're also likely to have been given the gift of passionate product-lovers who can't wait to find each other.

In Smart Car's case, these people existed before they could even get their hands on a product. In fact they were prepared to cough-up a $99 deposit on a car they wouldn't see for a year. Sixty thousand of them did that.

A year before launch, Smart USA took some European models on a road show and generated enough enthusiasm to get people writing checks without a test-drive. As Ken Bettenbeil, communications director at Smart USA put it: "It was very fascinating to us, actually." This phenomenon prompted Bettenbeil and his colleagues to launch "Smartusainsider.com" in June 2008, six months after the cars were available. Said he: "We were amazed and honored that our customers were so passionate and loyal to the brand and we followed that quickly and stayed involved."

The site was launched on the Ning platform, a social network specifically designed for people to find and engage with each other around common passions (unlike Facebook, for example, that is designed primarily for people who already know each other to share things). They e-mailed their $99 reservation program list and quickly populated the site. It now has around 11,000 members (there are roughly 40,000 Smart Car owners in the U.S.)

The Ning platform is a good option for community-makers in part because its tools enable relatively high interaction between members: blogs, updates, boards and groups. It's the latter tool that is a key driver for recruitment and loyalty to the community. There are almost 200 groups, meaning there are 200 sub-communities within the larger network, formed around particular passions (including the "Red and Black Only" populated, not surprisingly, by owners of red and black Smart cars.) Most are local clubs (Bama Smarties, for example, with 56 members) who organize events. "Our owners love to run together," said Ken when he described how Smart Car owners self-organized to pack their diminutive vehicles onto Lombard Street in San Francisco (the wiggly one) in an attempt to break a world record.

What's a key indicator of community? Mutual responsibility and acting together. It's definitely not just one-way fandom. Bettenbeil told a story where the community rallied together and displayed collective responsibility for the larger group. The transmission is unusual on a Smart Car, and the community got wind that one automotive journalist was panning it. The community galvanized itself into a militant force of opposition. It bombarded the journalist's inbox with mail and his phone with messages defending the transmission and telling him that he "just didn't get the Smart Car."

The company did not stage this. The status update feature of the site tends to be the "alert" section that rallies owners to action when needed. A similar thing happened when a test on car safety looked like it was going to say big is better. Again the community rallied and posted stories and photos of how the cars had saved their lives and they made themselves available to journalists to hear a counter point of view.

Members of cults and communities want to be among "like" others.

Ken Wagar is organizer of a Central Florida owners' club. He describes himself as someone who likes things others don't and is proud of being out of the crowd and in the know. He saw Smart Cars in Europe before they arrived in the U.S. and was intrigued by their unusual styling. As a previous owner of a Mini Cooper, and a current owner of a Harley, he likes things that make a statement. "It's tough to own a Smart Car if you're naturally introverted. They draw a crowd. I like attention I guess." Ken is a key local organizer and contributor on the community site. He confirms that Smart Car owners are different from most drivers and that they like hanging out with each other and talking about what makes their car--and them--different. And where they swap stories of stupid questions they get like when they're asked "is it electric" while pumping gas.

Community Strategy No. 2: Enable a community of shared skills.

Let's face it, Sharpie is a good product, but it's not a car. It's a bit of plastic with some ink and some of them are sharp. Yet this utilitarian product has become a center of a community defined by its creativity. "Imaginative, curious, expressive and definitely not shy" is how Sally Grimes, VP of marketing, defines them. "They're mostly designers."

The company sees its role as a curator, a connector of the thousands of groups on Flickr, YouTube and Facebook, and a catalyst of member-to-member engagement using a blog, events and how-to videos all "with the purpose of inspiring creativity."

Sharpie created Sharpieuncapped.com in June 2009 as a way for the existing communities of designers and amateur artists to find each other. "We were very lucky ... there was already a lot of Sharpie love in late 2008 ... there were over 2,000 Facebook groups."

As well as connecting existing communities, it adopted the role of curator to "bring out what was already in themselves ... it's about self-expression." They formed the "Sharpie Squad" of "20 select individuals" from the community to help them stimulate, curate and connect the rest.

This is essentially a loose federation of communities supported by the brand. They've adopted a realistic and humble position of "getting out the way and letting the experts [the members] take over" in the pursuit of self-expression. There's member interaction and some limited mutual responsibility in the form of advice on boards. And the Sharpie Squad is a smart move to help the community help itself.

Community Strategy No. 3: Enable a community of shared needs.

Car parts. They're not even as interesting as a pen. And the parts in question are wipers ... not exactly the most thrilling part of a vehicle (I might be able to summon some enthusiasm for an electric seat-warmer or the engine of a Maserati, but never a wiper).

Autotexpink is a woman-owned company and leading supplier of windshield wipers and motors. Eighty percent of car purchases are either made or are heavily influenced by women, but you wouldn't know it: The industry still reeks of testosterone. There is an opportunity for women to be armed in this last bastion of male hegemony by creating a safe place where women can share advice on buying, driving and maintaining cars. And it could be enabled by a brand.

Paula Lombard, the company's founder and CEO, has this vision and is just starting to build it. She believes a community can be founded on real, shared needs and that a humble wiper company can play a significant role by enabling it. She has created myautotexpink.com (also on the Ning platform) and hired a female auto expert to stimulate engagement amongst its members by seeding content on its blog. It really is early days. But she's attempting to include some of the key ingredients of real community-making: satisfying a real need and providing opportunities for members to engage, share and support each other. And importantly, she's recognizing what the brand can and can't do.

Adopting this supportive vs. center-stage role is being both realistic about the amount of engagement the product could ever generate, and it recognizes the new and valuable reality brands face: Be useful to people who want or need to share stuff.

Community Strategy No. 4: Sponsor existing communities of shared needs, passions or causes.

An increasingly common strategy is to not attempt to create a community centered on brand enthusiasm, but for the brand to enthusiastically support existing communities that have a purpose separate from, but relevant to the brand. This has been the strategy of some major brands that have sponsored groups through Meetup.com, a New York company where I worked for a while.

Meetup is an online social platform with a difference. Its purpose is to get people offline in local groups around shared interests (pugs or extreme Frisbee for example), needs (cancer survival or skills-learning such as speaking Spanish) or causes (e.g., sustainable building or stopping human trafficking).

Microsoft, American Express Open, and Blackberry have all sponsored small business or entrepreneur Meetup Groups. Columbia has sponsored outdoor and hiking groups. Huggies is in its fourth year of supporting stay-at-home mom groups.

Sponsorship means anything from financial (like paying the monthly fees) to adding value in terms of training (Amex ran entrepreneur boot camps, Huggies distributed potty-training DVDs to toddler playgroup Meetups).

The brands benefit from engaging with already robust communities that answer real needs. And they can enjoy positive brand perception, loyalty and word of mouth based on gratitude for their role as supporter and nurturer. This comment in a dog Meetup group is common: "I think it is wonderful that Nutro is sponsoring our Meetup and we are going to start buying more of their products as a result!"

Community Strategy No. 5: Champion a movement for social change.

Whatever your political affiliation, it's generally recognized that the Obama team flawlessly executed an election campaign that owed much of its success to a new set of online tools and strategies. They created a movement: a community on the move.

The Obama campaign mobilized 13 million people to take action. That's taking action, not just viewing pages. That action included everything from low-barrier initiatives, such as signing a petition to higher-barrier/higher commitment actions, such as organizing offline events and creating local chapters. The campaign used (and improved) many techniques already being deployed by some of the more advanced cause-related nonprofits and NGOs.

Not surprisingly, this has brands salivating. Creating values-based commitment manifested by members taking action is a different order of stickiness than you'll ever get from a fan page. This is a new community strategy yet to make its debut in the brand world. However it's coming. Brands such as Dove have only just got started creating loyalty to the brand by creating commitment to a movement for social change (in this case, redefining society's definition of female beauty). Nissan, too, is trying to build a community for its upcoming Leaf car by rallying people who care about zero-emission vehicles.

Some utilitarian products can't command loyalty based on unique design or rich experience, of course. The key insight here: Don't attempt to make a community around the product. It's unlikely to work. In fact, it can end disastrously. Instead, enable communities of members who share not passion for the product necessarily, but commitment to the things the product has appropriated or sponsored. They're often intangible things like a cause, a skill or values.

These community members can be at least as passionate as product devotees. The role of the brand, however, tends to be one of enabler and champion vs. fan-object. This is not necessarily an inferior role. Members can be enormously grateful and become passionate supporters, loyalists and word-of-mouthers of your brand because you've helped them connect with others who share the same interests and needs.

Key findings, in summary:

1. Don't fake it. Communities have to be authentic. They have to satisfy a real need (like sharing knowledge), or be about a genuine passion. Don't pretend that people are passionate about your product when they're really not. Find something they can be passionate about and champion that.

2. Enabling is often better than building. Following existing behavior is generally a better and easier strategy than trying to generate new behaviors. Some of the most successful brands have spotted existing passions and needs, and observed people's attempts to share them. Then they've simply made it easier to do what they're already trying to do. They'll build a Web site or connect existing ones, or celebrate members and their achievements.

3. The golden rule in the brand-community business: BE USEFUL. You're mostly viewed as a big corporation making tons of money, that doesn't generally listen to its customers' needs, and really doesn't give a damn about anything apart from its own profits. That's your starting point. Now work hard to prove that you care, that you love the fact that your customers love your product. Support their communities with money, ideas, content and publicity, whatever they need. Prove that you're genuine and that you care about the people off whom you're making money. If you do, the social networks will enable people to tell others. If you don't, they'll also enable people to tell others.

4. Be a partner or supporter, not a dictator. Most companies get this now. But until recently the posture of most brand managers was "command-control" not "support and nurture." (A legacy of the command-control attitude is the militaristic vocabulary that's still common: "target audience," "campaign," "conquering the market" etc.) With consumers more or less in control, the old marketing attitudes are dead. You're now a co-creator with the consumer of their brand experience and, nowadays, even larger society-changing effects should you choose the strategy of championing social change.

5. If you want a community, then you need members--not fans or followers. There's a difference. Receivers of tweet and fan-blasts are not members of a thriving, sticky community that acts together, buys into the goals and values, and feels responsible for each other. They're an audience, often on the receiving end of just a new form of mass media.

Douglas Atkin is the founder and author of "The Glue Project: about the stuff that binds communities together." It's a blog and social experiment that deconstructs how the best communities work based on interviews with founders of social networks, community leaders and brand experts. He is a former chief community officer and partner at Meetup.com, a leading social networking site. Atkin is the author of a book on cults and cult brands called The Culting of Brands: How to turn customers into true believers.

[via Forbes]

Social networking has risen among all age groups in the past few years, particularly among teens and younger adults, according to research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Pew research indicates that in 2009, 73% of online teens used social networking sites in 2009, compared to 47% of online adults. Breaking down online adults into older and younger demographics, 72% of adults 18-29 use social networking sites, compared to 40% of their counterparts 30 and older.

Facebook is Tops with All Adults

Social networking adults in all age brackets favor Facebook by a wide margin, with older adults preferring it slightly more. Seventy-three percent of all adults 18 and older who use social networking sites have a Facebook account. Broken down by age demographic, this includes 71% of adults 18-29 and 75% of adults 30 and older.

In contrast, 48% of all adult social network site users have a MySpace account. The younger generation is much more apt to use MySpace, with 66% of social networking adults 18-29 having a MySpace account, but only 36% of the 30 and older bracket. Usage rates for the professional networking site LinkedIn are the reverse of MySpace. Fourteen percent of all adult social networking site users have a LinkedIn account, which breaks down to 7% of adults 18-29 and 19% of adults 30 and older.

Younger Adults More Apt to Tweet

Tiwtter and other status-updating sites are more popular with younger adults than older adults. Thirty-seven percent of online adults 18-29 use Twitter or another status-updating site, compared to 9% of 50- to 64-year-olds and only 4% of online adults 65 and older. The overall Twitter/status-updating site usage rate among all adults is 19%.

Older Adults Blog More
Blogging is becoming more popular with older adults and less popular with younger adults.
While blogging among adults as a whole has remained steady, the prevalence of blogging within specific age groups has changed dramatically in recent years. Specifically, a sharp decline in blogging by young adults has been tempered by a corresponding increase in blogging among older adults.

• In December 2007, 24% of online 18-29-year-olds reported blogging, compared with 7% of those ages 30 and older.
• By 2009, just 15% of internet users ages 18-29 maintained a blog, a nine-percentage-point drop in two years. However, 11% of internet users ages 30 and older maintained a personal blog.

Almost Everyone Under 30 is Online

Seventy-four percent of all adults 18 and older go online. This percentage climbs to 93% for both 12-to-17-year olds and 18-to-29-year-olds. Even among adults 65 and older, the least likely age demographic to use the internet, 38% of the population is online.

Other Findings

• Eighty-one percent of adults between the ages of 18 and 29 are wireless internet users. By comparison, 63% of 30-49-year-olds and 34% of those ages 50 and older access the internet wirelessly.
• Roughly half of 18-29 year-olds have accessed the internet wirelessly on a laptop (55%) or on a cell phone (55%), and about one quarter of 18-29 year-olds (28%) have accessed the internet wirelessly on another device such as an e-book reader or gaming device.
• Three-quarters (75%) of teens, 93% of adults ages 18-29, and 58% of 12-year-olds now have a cell phone.
• Eight percent of internet users ages 12-17 use Twitter. This makes Twitter far less common than sending or receiving text messages — as 66% of teens do — or going online for news and political information, done by 62% of online teens.

Global Time Spent Social Networking Rises
In December 2008, global consumers spent an average of three hours, three minutes and 54 seconds on social networking sites, according to The Nielsen Company. That amount of time increased to five hours, 35 minutes and five seconds one year later. In addition, unique audience increased 27%, from 242 million in December 2008 to 307.4 million in December 2009.

The same Nielsen study revealed that Facebook dramatically increased its dominance of the US online social networking market between December 2008 and December 2009. In December 2009, Facebook recorded about 110 million unique visitors, a 100% increase from 55 million unique visitors in December 2008. MySpace, which remained the second-most popular US online social network, saw its number of unique visitors drop about 17%, from roughly 60 million in December 2008 to roughly 50 million in December 2009. While Twitter only recorded 18.1 million unique visitors in December 2009, this represented 579% growth from 2.7 million unique visitors a year earlier.

About the Study: This research is part of a Pew Research Center series of reports exploring the behaviors, values and opinions of the teens and twenty-somethings that make up the Millennial Generation.

[via Marketing Charts]

People are more likely to trust information that comes from people they know. So, not surprisingly, the clever folks at Google have created a new type of “social” search engine that includes personal online networks.