Was watching this new inspiring TED talk by Seth Godin and remembered my earlier research about tribes and brand communities which are so important  in analysing the post-modern consumer behaviour . Here are some of the main concepts of tribes and brand communities reviewed in the research:

“In the post-modernity period which encourages a move away from individualism towards a search for more social bonds, these communities tend to reorganize themselves into neo-tribes, networks of people gathering homogeneously together for social interaction, often around consumption and brands (Simmons, 2008). From the marketers perspective it is very important to consider tribal relationships as it may be a powerful tool in building loyalty and trust among the consumers. Even though neo-tribes and brand communities are two different concepts they share very similar features and often are very related to each other. According to Cova and Cova (2002) the main differences are that the brand communities are explicitly commercial whereas tribes are not, furthermore, brand communities are concerned about relationship between brand and consumer, whereas tribes – relationship between consumers. Muniz and O’Guinn (2001) (citied in Ouwersloot and Odekerken-Schroeder, 2008) describes a brand community as a specialized, non-geographically bound community that is based on a structured set of social relations among admirers of a brand. Mairinger (2008) suggests that:

• The brand community is not just formed around a brand; it creates the brand.
• The brand community is not just formed around a product; it is part of the product.

Therefore, the creation and development of brand communities is one of the most important tasks of the marketer as it can guarantee the company success in the long term. According to Mairinger (2008) brand communities can add real experiences and emotion to the brand, reach the long tail, address both individualism and collectivity needs and replace the celebrity endorsers with community brand advocates. Considering that 49 % of people made a purchase based on friends recommendations on social media property (Razorfish, 2008), social media can be viewed as an important channel and tool to interact, manage and enable these brand communities.”

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Was watching  Paul Sagan (Akamai, CEO) comments about the future of on-line video  and couldn’t agree more that online video still haven’t reached its highs, but it is nearly there. All these video services on the net like  YouTube, iPlayer  and others are redefining our habits, but in my opinion there is more to come. People still are getting familiar  with the idea of filming themselfves or communicating through video conversations or interacting with the video itself. The technology is here (3G, Facebook video, Joost) , but it takes time to get comfortable with it as video presents  new level of transparency on the net. Maybe that’s why people are still texting on each others wall’s rather than posting video comments as it is much more personal and real. I bet that’s why the video service  like Joost (where you could comment on videos in the real time) didn’t grow as expected, as people  were still getting familiar with idea of sharing (what and why to share?) on the net and opportunity to blog or comment live just seemed a bit frightening and came too early. But situation is changing – services like 12seconds.tv and ustream.tv proves that ordinary people want to be seen and heard online without any hiding  under the keyboard.

First of all, I just want to make it clear that I adore both of these two innovative social media properties. Even though, I’ve noticed that the past year was all about the Twitter. Actually, it’s quite crazy how much coverage it has received from social media citizens compare to its “big brother”. Therefore, just to make it fare I’ll try to identify 5 main reasons which makes Facebook superior social media platform over the Twitter.

The 5 Reasons:

Size. Does the size matter? Well it does in Social Media or in fact in any media. In terms of the audience and reach there is quite a big difference between Facebook’s 400 millions and Twitter’s 75 millions users. Moreover with the Twitter’s growth slowing down up to just 3.5 % a month it’s seems its going to be very difficult to catch up with the social networking behemoth. Read the full story