Take Me To Your Leader — The Social Network Hub
Apr 17th, 2009 by David Svet
My previous effort on SPURspectives posted about creating a pool as the basic form of community affiliation — getting people to follow your organization’s online profile. The pool is an essential first step in building your community of followers, but it is also fragile. Your Tweeps, Peeps, or Posse can be prone to fickleness due to their lack of personal connections. The pool relies on gradually developing each follower’s affinity to your brand (see a great piece on transitioning this by Mike Arauz). So, what’s a community organizer to do? Take them to your leader, or more accurately, take your leader to them.
A logical extension of a pool community is to engage members in a hub and spoke relationship by providing pool members with access to a leader in your organization through social channels. Notice I didn’t say ‘the’ leader, I said ‘a’ leader. If you can engage ‘the’ leader to take on a manageable, sincere, real presence online where they become available to your followers, then you should do so. But if your leader is reluctant, cyberphobic, or prone to speaking in corporate tongues from on high, then you are better off finding ‘a’ leader to take on the face position in your community building effort.
This face position’s role is not to sell but to inspire — something that proponents will argue is a higher form of selling and detractors will call lipstick on a pig. I fall in the middle and will leave you to form your own opinion. But, this is what I’ve seen work well. The best leaders can ignite passion by sharing their vision. This is an art form in interpersonal communication. The leader needs to capture the imagination of the listener and pull them into a shared vision. They ask you to follow and make you feel special for the privilege. The best leaders speak to a group and make each person feel they are the only one in the audience being addressed. Great leaders look and act like leaders. We recognize the signals and follow. We want to be lead.
To organize your pool into a hub and spoke (or hubs and spokes) you need to identify the best available leader and coordinate their exposure to the pool. They will be filling many roles: mentor, celebrity, storyteller, and ambassador to name a few. They will need to fulfill duties online and offline — yes, real world leadership, too! Remember, social networks are real groups of real people. Social channels are simply the communications vehicles that we use to communicate through networks (e.g.: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, telephone, direct mail, personal conversations, group meetings, parties, etc. — any channel with a prompt and response mechanism).
While this sounds daunting, it needn’t be. Churches have been doing this for centuries. Charismatic pastors attract large followings. You’ve seen the hub and spoke social network function in lots of places. Ford Motor Company’s Head of Social Media, Scott Monty, does a stellar job of building a following for Ford. Or consider New Marketing Labs’, Chris Brogan, who has developed a major social network communicating about how to create a major social network. They both work tirelessly online and off with careful attention to what they say and how they say it. You don’t have to start out huge, you just have to start.
The only real problem with the hub and spoke model is that we all change. Leaders change. Followers change. Organizations change. It is very difficult to build a long lasting, growth oriented social network around a single charismatic individual. When the leader moves on in some way the followers are left in the lurch.
The solution is to acknowledge and accept the fact that the hub and spoke model is temporary. It is another stepping stone in building a fully functioning network. Certainly you can always use the hub and spoke, particularly if you are the hub. Just know that the network ends when you end. For longevity, a strong leader can introduce other team members and let them share the spotlight and their unique skill sets. It can either be a growth plan or a succession plan. But, it works through the halo effect — the leader’s shine glows on those who are near. Then you can evolve to a fully empowered web structure. Tune in next time for some thoughts on the full web network.
