In the church of the customer
From different end of my worlds ...
I recently spent a good part of my subway ride home discussing with a colleague from my old non-profit theater days the changing role of new audience development and community outreach, which we uesd call Community Affairs. It got me thinking about how within Flickr, when they hired Heather Champ as community leader they hired someone who understood the driving snapshot aestheic and who could herd the energy of the users without having to drive them herself to doing things. She was embedded, as a user, moderator and as a curator. A customer empowered evangelist. I was wondering where I fit in on the spectrum considering my wide range of online particpation.
The serendipity gods of the Internet then struck!
Church of the Customer Blog: The 4 F's | Main
1. FiltersThe Filters are human wire services. They collect traditional media stories, bloggers’ rants and raves, podcasts, or fan creations about a specific company or brand and then package this information into a daily or near-daily stream of links, story summaries, and observations.
Most Filters maintain a steady objectivity like traditional news wire services, but some Filters cross over into analysis. For the most part, Filters are not prone to fits of pique or confrontation, and they occasionally produce their own journalistic work.
2. Fanatics
The Fanatics are true believers and evangelists. They love to analyze the daily or weekly progress of a brand, product, organization, or person and prescribe courses of action. They are, essentially, volunteer coaches.
The Fanatics praise great work -- which may vary widely from marketing to accessory development -- but they will also critique mistakes or obvious lapses in full view of the world, just like a coach may do as a teaching tool.
3. Facilitators
Facilitators are community creators. Their primary citizen marketer tool is a Web-based bulletin board or community software. Facilitators are like the mayors of online towns, and some online communities exceed the populations of small cities.
4. Firecrackers
Firecrackers are the one-hit wonders of citizen marketers. They can attract considerable attention because they have created a song, animation, video, or novelty that generates a lot of interest but tends to die out quickly as the creators go on with their other work.
Sometimes the proverbial wild hair springs up and a few hours later, two guys with a video camera record a funny rap about McDonald’s McNuggets, post it to a few video-sharing sites, and watch it accumulate 70,000 views. Not all Firecrackers are get-’em-out-fast productions. George Masters’ homemade ad for the iPod was a popular one-hit wonder, but he spent five months creating it.
I have yet to have my own one hit wonder moment, but I move between Filter, Fanatic and Facillitator quite regularly and with different degrees of success.
