A great customer network for professionals and managers, particularly on LinkedIn, requires 5 key ingredients:

1. Information and knowledge on tap. Always there, always easily accessible and well indexed, and always freely available to all members of the professional customer network.

2. The LinkedIn group to be collegiate. Meeting the work based social needs of the professionals in the network. Because while professionals compete with one another, fundamentally they have more in common with each other than they do with outsiders.

This reminds me of the surprise I used to feel when I would see Rugby or Basketball players standing around having chats with the opposing team following 80 minutes of players bashing one another during the game. Clearly many were good friends. This little mystery was explained for me by a footballer being asked in an interview why they were so friendly. His response was: “We’re all footballers, you know, that’s what we do for a living and for fun and we see one another regularly.”

So, the collegiate and social aspects of online networks, from sporting to professional ones, are vital.

3. The ability to research through the professional customer network. There must be members available to answer the particular, professional needs of other members. And because those information or strategy needs are complex and diverse, there needs to be a large number of professionals in the group to help answer them.

4. Considerable size. A perfect professional customer network, LinkedIn group, or ‘tribe’, by definition, has to be large enough to meet diverse professional needs. It will be absurd to have 5 lawyers and call it a ‘tribe’. You need to have 5,000, maybe 500,000 to be a truly effective and long lived professional customer network.

5. Finally, Sub-groups are important. Of course, you could have a ‘tribe’ of 5 divorce lawyers in Seattle or 20 property lawyers in London. But to be valuable, they need to be a part of a  group of a 100,000 lawyers.

Mix all that together, and the professional customer network will be powerful. And prosperous.

Definition: A marketing technique or approach that existed only briefly – a mere ‘blip’ in the history of modern humans. Marketing that has come and will shortly be gone. Mass media advertising, for example.

There are many products that have been ‘way stations’ – a well-known example is the CD in the music industry, which came and left in less than 30 years. Digital music itself has gone to another level with the iPod, iPhone, etc. – the delivery mechanism of that music was the way station.

Let’s look at some marketing examples …

Permission marketing was all the rage in the 80’s and 90’s amongst direct marketers.

This was an approach to marketing that grew out of the marketer’s new ability to more easily invade people’s personal space. The theory was that marketers had to earn the right to send information to people- to interrupt them. This approach of course is now under challenge as anyone can now reach everybody else via Social Media, so even permission marketing is becoming dubious.

Networks of people can now send messages sideways to each other and of course often back up the chain to the leader. This ability to communicate with everybody did not exist when the whole theory of permission marketing was developed, at least not easily or in bulk.

The mass media is another example of a Way Station. Mass media marketing appeared and has already started to disappear. In terms of our history, mass media marketing is a mere blink(less than 150 years, and only a major industry for less than 60 years). Social marketing and Social Media have challenged the mass media ‘Tell and Sell’ approaching two ways:

1. We can now micro-market. There is no need for a mass message that is untailored and impersonal. These messages were only untailored because we had no choice – no way to tailor it (except very crudely). The TV could only show one version of your ad to whoever happened to be watching that show (and so a new industry to define and track audience demographics for each show grew). This crude segmentation was clearly a waste! Advertisers would have loved to show it to their target audience only.
2. Our tolerance of having our personal space invaded and of being interrupted has fallen dramatically in the last 5 years. This intolerance will continue to grow to the stage where it will be better not to use it because the negative perceptions caused by your interruptions will outweigh any benefits.

The third example of a Way Station is the Groups on LinkedIn – the point of this article.

Over 95% of the active groups on LinkedIn are filled with spam. Cluttered. No-one has the time to dig through the junk to find value, so once they see the problem, they tend to ignore the groups and say they are useless.

Alternatively, many groups have no discussions at all, they are simply moribund. Dead.

A good way to understand the members of a spam-filled group is by using the old ‘boiling frog’ analogy. If you toss frogs into very hot water, they will immediately try to jump out. Alternatively, if you put frogs into water and gradually heat it up, they will cook to death. They don’t notice the slight changes and think all is ‘normal’, so as a result, they perish…

Just like the slow-boiling frogs, members of spam-filled groups are used to the large amounts of self-serving junk that piles into groups like a stream of excrement. The members think that this is normal as they can see no other alternatives…at the moment almost no spam-free groups exist.

Our mission is simple: create groups or professional customer networks where there are no streams of excrement flowing through them. Where instead, there is a flow of resources and useful discussions. A flow of knowledge and information.

The current spam-filled groups are just Way Stations.