Myth #1: A brand community is a marketing strategy.
The Reality: A brand community is a business strategy.

Myth #2: A brand community exists to serve the business.
The Reality: A brand community exists to serve the people in it.

Myth #3: Build the brand, and the community will follow.
The Reality: Engineer the community and the brand will be strong.

Myth #4: Brand communities should be love-fests for faithful brand advocates.
The Reality: Smart companies embrace the conflicts that make communities thrive.

Myth #5: Opinion leaders build strong communities.
The Reality: Communities are strongest when everyone plays a role.

Myth #6: Successful brand communities are tightly managed and controlled.
The Reality: Online networks are just one tool, not a community strategy.

Myth #7: A brand community is a marketing strategy.
The Reality: Of and by the people, communities defy managerial control.

Myth #6 is an interesting one. Online people often think online is the only thing there is. Fournier and Lee give great examples for non-web communities. Apple enthousiasts, Republicans or Democrats, Ironman traithletes are part of a so called Pool community. Oprah or Deepak Chopra followers are part of a Hub community and Facebook members of the Web community. Here you find also a video about the video.

The first impressive video was from ‘psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz’s estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.’

Ted advised me to watch Dan Gilbert after Schwartz. He ‘challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.’ Funny part are the 4 reasons to be happy:
1. Accrue wealth, power, and prestige. Then lose it.
2. Spend as much of your life in prison as you possibly can.
3. Make someone else really, really rich.
4. Never ever join the Beatles.

CFO optimism index

Today i saw a graph of the CFO optimism index in the economist. Great list. Especially when you look at the timing. The index started to fall in the beginning of 2007 and the serieus subcrime mortage crisis began in June of 2007 when two Bear Stearns hedge funds collapsed.  The CFO’s knew something? But what do you do as a screaming individual who wants to swim against the stream?

Of course it is also good to see that our top CFO’s start to be more optimistic again. But ‘whereas finance chiefs may be marginally less dour than in previous quarters, they are continuing to slash earnings forecasts and are speeding up plans for layoffs and spending cuts. Most CFOs in America, Europe and Asia expect to freeze hiring and wages over the next 12 months.’

Nice… And then we will get a positive black swan and it change in a direction or with a speed we didn’t expect

carpe diem synergy theory

Now the question: how  do we come to this cloud? Time will help a lot. But when you do nothing you will end on a cloud you don’t like, so when you want to achieve you personal (or company, or society) cloud you have to follow the right stream. You can see the streams as roads. There are a lot of roads to the cloud. Roads as: highways, dirt roads, secondary roads, small roads, hairpin roads, etc. It is the art in life to choose the right road at the right time. Sometimes you need to be on the dirt road, you need to slow down, feel the mud to step over after a while you take the highway. You have to do that conscious, but you also have to be very adaptable, open for new roads. I fact you have to presense  if you are on the right road, when you are on the right road you have to enjoy the effective ride.

Now the question: who is taking that road? There are many roads, you have to be very adaptable to new roads and the cloud is unclear also. For a stable progress the person, organization or society who is going to the cloud need to know very well who they are, what they are doing and why they are doing there ‘thing’. This core can change but like a personality of a human being; it is hard to change the essence of your being.

Now i read on AdAge that QR codes are taking of. Strange world…

One of the lessons ‘plan for content you don’t create’ is a nice one. You facilitate, like you used to do in a web2.0 world, the customer to make the content. But what happened when the creators have values that are not the values of the brand, think about what happened with Longsdale clothing in the Netherlands.

The brand needs to lead the conversation with the customer. Like you do in a verbal conversation: you can lead and follow. A brand can sometimes follow, but most of the time they have to lead the customer…

I immediately thought about the lifecycle theory of Adizes. He compares the lifecycle of humans with company lifecycles. In the Netherlands most companies are somewhere between the Go-Go and the Adolescence phase. Issues like Founders trap and unfulfilled entrepreneur come around the corner.

To achieve the optimum phase, the Prime phase, you have to overcome a few issues:
1. Decentralization of authority.
2. Change in leadership from entrepreneurship to professional management.
3. Goal displacement.