So we’ve been chatting about engagement these last few days, and particularly vertical action (essentially brands addressing their communities from the top-down, and creating mechanisms through which their communities can communicate vertically with them using the same channels). When you look at corporate blogs, Twitter accounts and most branded community sites, this is mostly what you see: Vertical engagement between companies and their customers/fans/friends/users.
Likewise, the breadth and depth conversation we had last week also relates to vertical action: Brand managers, Community managers and/or Social Media managers finding ways to engage customers from a brand-to-community perspective. Even when dialog exists, even when the communication channels are truly 2-way, most of what happens is vertical: Brand-to-customer and customer-to-brand. And that’s nice, but it is only half the story: In order to understand the power of the social web, the power of communities and the power of truly engaged fans, you also have to tip your hat to lateral action.
What is lateral action? Simple: Lateral action is simply peer-to-peer engagement that happens within or across communities. A brand or community manager may have planted a seed along the way (a tweet, a blog post, a comment, a promotion, etc.), but once it has hit the community, the message/info/conversation is spread from customer to customer without having to be prompted by any official brand representative.
Another example of lateral action is WOM (word-of-mouth): Peer-to-peer recommendations are classic examples of lateral action. Rumors are examples of lateral action. Community tweetup invitations are examples of lateral action. RT’s on Twitter tend to be examples of lateral action.
Lateral action is what happens when the brand, the company, the official presence of a business gives its community the opportunity to BE a community by taking a step back and letting people share what is important to them with peers.
And lateral action is often the answer to the question raised last week about breadth and depth of engagement: Once a brand has managed to scale its community to several thousand or tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands, even), how can a team of community managers possibly engage so many people properly? It’s impossible, right? (This being the logic behind some Social Media directors’ decision to focus on depth at the cost of breadth.) Truth: Vertical action alone cannot serve the purposes of engagement (breadth mostly, but depth also) in the Social Media space… or even when it comes to fostering vibrant brand-centric communities in the “real” world. Lateral Action is the yin to Vertical Action’s yang. Lateral Action is how community engagement actually scales and transcends any breadth-related engagement limitations.
And though Lateral Action is nothing new, it is not a typical strategic mode of thinking for most Marketing professionals who have spent most of their careers working in traditional media (yes, even in the world of the web). This is why MANY Marketing folks still talk about the challenge of creating “content” even in the Social Media space. This is why advertising, messaging and marketing products are still among the first things marketers try to “plug in” when it comes to leveraging Social Media “channels.” This is all top-down thinking. Vertical Action thinking. And though it has its place here, it cannot succeed in the Social Media space without an equal (and in many cases greater) measure of Lateral Action.
Brand managers, Social Media managers, Community managers – whatever their designation may be – need to understand that their job isn’t just to produce content and constantly stimulate vertical engagement. There is only so much they can accomplish this way. What they must also do is empower their communities to manage themselves to a great extent and generate conversations and motion from within. Community members have to reach out to each other. They have to reach over to other communities. They have to share and discuss and debate and organize themselves. Brand Managers in the Social Media space have to learn how to be good hosts and patrons and supporters without being mother hens 24/7. This lateral action has to be fostered, nurtured, and built into their online and offline communities.
This is a crucial point for all brand managers to understand if they want to be successful in the age of Social Significance and Community Marketing. I hope the video and this post help you understand the difference between vertical and lateral action… and their importance our ongoing discussion of community “engagement.”
Tomorrow, we will bring our engagement discussion to a close with some far less strategic yet much more valuable advice than what we’ve touched on so far. 
Have a great day!
Bonus Footage: Oui, en Francais! (For my Francophone readers, a question: Since I can, should I also start shooting videos in French?) And since a few of you have asked me if I would say my name in its original French so you can hear what it sounds like – Two birds, one stone. You ask, I deliver. (And yes, I take requests.) Check it out:
What these brand/social-media/community managers question is the how? How do we create lateral action amongst community members or customers?
It goes back into your previous talks about vertical interaction. What you do there and how you help cultivate your community has a direct correlation with any sort of lateral action. You have to be able to provide your community with not only great content, but a sense of ownership and connection with your company or brand. These connections help create brand evangelists, people within your community that are willing to be your voice and go to bat for you and what your company represents.
So, IMO, the hard work really comes from the vertical side of things – being able to put the proper strategy and people in place to build on your brand’s message, through horizontal interaction with the rest of the community.
Great post, Olivier – and damn, I need to learn a 3rd language ( not many people resonate with Punjabi
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“You have to provide your community with not only great content, but a sense of ownership and connection with your company or brand. These connections help create brand evangelists, people within your community that are willing to be your voice and go to bat for you and what your company represents.” – Sonny Gill
Pow. There it is right there. Awesome.
The most important thing here is to be important to your community. To truly matter. If people just “like” you, they probably won’t bother to want to share their stories about you with others. But if they LOVE you, man… you’ll never really have to advertise unless you want to.
The “bad” news is that getting people to love your brand, products, company is hard work. It takes a serious commitment to excellence, to treating your customers with respect, to put out the best products and create the best experiences 24/7/365 and do things better FOR THEM (your customers).
The good news is that there are TONS of ways of doing this, from focusing on product design, quality control, unique user experience and stellar customer support to creating kickass marketing campaigns, fostering inspired transparency, developing a healthy, positive, engaged internal culture (especially at the executive level) and taking community relations to a whole new level of customer empowerment.
And… Punjabi is a whole lot more exotic than French, Sonny. Work it, man.
Olivier,
The first video is really short and to the point. I think you said exactly what community management is about, without using the typical marketing BS. Your videos are really helpful, so thanks for that.
The second video showed me that my French is even worse than I thought. I did understand your name, though
Tobias
Lateral action is a much more sophisticated way of explaining ‘viral’ I think. Gives the concept more of a professional tone than having the C managers say ‘we want you to create a viral campaign’…blah blah
If you can explain your strategy in terms of lateral action from your community it really does encompass WOM, viral, community building…
Empowering lateral action…that’s my takeaway! Nice line! Would be a great job title…
Right. Viral is one aspect of lateral, and a misunderstood one at that. I’ve heard of ad agencies selling “viral” to clients as if… they could actually predict and control what goes viral.
Typical traditional (vertical) media thinking being wrongly applied to the social (lateral) web.
But to your point: Yep, I hope that by calling it what it is (lateral action or lateral engagement) we can bring some clarity to the difference between what brands/companies do and what their communities do.
You said “What they must also do is empower their communities to manage themselves to a great extent and generate conversations and motion from within.” and I think some marketers & brand managers would love to know how to achieve the kind of brand fervor that leads to enough interested people doing that on their own. I see all these ads and tweets and comments here and there, about “make your message go viral” and that is such a joke, because sometimes I don’t think we can predict what will go viral and what will lay flat. How do you “empower lateral action” as Nicky says? I can see there may not be a simple answer to that question.
The video in French is so neat. Why does it seem you speak so much faster? Is that real or a perception because I don’t know everything you’re actually saying? I picked up a few words but not nearly all.
I feel the same way when I hear native Spanish speakers having a conversation. Maybe there’s something about foreign languages that makes syllables sound like words… so the speed thing may just be an auditory illusion.
Your comments on “viral” are dead on. I just wrote a reply to artroxthinks that echo the very thing you just wrote about the BS of predicting or selling “viral.”
The “how” is a long list. There’s no magic formula. What works for BMW is different from what works for Apple or HBO or Pixar. What makes people care and rally around you can be a collection of any number of things. See my answer to Sonny’s comment, and many of my posts over the years. Truth: Making people care THAT MUCH takes a lot more than just hiring a cool Social Media team. Apple, Cartier, Gucci, BMW, Fitleist, Canon and Virgin didn’t become lovebrands because they had a killer marketing team.
We can’t put too many hopes on this medium. It can accomplish a lot, but you still need substance behind the cool engagement. There has to be something spectacular behind the veil to make it all work.
Olivier, I could go on and on about this subject.
So I’ll try to be short…haha!
Looking at engagement in verticals and horizontals is a sound strategy… but from my experience I’m limited when I just think strategically for my clients in verticals and horizontals. I also explore cycles and how the brand can play a role in introduction, participation, adoption, evangelism, and shared ownership.
Our goal should be to move a passive consumer to become an evangelistic fan willing to make the ultimate investment (their time or money) and make sure someone else can benefit from that brand’s product or service. Basically creating another ripple to be expanded again and again.
Again let me say that I also believe vertical and horizontal thinking is strategically needed. Hopefully this level of thinking will change the way brands and marketers think about generating conversations from social media as a means to another transaction.
Vertical and horizontal digging can hopefully help the brand find meaning for themselves and understanding the meaning of their brand from the customer point of view.
Of course.
Remember that I try to touch one concept at a time in these posts. Brand management is a lot more complex than just F.R.Y. or just vertical vs. lateral engagement. These are all tiny little pieces of a much larger puzzle. Just laying one piece on the board at a time.
I like what you’re saying about helping passive customers evolve into engaged evangelists. There’s some serious magic in that piece of the puzzle right there.
Olivier, you know me ADD A to Z…