In reading the book The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Heidt I came across an important element that makes ultrasocial societies work - reciprocity.

Heidt defines ultrasociality as: living in large cooperative societies in which hundreds of thousand of individuals reap the benefits of an extensive division of labor. Only four instances of ultrasociality are in existence - among hymenoptera (ants, bees and wasps), termites, naked mole rats, and humans. In all species but humans the force that makes that possible is the genetics of kin altruism. In an ants nest or a bee nest, everybody is brother and sister, and since you have as much genes in common with your siblings as you have with your children, the evolutionary drive to leave surviving copies of your genes makes those ultrasocial communities work - shared genes equals shared interest.

In societies that are not structured like bee or ant colonies, the shared set of genes that you have with others drops off rather dramatically - while you share 50% of the genes with your children and siblings, you only share 1/8 the genes with your cousins, and 1/32 with second cousins. In a strictly Darwinian calculation, you would only spend as much energy to save 4 of your cousins as you would for 1 child or brother. That is why kin altruism explains only how groups of a few dozen, or perhaps a hundred, animals can work together. The rest would be competitors in the Darwinian sense.

So what happened to human societies? How did we get fictitious families, like the Mafia, where there is no real kinship, even though they talk about the Godfather and being part of the “family”, to work as ultrasocial societies? It’s the old fashioned “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” phenomenon - which is in fact a mindless and automatic reciprocity reflex. if someone receives a favor, that person will be driven to repay that favor - not because it the proper thing to do - but because it is a built-in ethological reflex. It’s tit-for-tat, hardwired in our brains, that opens the possibility of forming cooperative relationships with strangers. Now mind you that tit-for-tat can only explain the existence of social groups up to a few hundreds. What allows larger social groups is its co-existence with vengeance, gratitude and gossip as tools that reduce the payoff to cheaters by the cost of making enemies.

Those very primitive hardwired human behaviors confirm a lot about what makes online communities work as well - the importance of reputation, the importance of self-organized possis to police communities, the importance of helping one another as a currency, and the failure of communities where reciprocity is not an integral component of the community.

I am scheduled to travel to Belgium to visit my father who was diagnosed with two aneurisms and is facing a fairly complex and dangerous operation later this month. When he had an aneurism 17 years ago it burst and not only did he almost lose his live - he lost his business.

So I made reservations on Air France to go visit, and when I called my parents today with my itinerary I realized that I had made a mistake. I wanted to come back on the 27th and for some reason when I ordered through airfrance.com they booked me a train from Brussels to Parin on the 27th and a flight on the 28th. Now I order stuff online all the time, and if there is an overnight situation I expect the site to alert me to this. I called Air France, hoping that they would rectify the situation, as I do not want to spend a night around the Paris Airport and also need to be back in the US on the 27th. When I heard that they had plenty of room on the 27th, I thought it would be a no-brainer for them to change my reservation - and was even prepared to pay a fine for what surely was their screwed up user interface. But no, they could not change it - I begged, played nice, tried the empathy card - but the answer was no way, non, merde…you lose your ticket and buy a new one (which I did - but on Air Lingus - hoping the Irish are somewhat better).

Now my family has been using Air France ever since the Belgian Airline went out of business 6 or so years ago.

In these bad economic times, you would expect companies whose service are going to be the first to be cut from personal and business budgets to do everything they can to hold on to their customers - especially if it does not cost them a dime to accommodate the change request which would satisfy the customer, and perhaps make up for their deficient product offering.

I am flabbergasted - but should I? You could blame customer service arrogance, something that the French have been accused of, but in the end it has become an industry-wide behavioral attitude.

How do we customers give them the middle finger?

I have written about the Fiskateer community many times, and finaly got a chance to interview the people who are responsible for making this community happen.

I will extract some blog posts from the interview in the near future, but for now you can listen to interview below.

As part of the Marketing 2.0 group I will be conducting another CMO 2.0 Conversation tomorrow at 1pm ET with Jay Gillespie, the VP of Marketing at Fiskars, who brought us the Fiskateers community/movement, a really successful community-based program. You can register for the conversation here and if you cannot attend, we will put up the recording on the Marketing 2.0 Blog.

I will also be participating in another webinar in conjunction with the upcoming Social Media Strategies Conference, which will be held in San Francisco Oct 29-30, tomorrow at 2pm ET on Social Media Analytics Strategies. You can register for that session here. I am an adviser to the program for the conference and hope to see you there as well as tomorrow in the webinar.

I interviewed with Shel Holtz yesterday about the Tribalization of Business Study. It was a fun interview and you can listen to it here.

As we are gearing up for the next version of the study, let me know if you would like to be part of it by leaving a comment or by emailing me at francois [at] beelinelabs.com.

Many companies seem to have legal departments that put up huge barriers to adopting communities and other social media programs that include employees, customers, prospects and even detractors. In fact some put up barriers so high that nobody can do anything in the space. Now, if your competitors cannot find a way to overcome those objections either, you may be ok, but if they do and manage to extend their business processes to leverage the power of the internal and external crowds, it may be “game over.”

Typical legal objections include the issues related to brand protection, engaging hourly workers as part of internal communities, the threat of liability for what employees say in public, having employees socialize online instead of doing work, meeting regulatory compliance requirements, and more. While most legal departments will claim that their situation is very unique, at the end of the day the issues are fairly common among many companies.

I do not think that there is one best practice on how to overcome those objections. Some companies find it easier to get legal involved upfront in the process, while others are asking legal to quantify the risks and then balancing those with the benefits or the risks of doing nothing. One good bit of common sense (as recommended in this BT case study) is to make sure that you do not overhype what you are trying to do and position it as something radically different from other programs. Many companies already have policies in place that cover things like email communications and acceptable behavior in public forums - which could possibly be extended to virtual environments without too much change.

What have you found to be working?

When we conducted the 2008 Tribalization of Business Study, we discovered that those companies that were most satisfied with their community efforts were those that measured the impact of their community programs on their business processes the same way they would measure the impact of any other program on those same business processes.

So if you measure the impact of a certain program by increased store sales, or by improved customer satisfaction - then measure the impact of social media programs on those business processes the same way. Even if you think the current measurements are wrong. If you do not like how customer service is being measured by the average time people spend on the phone - it does not matter. Don’t try to change it when you roll out a social media program. The fact that the current measurements are well understood and often hardwired within the company culture will ensure that people will understand and embrace your social media programs rather than marginalize them as exotic new hype-driven non-mainstream programs.

Taking this a step further - the faster you can get the various departments that benefit from your programs to co-fund them, the faster your programs will become mainstream.

All that being said - how do you measure the impact of your social media programs? What works? What doesn’t work? As we are gearing up for the next iteration of the Tribalization of Business Study, what would you like to find out?

PS - If you prefer discussing the topic instead of just commenting on it, join the Marketing 2.0 community where I started a discussion on the topic.

At last week’s Web 2.0 workshop and also with some clients recently I started noticing how people mix up communities and work teams - a distinction which I think is worth making.

Work teams work on projects which have a beginning and end, they usually have well-defined roles in those project, and they get paid for doing that work - it’s their job. To use Dan Ariely’s metaphore, they are evaluating what they do and how much they contribute in their market framework.

Communities are mostly self-organized around a shared passion or around the need for people to help others and be helped. There are few pre-defined roles, and people usually do not get paid to participate - it’s not their job. In the most successful communities, people evaluate their contributions in their social framework.

So why is that important? Because they require radically different motivators in order to work.

Take an innovation initiative within a company. There may be a core set of people in marketing and product development whose job it is to innovate. If at some point you want to externalize that innovation process to include communities with all your employees, customers and prospects, you will need to understand that the motivations of those communities are very different from those of your core innovation team. It’s not their job to innovate and they are likely to be very busy as it is. You could of course pay them to give you ideas, but considering the incentives usually used in communities that is more likely to result in poor ideas than good ones. In order for this to work you need to appeal to a higher social motive - like helping out.

Now if you can instill a higher level of passion in your regular work teams, they too will start performing at a much higher level…

After presenting at the Web 2.0 Expo last week, we have a lot of other events coming up. The first is this coming Thursday, when I will be kicking off a series of CMO 2.0 Conversations for the Marketing 2.0 Group. This first conversation will be with H&R Block’s VP of Marketing Paula Drum. You can register for that conversation here. If you have anyone you would like to recommend for a future conversation, please let me know.

After that, we will presenting the results of the 2008 Tribalization of Business Study at the BRITE conference at Columbia University on October 15-16. Following that I am getting involved with the Social Media Strategies Conference in San Francisco at the end of October. Shortly after that there will be the Society for New Communications Research Symposium here in Boston. I will try to add the buttons that will give you discounts for these events on my site in the next couple of days.

Hopefully we can find some time to connect in person at one of those events.

Shel Israel conducted an interview with me on the 2008 Tribalization of Business Study which we conducted in partnership with Deloitte and the Society for New Communications Research (where both Shel and I are Fellows).

His line of questioning made me think about issues and angles about the findings that I had not necessarily thought of before.

Thank you Shel for the opportunity!

And Shel, good luck with the new upcoming addition to your family…