WHAT IS A TRIBE?

"Doritos munchers, bikers for Obama, MINI Coooper enthusiasts. Once [J.D. Power] has sorted bloggers into tribes, it can start digging for correlations between tribes and products."

Stephen Baker
The Numerati

Part of the power of social media is that so many people participate in it.
Because of this, you can take any characteristic, activity or grouping you can think of, and you can build a "tribe" around it. You can then look at preferences in products, music, sports, media, and politics—you name it—for this group.

HOW DO TRIBES WORK?

Members of Tribes self-select themselves for inclusion. In other words, Tribes consist of individual social media authors who identify themselves as member through definitive statements of inclusion or preference in a social media post (e.g., “every night I lie on the couch and munch Doritos while watching TV”…hence, a Doritos muncher).

After uncovering an understanding of who these people are, we then collect everything that they’ve posted in blogs over an extended period of time.

Once we’ve collected everything they’ve posted, we then turn our proprietary algorithms loose to uncover the attributes, attitudes and behaviors they share in common. Not only that, we overlay sentiment analysis to gain a deeper understanding of their likes, preferences and predispositions.

We can then identify common clusters of conversational topics that allow us to build a comprehensive understanding and persona representative of the tribe that is then used to:

• Guide new product development initiatives by gaining a deeper understanding of unmet needs
• Uncover partnering opportunities with other brands and products loved or consumed by the tribe
• Better target your marketing by understanding what media they’re consuming and where they’re consuming it and how they’re spending their time.
• Better position your brand and products in line with the deeper motivations and aspirations of tribe members
  

WHY ARE TRIBES SO EFFECTIVE?

Tribes are effective because Tribe members self-elect themselves into a tribe. Their membership is self-volunteered, unaided, not prompted (as prompting is often required when using traditional research approaches, which then introduces bias). Tribes allow the ability to climb inside the head of your target consumer and gain a deeper understanding of who they are, what they do and think, and how they live. And, unlike focus groups or online panels, Tribes often consist of tens of thousands of members all expressing their opinions and perceptions online waiting for you to listen.