Part of what I love about working with the team at Latitude is the opportunity to laugh each and every day.

Throughout the week, our community moderators post blogs to their members to touch base, say hello, give them an update and (hopefully) make them smile.

With our unique approach to community engagement, moderators are encouraged to inject a healthy dose of their own personality into communications with their members, with often humorous results. Throwing in a few tidbits of novelty information, or a joke or two allows us all to reveal a little about what interests us, makes us tick, or cracks us up, which in turn encourages members to do the same.

Here’s a couple of snippets from some recent moderator blogs…

One moderator shares her weekend of indulgence with her community…

To celebrate International Talk Like A Pirate Day…

While this sort of dialogue may not be a source for powerful insights for our clients, what it does facilitate is a fun, friendly atmosphere in which our members can express themselves openly, engage with us as moderators and bond with each other as members.

Because after all, who doesn’t love to laugh every now and again!

“Can you pass me my iPhone?” a friend recently asked me when we were out together.
What is noteworthy about this sentence is that she referred to her mobile by brand – have you ever heard anyone say ‘can you pass me my Samsung?’

Apple doesn’t produce phones. It produces iPhones. You don’t own a phone, you own an iPhone.

Substituting a brand name for a product is not uncommon – think Coke or Glad. However, the difference here lies in the fact that Coke can refer to any type of cola drink, and Glad to any type of cling wrap. Only phones produced by Apple are iPhones. The iPhone exists within a category of its own.

Now, it’s no news that Apple has been able to achieve massive brand presence and a strong loyalty base. So, what can we learn from Apple’s marketing victory? And can it be replicated?

Most Apple loyalists will tell you that Apple offer functionally superior products, and are thus a more successful company. However, when consumers pay double for white Apple headphones, something other than functionality is at work. In marketing terms, reducing the success of a brand to the products it creates is a simplistic view. Products can be imitated. It is the brand that holds the unique relationship with their consumers – whether they acknowledge it or not.

It is about building something bigger than your product. Something people can use to connect to each other. Red Bull connects its customers through a common interest of extreme sports. Blackmore’s is currently building an online community dedicated to health and well being. Like Apple these brands are creating tribes – where emphasis is on people, not product.

What do you think of this tribe mentality? Can it work across all categories?

As part of last months State of Design Festival, Dan Hill, Senior Consultant with Arup ,was discussing some of the design innovations occurring around the world, and the potential they have to fundamentally change the way we interact with the physical environment.

One area he touched on that I found of particular interest was a traffic experiment in the city of Drachten, The Netherlands.

In 2002, all traffic signals were removed from a busy inner-city intersection that handles around 17,000 vehicles per day. The results can be viewed below…

I watched this short clip with a mixture of both fascination and horror as I waited to witness the imminent disastrous collision. However it never occurred, and Dan assured us that this intersection has proven to be essentially accident free!

The notion that a somewhat chaotic approach to traffic control, where anything goes and motorists, cyclists and pedestrians are left to sort out the rules amongst themselves initially seemed absurd. Yet upon further consideration this relaxation of the rules began to make more and more sense.

Perhaps, in many ways, it is actually the rigid rules and regulations of some activities that can lead participants to ‘switch off’. When expected to follow the prompts and directions prescribed to us by others, could it be the case that our level of engagement diminishes simultaneously?

When left to our own devices, armed solely with the desire to avoid smashing into something or someone else, we are suddenly required to pay attention, to increase our awareness and to apply a further level of consideration to our thoughts and actions.

Rolling this idea around in my head got me thinking about some of the unmoderated activity that happens everyday in our online research communities. The common assumption is that all of the real ‘nuggets’ of insight are derived purely from the research discussions we as moderators initiate.

However, when left to their own devices, our members not only initiate a great deal of their own discussions, but also show a great commitment toward ensuring the community runs smoothly; in many ways, they moderate each other. By practicing tolerance and embracing the different ideas and opinions of others, members prove to be very effective at creating a safe and harmonious place to interact.

Observing these interactions between community members is essentially very similar to observing Drachten’s traffic experiment. By removing the formal rules and regulations, and allowing individuals to navigate and negotiate themselves, we have the opportunity to gain a powerful insight into what they observe, what they pay attention to and how they respond.