Meeting Business needs by meeting Social Needs in Small Communities: Why Size Matters.

Move Over Maslow: How fulfilling 6 human social needs creates business value from social networks

Some new thinking for marketers on which type of social network is most likely to produce the results they’re looking for comes from new research from Communispace.

The answers come from social science and the study of basic human needs – mapped to what’s happening now in Web 2.0. (Fast forward Maslow and his famous hierarchy of human needs in the 1943 paper, “A Theory of Human Motivation.”) Communispace’s hypothesis: people are looking to fulfill six essential social needs online, and the organizations that understand this and build the right kind of social networking opportunity are more likely to create deeper emotional bonds than usually exist between companies and customers.

In the report, Meeting Business Needs by Meeting Social Needs: Why Size Matters Communispace decodes which social needs are met by participating in social networks.

The Six Social Needs People Seek in Social Networks

1. Expressing personal identity: online social networks provide people with the ultimate tool for defining and redefining themselves, as evidenced in profile pages on Facebook and MySpace.

2. Status and self-esteem: the need for autonomy, recognition and achievement are essential to our sense of self-worth and are fulfilled in online communities, blogs, and social networks that provide a way to develop and manage a virtual reputation.

3. Giving and getting help: people have a need to both seek and provide help to others.Mutual assistance between strangers is a phenomenon that has been uniquely enabled by the Internet.

4. Affiliation and belonging: online communities are becoming the way people find, create and connect with others “just like me” – people who share similar tastes, sensibilities, orientations or interests.

5. Sense of community: a sense of belonging or affiliation alone is not equivalent to a true sense of community. Achieving a real sense of community requires long-lasting reciprocal relationships and a mutual commitment to the needs of the community as a whole.

Communispace tapped its other research on social networking behavior and found that when companies meet the full range of social needs, they gain trust and deep insights into their consumers and community members – marketing nirvana. And when companies go still further to actively embrace and act on people’s ideas they fulfill a sixth social need:

6. Reassurance of value and self worth. People want to be reassured of their worth and value, and seek confirmation that what they say and do matters to others and has an impact on the world around them. Meeting all 5 plus 1 of these social needs generally requires the level of intimacy and facilitation that are the hallmarks of smaller, invitation only online communities.

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