Posted on May 27, 2010 - by Kwame

Understanding Social Media Using Honey Bees As A Standard Model

The honey bee is a social insect. By studying honey bees, humans have been able to solve problems in electronics and science in general. I know it is unbelievable but it is actually a fact. Some people have even asked us (humans) to use honey bees as a standard model for our social lives. Read this wiki if you need confirmation: Bee Colony Optimization.

What can the honey bee teach us when it comes to social media? Well, they can teach us a lot. In fact, a honey bee’s social life could be likened to that of a good social media marketer.

Before we delve into this topic more, let’s look at the picture below: It explains how honey bees communicate: Now let’s explain the picture.

There are certain worker bees whose primary work is to forage for food. They focus on gathering nectar and pollen.

If a foraging honey bee finds a source of high quality nectar and pollen, it returns to the hive to communicate it to other worker bees in the hive.

They perform a dance to communicate the location of the food to other worker bees. After performing the dance, a swarm of bees fly to the food source.

Honey bees are master communicators and they are very good at bringing a “buzz” to an orchard or source of food for them.

Now, let’s replace the honey bee’s story with our own human story in terms of bringing buzz to our business. Do you already see where this is going?

So let’s think of the honey bee as a regular internet surfer who has a social profile on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media site. Regular internet surfers visit many websites and blogs a day looking for different kinds of information.

They normally like to share websites with their friends but one thing is that, they normally share websites that offer a lot of quality information or has a lot of goodies.

So in order for you to grab a web surfer’s attention, first you will need a good website design (flower petals?).

Now they land on your page and start ‘foraging’ for information. Now, your content will be the pollen and the offer or value your website promises will be the nectar.

If the web surfer finds your design to be cool, your content (or pollen) to be awesome and your offer (or nectar) to be excellent, they will be tempted to share your sweet stuff with their friends in the hive (ie, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, et cetera) so that they too can come and enjoy the value you provide.

When their friends also land on your site and find it useful, they might also share it with their friends and that may lead to a lot of buzz (if they were honey bees, you’ll here a “buzzzzzzz” from their wings ) for your business and it will also lead to pollination (profits). This graphic below makes it easier to understand:

The differences between our social web lives and a bee’s social web life are:

1. Everyone of us forage for information on the web and then we share it. With bees, there are specific workers who do the foraging.
2. When we are in the position of people in stage number 4, we may do what’s stated in stage 2 or choose to share our own findings starting at stage 1.

I know some of you are saying, “ point number 3, we are humans and they are insects.” Well, that’s not the point we want to make .

Clarifications:

Your products need to be worthy to be shared to other members of the ‘hive’. You can establish a presence in the hive yourself and let the ‘worker bees’ do all the talking and recruiting for you.

You don’t need to hard sell to them inside the hive because if they become your fan or follower, they already know your value and are going to do the selling for you. Remember that they may have seen many other fine petals but came to you because your pollen and nectar (content and offer) was more valuable.

Inside the hive, you need to continue to produce blooming petals and provide nectar and pollen regularly.

When you dull out, there will be no use for you inside the hive and the people who follow you will start unfollowing you.

So how do you continue to bloom? Just make it easy for people to spread the word about your business by interacting with them.

• When it is Christmas, wish them a Merry Christmas,
• When there is a discount sale on your website, tell them there is a sale on your website.
• Create a Facebook fans only or Twitter followers only offer and let them have it.
• Give them ideas on how to use your product.
• Don’t spam. Spam is annoying and it makes you look desperate.
• Share your business’ life or activities with them like “we are removing ginger from our ingredients, do you think this is cool?”, “we made a donation to Oxfam. Buying from us made this possible”, “Which of our products do you want to see more of?”

Again, interact, don’t sell. Get their ideas, use it and they will feel attached to your business.

Coca Cola does an excellent job with their Facebook fan page. They once shared a status showing fans the best temperature to drink a coke.

How do you interact with your customers inside and outside the hives?

If you loved this article, share it with your friends, family and work colleagues. Thanks.