Traditionally, information about your company was spread via public relations firms or marketing departments that would craft, disseminate, and even monitor your promotional messages. The rise of social media has changed this dramatically as companies and PR agencies no longer entirely control the content or the form of the public conversations about your products and services. And while this doesn’t necessarily spell the end of conventional PR or marketing practices, it does mean that companies should track and take advantage of the customers who are already actively engaged in these discussions.
Word-of-mouth advertising is hardly new and still remains a very common form of promotion. We are much more likely to try a service or buy a product if it’s endorsed by someone we know and trust. However, word-of-mouth doesn’t necessarily “stick.” As Seth Godin argues, “Word of mouth is a decaying function. A marketer does something and a consumer tells five or ten friends. And that’s it. It amplifies the marketing action and then fades, usually quickly.” And while all of us, at some point or another, have recommended a restaurant or a band or a movie or a book, these endorsements (or warnings, for that matter) can be quite casual or offhand.
But there are some products and some recommendations we make with a bit more force and a bit more regularity. These are the people for whom your service or your mission or your values has struck a real chord. And companies would be wise to identify those individuals who do just that – those customers who are your brand evangelists.
Part of this identification comes from monitoring social media streams as part of your larger customer relationship management endeavors. Pay attention to who and what and where conversations about your company are occuring.
Once you have identified your brand evangelists, be sure to harness them to further promote your company. Make it easy for your evangelists to share your content by including all the various social networking buttons. As wryly noted by the Church of the Customer Blog, pointing to a company promotional video with the stern FBI warning against unauthorized distribution, you want to remove barriers that might prevent your customers from spreading the word. Furthermore, make sure you give them something interesting to share — a press release, for example, is far less likely to be shared on Facebook than a video.
You should make these customers feel like their contribution to your company’s PR matters. Reward them – with contests or exclusive content. And thank them publicly.
Although brand evangelists are often associated with those who are early adopters and innovators themselves, it’s worthwhile to track down the “everyday” evangelists. After all, the expectations and interests of early adopters might not be the same things that will motivate a broader customer base to adopt your product or service.
Despite the power of social media to spread messages about your product, remember that there can be offline evangelists as well. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson tells the following anecdote about the entertainment software startup Boxee. The company “posted on their blog that they were looking for 5 early Boxee users to come with them to CES. Instead of hiring models, or whatever, to man their booth, they literally ran a contest and got 5 power users. You had to write why you love Boxee and it was 2 or 3 guys and 2 or 3 women. The thing was; they paid your way to CES, put you up in a hotel, paid your airfare, and you had to do 4-6 hours every day in the booth. Then after that you were free to do whatever you wanted in Las Vegas for a week. They got 50-100 people who applied with some great applications. They picked 5 of them. Abner, the CEO, told me that those 5 people were the best booth attendants he’d ever had because these people were into it. They were into it because they were already into it, but they were also into it because they were getting a free trip.”
This form of guerrilla marketing, while not costly, does require some planning. It must be authentic. Just as word-of-mouth benefits from the trust between the referrer and referee, it is important that you are identifying and harnessing evangelists who are trusted and, ideally, influencers themselves.
When you harvest these brand evangelists, make sure that it is in the service of a clear business goal – that it isn’t merely social media chatter for the sake of social media presence. Promoting certain brand evangelists should be done in the service of customer acquisition or retention, for example, or in the service of building a stronger community or better conversion rates. It’s difficult to measure the success or failure of the evangelizing if you don’t have clear goals against which to compare.
