“How to Turn Relationships into Brand Advocacy” and Other Must-Reads

What you read below is a piece written by my colleague Tiffani Allen on the 101s of brand advocacy. It was so good, I figured, why reinvent the wheel? Brand advocacy is a relatively new term or at least has been redefined in the digital age. The following piece should help you get your head around its benefits and power.

We’ve all heard the phrase, “Everyone’s a critic,” right? As it turns out, this has more truth to it than we may care to believe. Anyone with Internet access can now be a food critic, movie critic, or any other kind of critic you can think of. The days of relying on expertise and reputation are fading fast and being replaced with customer reviews, recommendations from family, friends, strangers, and somewhat anonymous tips on social media sites.

If you don’t provide excellent service, engage with your customers online and in person, or otherwise build relationships with them, you are potentially losing business. Brands need to have a loyalty program in place to turn existing, happy customers into brand advocates. The following articles are the best I’ve found this week on the topic; whether you have an integrated digital marketing strategy or you’re still trying to figure out what #Hashtags are, this information pertains to you.

“Can You Buy Brand Advocacy With a Bag of Sweets?”
Andrew Moloney, @AJMoloney
While you read this article, think about what your bag of sweets is. Every brand experiences customer complaints, but it’s how you handle them that will set you apart from your competition. Rewarding your customers for their feedback, positive or negative, opens a line of communication that you may not otherwise have access to.

“How to Increase Relevancy of Your Brand Advocacy Program via Segmentation”
Sanjay Shetty, facebook.com/sanjayshetty
This article is from the end of December 2012, but it is one of the best explanations that I’ve found on the subject of brand advocacy. The author uses a metaphor about shoes to tie segmentation into brand advocacy, no pun intended, to detail how important customized messages are becoming in the marketing sphere.

“Advocacy: The New Currency of Marketing”
Dion Hinchcliffe, @dhinchcliffe
This article puts the importance of brand advocacy in the digital world into simple terms and has been retweeted quite a bit recently. It outlines different types of advocacy and how to implement strategies that are measurable and functional. There are some good infographics in the article that help to illustrate the point.

And in case you missed it . . .
“How to Turn Relationships into Brand Advocacy”
Ted Rubin, @TedRubin
Rubin emphasizes the importance of building a relationship with your social media followers, rather than just gathering “likes.” Doing so can lead to your customers advocating for your brand and thus increasing your “Return on Relationship.” Published back in July 2012, this article is still relevant to today’s brand advocacy conversation—and it’s also getting some retweet love this week, so it looks like it has been “rediscovered.”

Why Corporate Journalism Is Real Journalism

My colleague Karl Pearson-Cater here at Ciceron is a journalism major. Over the past 20 years, he’s put CityPages.com on the map, worked at the Star Tribune, and then helped grow online news startup MinnPost.com. Clearly, this is a guy with a true journalism pedigree, and let me tell you, he has opinions about what is and what is not journalism. (We have many a pleasant argument over this, over beers, of course.)

We had a dozen-year open job offer for Karl here at Ciceron, and he took us up on it in 2011 when we threw him into the corporate digital marketing meat-grinder. In his role as senior content architect, he helps clients think more like journalists and less like marketers. This is a huge mental transformation for many trained marketers. And, frankly, it’s often a challenge for Karl. A marketer’s mentality—especially in a publicly traded company where quarterly results are expected—is to “sell, sell, sell.” A journalist’s mentality is to carefully fact check, tap subject-matter experts, and create content that is in-depth and entirely truthful. Karl’s job is to foster the latter mentality.

Why?

Here are three major reasons why corporate journalism is real journalism. Or will be.

1. Because corporations no longer have just customers—they have audiences.

In the modern era of followers, friends, “Likes,” and opt-ins, corporations are growing audiences who have chosen to be informed, entertained, engaged, and activated. In many, many cases, the sizes of these audiences are staggering—millions often, hundreds of thousands even more. Ask Newsweek (digital-only as of last week) if they’d like millions more subscribers. There are companies and organizations that have more followers than small cable channels, city newspapers, and magazines. Get this: Oreo has 31 million Facebook followers. This is a direct, earned audience they never had only a few years ago. What is Oreo’s content and journalism plan for these people? Whether Oreo or anyone intended to, these companies got into the publishing and entertainment business.

When most organizations got into the “social media” business, they didn’t do so as a means to create a long-term, engaged media audience. They weren’t intending to begin an online corporate Web TV channel or radio station or magazine. They did so, largely, to create a new marketing and advertising channel. Yet, when you speak with consumers, that is rarely their intentions. They opted in because they wished to establish a deeper relationship with a brand they truly like through deep-form content and conversation—not taglines, endless contests, and marketing drivel. They want to feel like they are a part of a community of people who also enjoy the brand’s products or services, and involves participation from the real people who work for the brands they love.

2. Because in this era of unavoidable consumer transparency, the absolute truth matters.

The last election was a focal point on the intersection between stated brand claims (a candidate’s stated position) and fact checkers. If you think corporate America isn’t under the same microscope, fuggetaboutit. Advertising is full of claims, from “the cleanest” to “the safest” to “the most green”—and on and on. Advertising and marketing no longer operate within the comfortable confines of a restricted media environment, where a very few media outlets could sway enough “voters” (consumers) to give up their cash. A simple Google search will uncover where brand claims fall short of actual consumer experiences, because each consumer is now an individual channel. En masse, they’re huge. For example, if you’re a one-star hotel on consumer review site TripAdvisor, no advertising campaign will turn you into a four-star hotel. That’s a fact.

Content creators within corporations need to use journalistic standards in investigating their own products, services, and cultures. They need to be internal pied-pipers for consumers, the front lines of anticipated public reaction to claims. This means that internal people need to be 100 percent honest with one another. If a corporate journalist doubts a claim that the product development team is making, she should have the right to dig deeper into that claim because, the reality is, if the claim is indeed false or even slightly false, it will be exposed, and the entire brand suffers. This, to me, is journalism.

3. Corporations need to be susceptible to criticism if the facts present themselves.

Traditional journalists make mistakes, not because they’re journalists but because they’re human. Corporations are no different. (Did I just say, “Corporations are people?”) Corporations makes mistakes because they’re composed of humans. The more transparent and human companies are, the more likely they are to be able to respond to criticism. As social channels continue to tear down traditional access methods to companies, companies will inherently become more human. We see this everyday on channels like Twitter, where customers may rant publically, only to be shocked when a company representative actually listens, responds, and solves a problem. That point of contact—in a very human and public channel—is new to consumers. They still don’t expect brands to respond or even care. But the high-performing companies that have embraced social engagement will be the first to tell you that their relationships with their customers are more real, more intimate, and more loyal. This new breed of customers is the one who becomes highly networked brand advocates. And if you’ve been reading this blog for any time, you’ll know that that’s what I believe to be the Holy Grail of corporate performance.

I posit to you then that corporate journalism shares the same basic tenets of traditional media journalism. I greatly welcome the debate on this. Please remember, however, that the ideas I’ve shared above are not embraced widely, but the debate keeps surfacing. Understand that I’m speaking of a future state, not a current one. I would expect you to critique how organizations of all types are using these emerging channels. Most not well. I’d love to hear your stories of brands doing it right.

Who’s Minding The Social Business? Part One: HR

Ample evidence suggests that companies that have mature social business models in place are not only more productive but more profitable. I would suggest that these companies have done the single most important thing: They moved social business out of the marketing department. When you look at all the available departments to house social business, marketing requires the most mental and personality transformation.

As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, the term “social media” does a disservice to the field, because it assumes that marketing is where social networks garner the greatest value. This is true only in potential, but very few companies have figured out how to make the necessary major (and mostly internal) modifications to allow themselves to succeed. More often than not, power grabs, internal conflicts, institutional misunderstandings, and mass execution of solutions looking for problems sabotage that tremendous potential.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to use this precious little space to focus on where successful social businesses are executing brilliant plans to take the reins and succeed with social business activities stemming outside of marketing. The key to all of this success is multi-channel, interdisciplinary leadership. Today, I’m going to begin with human resources—often the front line of the battle for company reputation. In upcoming posts, I will focus on customer service, product development, and business intelligence.

Human Resources: The Front Line
A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting with a marketing executive exploring a different angle for how social networks could benefit her company. Knowing its metrics, I know that this firm receives a significant portion of its traffic and page views via the employment and job pages. So we did a simple Google search for her firm’s name plus “jobs.” Even prior to the firm’s page being listed were several employer review sites, like Glassdoor.com.

When we visited Glassdoor, my client was less than impressed with her company’s reviews on the site, but she admitted that they were accurate. I suggested there’s an opportunity sitting right here in front of us. Clearly, a job seeker is going to Google her company. Are the negative reviews chasing away good people? If so, that has long-term bottom-line effects on a company.

The issue became clear: My marketing client has nothing to do with human resources. Her response was, “I don’t even know where to start.” And I get it, she has her own objectives, and none of them require her to walk down the hall to explore a business strategy with HR. Why? Because no one in her firm owns the social business. No one is connecting the dots.

Mature companies recognize that the front lines of their employee base and culture includes the voice of past and current employees. These folks should be encouraged to visit these company review sites and add their personal experience and flavor to the mix. If they don’t, then organizations are completely beholden to the naysayers, critics, and frankly, the purely disgruntled. This is no different than marketing and public relations departments saying, “What if people say bad things about us?” Well, what if? You don’t think they have outlets to do so? Are you just going to sit there and take it? Why the hell would you do that?

Start with LinkedIn
Give human resources complete control over your company’s LinkedIn page. LinkedIn isn’t a marketing destination—it’s a human resources one. LinkedIn has recently undergone a significant overhaul and now allows for many more robust features for companies to create elegant and resourceful pages. Human resources should create a LinkedIn profile with accurate contact information and a mission statement, but it should also cover more:

• Talk about the current culture of the organization
• Celebrate employees
• Speak to charitable or volunteer work in which the organization engages, and which elevates the profiles of leadership
• Promote recent news about the organization

Human resources should also provide counsel to internal employees for creating their own pages and let them describe the company in their own words.

The Question & The Challenge
It’s a very simple question, but who inside your company can make the call to turn over the company’s LinkedIn page to human resources? Shouldn’t be that big of a deal, right? But the answer may be difficult to come to. The VP of marketing? The CEO? Your answer to this simple question may reveal a higher-level challenge. If you’re struggling with the answer to who owns the social business and can navigate nimbly across the organization, then that’s an excellent opportunity to examine a new path to success. Again, the mature social companies have figured this out, and no one is immune.

Word of Mouth Isn’t a Fluke

Here I sit at the Corner Bakery off Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Up the street at the Radisson Blu Aqua hotel (one of our beloved clients, I might add), the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) is holding its annual WOMMA-U conference. Some of you might chuckle a bit to know that there’s an actual professional organization for something that seems as organic as “word of mouth.” But a funny little thing has happened over the past eight or so years: The advent and now dominance of the social Web has made old-fashioned, over-the-fencepost word of mouth very scientific, measurable, and amazingly scalable.

The latest stats show that each individual on a social network is connected on average to nearly 250 other people. Since marketing organizations are typically the department to which social marketing has been bestowed, much attention is given to fan and follower counts. These top-line figures are of course important, but they are truly just the tip of the iceberg. I’m often struck by how much attention is given to these top-line numbers and how little attention is given to the impact that these followers potentially have upon an organization. Think about it. It’s simple math. If an organization achieves 10,000 followers across its assorted social presences, it now has the potential reach of 10,000 x 250, or 2.5 million people. That is the important number.

But what to do about this staggering potential? This potential is what we in the biz are calling “brand advocacy,” and it assumes a couple of essential points. One, your customers have tremendous power. Two, when satisfied, they can do much more than simply tell a friend or two about your brand. They can tell their network. You see this in tweets and Facebook updates. A person of influence can push the dial. Let me tell you about the time Dr. Phil sent out a simple tweet about my client, Feeding America—stuff exploded. That is all: Dr. Phil sent a tweet, and everything changed. That’s powerful.

The challenge I see for brands today is to invest in these post-sale advocacy activities. I talk with many brands that simply hope that people will say good things about them. They understand this advocacy potential from social networks but don’t have actual plans or strategies around creating environments, content, and connections that fuel or encourage these fired-up brand champions to spread the word.

I often use this analogy regarding how companies are using social media: I think of it as a log, and marketers are continuously lighting matches to it but can’t figure out why it’s not catching fire. The log isn’t social media; it’s your brand. The kindling—the tweets, Facebook updates, LinkedIn profiles, Pinterest boards, Tumblrs, and all the various real conversations taking place between you and your customers—is what makes your brand catch fire.

At the End of This Blog, You Will Buy Me a Car

Have you seen the 2012 Audi R8? No? Do you want to? Here.

Now that’s just a ridiculous car. It looks fast. I’ve never owned an Audi, but if I did, I’d hope it was the R8. I’d get a lot of speeding tickets. I mean, how could you not? “I’m sorry, officer. You see, I’m driving this car. You understand, right?”

How do I know about the R8? I saw one in a Target parking lot the other day. I didn’t see a TV commercial or hear a radio spot for a weekend “sales event.” (Really? An event? An event is something special, not something that happens every damn weekend.)

I didn’t know the car existed until I saw it, and it was extraordinary. When I got home I wanted to know more so I went to the Web site and began drooling. Then I Googled “what’s the R8 like to drive?” I really did. I wonder if the search engine specialists have optimized content for that phrase. I came upon several reviews from auto magazine Web sites like Autoweek.

Then I thought, “What’s it really like to drive?” I determined then and there that if I ever found another one in a Target parking lot, I would sit in my car and wait until the owner exited the store with his $300 toothbrush—I mean, that’s all he intended to buy in the first place—and walk up and say, “I’m sorry to bother you, but seriously, man. What’s it like to drive that car?” And you know what? I bet we’d spend the next 20 minutes talking about what it’s really like to drive that car. At that very moment, I will have moved from a non-believer to a total, complete believer. I believe in the Audi R8.

So what happened here? Was that advertising? Was that marketing? Or was that simply a car manufacturer making a product so extraordinary that its owner can’t wait to talk about it? Perhaps I shouldn’t have used this example. Fact is, we’re not all Audi R8s. That toothbrush is not an Audi R8, and I seriously doubt if anyone has ever said, “Hey, how do you like that toothbrush? Can I take yours for a test drive?” But many of you truly do lead extraordinary brands, and when you do, you have an incredible opportunity at your finger tips that allows you to harness the tipping-point power of advocacy.

Any bells going off? Social media, perhaps? When I ask marketing executives if classic word-of-mouth is the most powerful form of consumer persuasion, most nod in agreement. Yet, when I ask if there’s a formal plan to encourage and make word-of-mouth an embedded if not critical component, many of them indicate they do not. They hope and maybe even expect it’s happening. As I’ve said many times, I’m not a big fan of hoping for something to happen when my career is attached to that something happening. When I ask these same leaders if they have a Facebook presence, they often say they do. Or they think they do. Someone’s doing something on Facebook.

We’re at a nexus where we finally put a dagger in the idea that social media is an actual media broadcast channel. It is not. And treating it as one has us in the wrong mentality. Facebook, online forums (like car enthusiasts sites), LinkedIn, and many other sites are places of critical conversation, celebration, critique, and advocacy. Without a plan around these communities, brands become terrified of the “critique” element of social media, and go into corporate fetal positions. They fire up their crisis management PR people rather than their product managers. What do I mean by that? For example, when Apple customers flood message boards with complaints about a new operating system or an iPhone feature, they’re complaining not because they hate Apple—they adore Apple so much they want them to be better. And Apple listens. Do you think Apple is afraid of critique? Those millions of customers are essentially giving them the road map to future success.

This is the right mentality around social. You as a leader of a brand have an incredible opportunity to be more excellent, simply by allowing your customers to make you better. Publicly. You also have the opportunity—no, the responsibility—to provide platforms for your brand advocates to tell their stories loud and clearly. They’ll do this on their own, mind you. But why not put plans and platforms in place to make it easier? That, dear readers, is what social media is all about. Social media is not a shiny new place to put your product videos. But it is most likely the best place for your advocates to put their product videos.

Moving a mental picture of social media from broadcast channel to advocacy channel is the great leap. Doing so will make your life a heckuva lot easier.

So. Will I buy the Audi R8? Here’s the deal: If this blog post was so compelling to you, so likely to earn you millions of new customers and hit all of your revenue targets, then by all means, please send a check for $186,000 to Andrew Eklund, c/o Ciceron, 126 N. 3rd St., Suite 309, Minneapolis, MN, 55401. I will forever advocate for whatever it is you sell. All day.