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17 Ways to Discover Your Brand Advocates

Posted on February 22, 2012 by SanjayShetty

Having a brand advocate strategy is invaluable. But finding brand advocates can be tricky and there’s a lack of resources out there to teach you how to reach out to your advocates, so I’ve created my own list of ideas.

There are three primary sources for organizations to discover potential brand advocates: Internal, external and automated tools.

Sources to Discover Brand Advocates

There are three primary sources for organizations to discover potential brand advocates; Internal, External, and Automated Tools .

Internal Sources to find Brand Advocates

1. Loyalty Program Members – Regular users of your products and services are the first place to look for brand advocates. The people who often complain, or better yet, send in suggestions on how to improve, are great potential candidates.

2. Early Adopters – There are some people who live on the bleeding edge. They are the people who want to be the first to check out the latest products, and as such, are in direct touch with the provider organizations. In the software industry, these early adopters are known as the beta testers. Such passionate people can be your most vocal brand advocates.

3. Forums – Most organizations provide support forums where customers can post questions and typically other members, users of the products and services, provide answers. The forums we see today are the closest incarnation of the erstwhile bulletin board and newsgroups, where a whole lot of people went to search for answers and a bunch of passionate product lovers supported them by responding to queries. This is a fertile hunting ground to discover some of the most helpful brand advocates. More importantly it enables you to get extremely valuable insights about customer experiences. You also get to silently observe these potential brand advocates and understand their level of expertise and passion in your products and in supporting others.

4. Employee Referrals – It’s amazing how much valuable information is trapped within an organization and the organization is so not aware of it. If I were beginning to find advocates, I would first approach my internal teams, the people on the field, the customer support representatives. They are a great source of information about people who can be your brand advocates. Starting internally with employees is a great advantage as it helps you get support from all your people in adopting your brand advocate program.

5. Partners – Your partners, companies which provide solutions around your products or service providers can be a great source as well. Most often unknown experts and brand advocates are found here. Approaching your partners as sources for brand advocates will also help cement better ties between your organizations.

External Sources to find Brand Advocates

6. Social Media – Social media has enabled a whole lot of people to connect and share whether it’s how to videos on YouTube, or tips and links to useful content via Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Similarly bookmarking sites and sites where people can aggregate content such as Digg and StumbleUpon are invaluable sources of potential brand advocates.

7. Publications – Book authors and magazine article writers are typically experts on a particular subject, and have a tendency to share information with others. In the same vein, you have a number of online aggregators of content, where a lot of authors contribute content – from how to articles, to in-depth whitepapers etc. All these authors are potential brand advocates. Creating a list and keeping track of such people is invaluable.

8. Followers of A-Listers – I’ve often found hidden gems in terms of people who participate or comment on content provided by high profile authors/bloggers/article writers; the so-called “A-Listers”. People who follow and interact with A-Listers are likely to be good candidates to be part of your brand advocate program.

9. Bloggers – I’ve specifically listed bloggers as a separate source of finding brand advocates, as I’ve observed them to be more passionate about the subjects they’re interested in than say, Twitter users or FaceBook status updaters. You might find that though they are great at creating useful content, most of them may not be your typical a-lister, with a large number of followers. However, they probably have a loyal, captive audience, and therefore can add to the positive buzz around your brand and should certainly not to be ignored.

10. Industry Associations – Any industry today has a traditional industry association. Whether we’re talking about accountants, or geeks, or financial experts or restaurants. Many of these associations are not-for-profit, helping the cause of that particular industry. In addition, there are associations which represent categories of professional audiences, for e.g. chief marketing officers, project managers, architects, human resource professionals etc. The members and speakers at these associations can be excellent brand advocates.

11. Community and User Groups: Groups of people focussed on a particular topic, who meet regularly whether in person or via online virtual meetings are another great source for discovering brand advocates. Most of these groups are started by leaders who love to share their passion, and a whole lot of community members speak and share their expertise with others. This is by far the most powerful way to find and connect with brand advocates.

12. Podcasters: I’ve put people who produce podcasts in a separate category, as these brand advocates typically have a different kind of audience. For e.g. I’m not big on listening to podcasts. However, I know of a whole lot of people in the technology field who are podcasters and who are listeners.

13. Q&A sites – A number of online Q&A sites can be found focussed on a variety of industries. These are similar to forums but are typically run independently or as part of other social sites for e.g. Yahoo Answers, or LinkedIn Answers, Quora or StackOverflow , which is focussed on the tech industry. Most of these sites also provide recognition in terms of badges or points indicating the most active participants, making the job of finding brand advocates easier.

14. Customer Referrals – A quick way to find the most popular brand advocates is to ask your customers who their go to experts/consultants are or even their in-house experts. It’s extremely useful to get these people into your brand advocate program.

15. Consultants – Most consulting companies have key consultants who are often speakers at industry events and typically publish content around their topics of expertise.

16. Trainers – Trainers are a great source of experts who want to publicize their expertise and are most motivated to be the first to learn about new products. They along with consultants interact with a variety of customers and are exposed to various scenarios in which your products are used. Having them included in your brand advocate program will prove invaluable.

17. Conference, Industry Event Speakers – Speakers, whether they are doing keynotes or at even sessions can be extremely powerful brand advocates.

I’m sure you’re wondering whether there are automated tools to help you discover brand advocates. The simple answer is yes — but I have mixed feelings about these tools as they are online-only. Influence happens both online and offline.

Moreover, going through the sources listed above and identifying and observing potential brand advocates manually enables you to gain insight and understanding of your potential brand advocates — where the participate, what they focus on, what kind of questions people ask them about, etc. This experience will prove to be valuable in its own right. Once you’ve gone through these 17 sources to find your brand advocates, then consider evaluating automated tools. This will give you a far better understanding of the tools’ capabilities.

Here’s a mind map that captures all of the above ideas in one visual (click to view larger).

On that note, I’d love to hear from you about which of the above ideas has resonated or worked the most for you, do share your experience via a comment. And if you’ve successfully used an automated tool to discover brand advocates, please share details, such as which tool, how many advocates you were able to find, how many actually entered your program and participated.

One last thing, if you found this article useful, please share it.

This post was originally published on SmartBlog on Social Media. For more social media marketing news, sign up for SmartBrief on Social Media.

Posted in Advocate, Brand Advocate, Influencers | Tagged Brand Advocates, Discover, Evangelist, Find, Search, Sources | Leave a comment

Interesting Readings around building a community

Posted on February 11, 2012 by SanjayShetty

This week I got a lot of questions around building a community. I’ve listed below some resources I’ve found online.

Community Building Ideas

1. http://blog.asmartbear.com/building-online-community.html (How David Garland built a community of 100,000 followers in 24 months)

2. http://thecommunitymanager.com/how-to-build-a-community-from-scratch – How to Build a Community From Scratch

3. http://www.feverbee.com/2010/10/startinganonlinecommunity.html – Building An Online Community: How To Start From 0 Members

4. http://www.thesaleslion.com/key-building-blog-community-changing-lives/ – The One Great Key to Building a Blog Community and Changing Lives

5. http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-i-built-an-online-community-from-0-to-1500-members – How I Built an Online Community From 0 to 1500+ Members

6. http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/02/the_art_of_crea.html#axzz1llLUbG9H – By Guy Kawasaki – February 14, 2006 – The Art of Creating a Community. Targeted at companies, but relevant for independent community managers as well.

7. http://www.communityspark.com/how-to-build-an-online-community/ – How to build an online community

8. Building a User Community Part 1

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/12/how_to_build_a_.html

Posted in Community, User Group | Tagged Building, Community | Leave a comment

How to determine the value of your community and brand advocates?

Posted on February 7, 2012 by SanjayShetty

Most community managers fail to answer the question as they’ve never focussed on quantifying the value of their community. This leads to disenchantment and lack of support from corporate sponsors in the long term. I’m going to take you through a practical example showing you how Microsoft justifies the ROI of their community and brand advocates.

Note: If you’re an independent user group, community leader who faces a hard time getting sponsors for your group activities you might want to jump down to the last part of this article and come back up to read the rest as I begin from the perspective/goals of the enterprise company.

How do you evaluate the value your community and brand advocates?

Lets take the real life example of a very popular Microsoft community. Here’s what it says on the Award site for the program - (https://www.microsoftcommunitycontributor.com/logon.aspx)

“The Microsoft Community Contributor Award seeks to recognize notable contributions to Microsoft online community forums such as TechNet, MSDN® and Answers. The value of these resources is greatly enhanced by participants who voluntarily contribute their time and energy to improve the online community experience for others. Each day around the world, Microsoft Community Contributor Award recipients contribute to Microsoft online technical communities in a range of ways, including providing helpful answers, translating online resources into local languages and serving as moderators.”

Ok that’s a mouthful right! Let me break it down for you:

1. It seeks to recognize notable contributions by people to certain Microsoft online properties.

2. The people who participate, help by doing the following (this is important pay attention)

Action	Financial impact on Microsoft
Provide helpful answers	1. Reduces calls to their customer support center. Hence reduced operational costs. Such as time of call center employee and infrastructure cost associated with call center. 2. Creates enormous amount of documented content supporting their platform. Let me explain this in more detail. When a person answers a phone, the recipient benefits, no one else. However, when a person receives a response online on a forum, others can look it up, thereby reducing the effort and providing enormous volumes of documented content.
Serving as moderators	If senior community members act as moderators this enables Microsoft to reduce further management cost. This is a huge saving.
Translating online resources into local languages	For large organizations who’re present in multiple geographies, producing content in multiple languages is a huge expense. This translates into amazing cost savings.

Evaluating the ROI, benefit of your Community and Brand Advocates

Lets look at the actual numbers of how just introducing a new community advocate program “Community Contributors” helped boost the online support provided by the community members. If we consider only one of the actions given above i.e. community members providing helpful answers. You’ll see in the graph below how Microsoft’s new program caused a 29% initial jump followed by settling down to a 14% jump in average monthly answers per community brand advocate.

(Source of Image: http://www.slideshare.net/GasPedal/blogwell-seattle-case-study-microsoft-presented-by-nestor-portillo Slide number 9)

If you assume an industry average of 10% more, of the overall audience who’re just the silent observers and don’t contribute answers but who search for answers, benefiting by the additional answers provided by the community brand advocates. We’re talking large numbers in terms of reduction in customer support costs for Microsoft.

Before you jet set to start your community initiative, you might want to read the report on how and what Microsoft does to leverage its community brand advocates. Community Brand Advocacy programs need to begin in the reverse. What I mean is that you need to first clearly define your business objectives. Note: Business objectives are not, number of twitter or Facebook followers. In the above example, the business objective was customer call deflection or generally speaking reducing the cost of customer support. Creating a brand advocacy program involves a number of steps. It’s best to use a framework to help with the process of defining your objectives and creating an ecosystem which will encourage your communities. Before I leave this topic, let me address a big problem I’ve noticed with independent communities, they often don’t know how to justify or seek sponsorship for their activities. This happens even if they’ve been originally seeded by companies or the companies have helped start the independent communities and user groups led by their brand advocates.

What if you run an independent community or user group focussed around a particular company or it’s products? What should you do to define the value of your community?

Most independent communities, user groups are started by people who are passionate about what they do. If they are self-funded and targeted at solely supporting their community members i.e. the user group community provides value to it’s members in terms of sessions, networking, solutions for its members problems etc. Then it’s stakeholders(members) who benefit from these activities need to help it run. However, if you’re like most community leaders who’re trying to do more, you need to question what value your community is providing to the company who will potentially sponsor your activities. Most community leaders don’t provide these hard numbers and hence are left hunting around for sponsors for their key events and activities. So if you’re a leader stuck in the above described boat. It might be time to focus some efforts on gathering the hard data which prove beyond doubt the value you’re providing.

Next Steps: To value your community brand advocate program.

1. Create a table mapping activities which your community does, to the business objectives your community is helping you achieve.

2. Align your business goals by utilizing the R.I.D.E. framework for building a brand advocate program

3. Do a cost benefit analysis on a regular basis to ensure corporate support for your programs.

I’d especially like to thank Nestor Portillo from Microsoft, for openly sharing his wonderful presentation which helped provide useful pointers for this article.

Your Turn: Have you successfully been able to measure the ROI of your community or brand advocacy programs? What other activities have you measured? Lets carry on the conversation in the comments below.

Posted in Brand Advocate, Business Objective, Community, ROI | Tagged Advocates, Brand Advocacy, Brand Advocates, Communities, Evaluate, User Group, Value | Leave a comment

The IBM CMO Study: Strengthened Visually

Posted on January 23, 2012 by SanjayShetty

While I read the report, or rather re-read it, I realised some of the data could be better explained and hence this visualization. It’s only when I went thru this exercise of visualization, I realized that there are some areas which they need to highlight much more, well at least according to me, and I feel that’s the crucial part. More on that down below.

IBM CMO Study(From Stretched to Strengthened: Insights from the Global Chief Marketing Officers Study). Firstly it’s a good report, however, I doubt most will be able to leverage it. Note: I think it’s a good report, however, it has so much valuable insight – 72 pages, that consuming this report effectively is going to be a challenge for most individuals and hence organizations.

The Empowered Customer

The report begins by clearly identifying that today we’re dealing with an Empowered Customer and she seriously affects traditional marketing.

The empowered customer today has the ability to shop around the world.

The empowered customer can easily search and find information about companies their products and services.

Empowered customers can easily share their views with hundreds and thousands of other people and customers.

Empowered customers can literally make or break a brand overnight.

There you have it all four factors of today’s empowered consumers.

Can you list at least five different ways this affects your business? Or five things which you should be doing? (drop a comment I’d love to hear.)

Four Pervasive, Universal Game-Changers

Most CMO’s acknowledge the above four factors are huge game-changers and dealing with the above is challenging.

Data Explosion – YouTube’s 490 million users upload more video content in a 60-day period than the three major U.S. television networks created in 60 years. (Source : Elliott, Amy-Mae. “10 Fascinating YouTube Facts That May Surprise You.” Mashable. February 19, 2011. http://mashable.com/2011/02/19/youtube-facts/)

Read that again, could you possibly imagine the implication when it comes to much simpler to produce textual information, just like this blog post

Social Media - digital data sources can provide crucial insights into how
customers and influencers think and behave.

Devices – Social media, and the growing number of channels and devices from which customers can choose, come a close second and third in terms of the anxiety they generate.

Shifting Consumer Demographics – Sixty-three percent believe shifting consumer demographics will have a significant impact on their marketing
functions. However, only 37 percent feel substantially or fully prepared to deal with the shift.

But to scale this effectively,organizations need to consider building fundamentally different relationships. They need to enable employees to engage with customers and provide customers and other constituents the ability to help one another.

What are the top successful CMO’s focussing on?

The most proactive CMOs are trying to understand individuals as well as markets.

Engaging with customers is not just about communicating with them. It’s also about helping them enjoy the products and services they’ve bought, and collaborating with them to co-create new products and services.

This is not for the faint hearted, there are lot of things one needs to do, to get to this stage, you’re literally talking about leading your entire organization to engage with customers. You need the entire c-suite behind this effort.

Many organizations have a clearly defined corporate character but still need to work on instilling that character in the workforce.

Cultural change and imbibing character is one of the biggest challenges for organizations. Creating and fostering internal advocates and communities is key to enable a cultural change.

Key challenge faced by all? ROI

CMOs recognize they now need to quantify the value they bring to the business, be it from investing in advertising, new technologies or any other activity. Nearly two-thirds of CMOs think return on
marketing investment will be the primary measure of their effectiveness by 2015. But proving that value is difficult. Even among the most successful enterprises, half of all CMOs feel insufficiently prepared to provide hard numbers.

Roadblocks? What’s preventing CMOs from using new tools? Building the business case, IT issues and lack of technology skills in the marketing function.

I feel lack of a coherent enterprise wide strategy driven by clear business objectives is the biggest roadblock. An enterprise wide ecosystem needs to be established. Marketing alone can’t take this forward, the entire organization needs to adapt, across customer support, to R & D…

Final words for you the reader and the report creators at IBM

You can’t do it alone: I feel one element needs to be highlighted much more to organizations. No matter how many resources you mobilize internally it will fall short. You need to build an ecosystem consisting of advocates(empowered customers), partners, communities and consultants. You need to adopt frameworks and think hard about the cultural impact which will occur and are needed within your organization.

Ok now for the IBM’ers, firstly awesome report, totally love the content, but I’m sure you can make it simpler to understand, absorb and adopt, infact I’d suggest to make a video. Or maybe its just me, who is suffering from this phenomenal data, nay, insights load. If you need help contact http://vizcraft.wordpress.com Totally Shameless Plug

Now for you the reader… If you’ve enjoyed the post and nodded along or not, the comments section below is really waiting for someone to break the ice… be among the first five to do so, and I promise a fun 30 minute Skype chat to discuss the above ideas and any questions you have. And pretty please, if you like this, share away and that will make my time composing this post fruitful also don’t forget to thank the good guys at IBM here and on their LinkedIn Group.

P.S. You might also like to read our latest report. An exclusive peak into how Microsoft leverages Brand Advocates and builds lasting relationships with empowered customers. $1000 value report for free:

“Microsoft: 20 Brand Advocate Lessons” Learn about it here!

Posted in Advocate, Brand Advocate, Enterprise, Research, ROI, Social Media | Tagged Chief Marketing Officer, CMO, IBM, Marketing, Research, Study, Visually | 6 Comments