Here is one of the handouts we gave to attended at the Sauder eMarketronics trade show at Robson Square on the 6th of October.
Why are we doing this and how is it done?
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Social Media – An Exciting Way to Create Brand Evangelists
Social media in the world is influencing more businesses today. Consumers are becoming more empowered through the use of blogs, forums and communities as these mediums of communication are being harnessed to their benefit. Consumers are using this social media to speak about corporations large and small, and this represents a significant opportunity for business.
What do customer evangelists look like and what do they do?
They:
- Passionately recommend you to friends, neighbours and colleagues
- Provide unsolicited feedback or praise
- Forgive dips in service and quality
- Are not bought; they extol your virtues freely
- Feel part of something bigger than themselves
Why are brand evangelists important to your company?
Think of a pyramid: at the bottom, people speak about your brand, the middle represents immediate outcomes that come form listening to them and the top completes the process in the form of financial benefit to the firm.
Pyramid – Bottom
-Are you listening? As stated, consumers will speak about your brand, in both positive and negative ways. Herein lies an opportunity to effectively listen and manage the conversation. Engage thoughtfully…
Pyramid – Middle
- How can you turn these conversations into new activity? Aligning corporate interests with desired consumer outcomes could lead to increased consumption, new and repeat customers and business referrals. It also allows companies to take a stringent look at operations and achieve synergies.
Pyramid – Top
- Listening to customers can lead to innovative product and service improvements, which ultimately lead to financial gain – top line sales, increased profit or an enhanced cost structure.
How do you identify Brand Evangelists and make harness their
energy?- The first step to identifying who is speaking about your brand is to begin a brand monitoring system. There are people who love your brand – diligent search will uncover their thoughts and feelings. Search communities, forums and blogs to assess the degree in which people are talking, manage it by using existing social media or by creating it yourself. The choice depends on your firm’s product/service, marketing strategy and obviously what capital you intend to allocate. Either way, if you decide that social media speak is a strategy for your company there will be costs to train employees or executives, which can be expensive.
Next, how can you energize these individuals or groups to take their game to the next level? Provide these evangelists with some autonomy and incentives, although it is recommended that monetary rewards are not primary. Evangelists don’t require money; they long for attachment, the opportunity to influence product and service development and more than anything – referent power as being a part of the organization. Evangelists carry a lot of information about your organization and many of those want to give back – they want to help others see the true benefits of your company.
Finally, Empowering evangelists can take your company to the next level. An example of true empowerment comes from LUGNET, the Lego User Group Network. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, two researchers at Forrester Research, unveil the power that these users have on Lego in their book, groundswell – winning in a world transformed by social technologies. It turns out that adult Lego fans purchase nearly $10 million in Lego product per year and evangelists of the product have a significant role in that sales attainment. Adult Lego fans from all around the world vie for 25 prestigious ambassador roles, where they consult regarding product development and provide the many other fans with information surrounding the product. Lego has acknowledged that fans speak about their highly differentiated product, which draws an inherently unique fan base and great potential to harness their collective energy.
Using social technologies isn’t for every company. Risks and benefits accompany an online presence and it must fit into marketing and corporate strategies – with a long-term goal in mind. Social communities are no fly-by-night process, but will only become more intricate with each passing day. If your target market is under thirty, you need to have some sort of presence online as most of your customers are already there. Finally, senior executives must see the value in this initiative and support the process through to the end. Again, patience is the overriding theme that will allow you to understand what people are saying about your company and guides the decision to capitalize on evangelist thought.
Here is a post that Mark Holder, a colleague in my group, made regarding the project:
Social Media… an exciting way to create Brand Evangelists!
evangelist |i_vanj_list|
noun
1 a person who seeks to convert others to the Christian faith, esp. by public preaching.
• a layperson engaged in Christian missionary work.
• a zealous advocate of something : he is an evangelist of junk bonds.
2 the writer of one of the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John) : St. John the Evangelist.
What is an evangelist you ask? Well, the dictionary that comes pre-loaded on a Mac defines it as “a zealous advocate of something”, as you can see above. Okay, so what is a brand evangelist? Naturally, this would be an extension of an evangelist…an individual that is a zealous advocate of a particular brand, say Nike for example.
So why the need to find these brand evangelists, what can they offer a particular brand? Probably one of the biggest reasons to have brand evangelists is the word-of-mouth opportunity that exists. Brand evangelists will go out of their way to spread the word (positive) of a particular brand the individual feels strongly about. The online community is filled with stories of consumers bad mouthing companies for a number of reasons. The reason, or reasons, a lot of times doesn’t matter, the fact that a brand is associated with negativity and bad publicity is a serious situation. These messages can spread very quickly throughout the digital world, which means companies must be prepared to react quickly to combat these “fallen angels” and these bad messages. So obviously it is better to have consumers spreading positive messages about a particular brand, but how else can brand evangelists make a difference? The opportunity for repeat purchases by these brand evangelists is important; gaining new customers because of the positive messages brand evangelists spread to other consumers is important; and the potential to harness new, innovative ideas is also very important. All of these things collectively help a brand to achieve increases in brand awareness, brand recall, brand equity, and ultimately increased sales and profits.
This post will look at a number of issues relating to identifying, energizing, and empowering brand evangelists. Consider this introduction the “what” of the topic; next will be a discussion of the “who”, the “why”, and the “how”, followed by some real-world examples of companies that have harnessed (and attempted to harness) the power of brand evangelists (online), and a short discussion of some research our team conducted on the topic of brand evangelism.
Who are Brand Evangelists? What are their characteristics?
Brand evangelism is not a new phenomenon; it has recently started becoming more popular, arguably to “buzzword” status. An e-book written by Ben Connell and Jackie Huba in 2004 entitled Testify! How Remarkable Organizations are Creating Customer Evangelists does a great job in summing up exactly what a brand evangelist is. Connell and Huba define brand evangelists as being “volunteers for your marketing and sales departments”. Brand evangelists can have a dramatic effect, and generally at no costs to the organization. The authors also define the difference between brand loyals and brand evangelists; a brand loyal (customer who purchases from a brand on a regular basis) may buy from a particular company for reasons of convenience or price, but this customer isn’t necessarily spreading the word to others about your brand. A brand evangelist does spread the word.
Connell and Huba define brand evangelists based on what they do. According to the authors:
- They purchase and believe in your product or service
- They passionately recommend you to friends, neighbours, colleagues
- They purchase your products as gifts to others
- They provide unsolicited feedback or praise
- They forgive dips in service and quality
- They are not bought; they extol your virtues freely
- They feel part of something bigger than themselves
It seems unfathomable for a situation to exist where a brand wouldn’t want customers to show any of the above characteristics of brand evangelists. Keep reading to learn how you can identify, energize, and empower brand evangelists for your brand.
How about survey results: Another colleague, Nick Weichsler, conducted an online survey on behalf of the group - the following outlines the results.
e-vangelist Survey Results
To get a better understanding about what turns a customer into an evangelist for a brand, product or service, we decided to do an online survey within our social media and business networks.Using Surveymonkey.com, we generated four questions about customer evangelism, and some further ones to obtain demographic information:
1. What in your opinion turns customers into evangelists for a brand, product or service?
2. What brands, products or services are you an evangelist for (please list up to five, give a short description if the item is not commonly known)?
3. Do you frequently visit websites of these companies?
4. If yes, do you create, read or react (blog, forum, community and discussion posts) to content?
5. What's your gender?
6. What's your nationality?
7. Which country are you living in currently?
8. What's your age?
In total, the survey yielded 106 valid responses by the deadline we had set for harvesting the results (72 hours after putting it online).
Two thirds of our respondents were male, one third female. We had mainly respondents from Canada, followed by Germany, the US and the UK.
Most respondents regarded quality levels, service levels and trust as the most important things to inspire customer evangelism. The least important aspect according to our results were promotional activities and reward programs.
The most often mentioned brand was Apple, followed by Nike, Nokia, Google and Toyota (among all responses).
Among first responses (i.e., top of mind), the most mentioned brands were Apple, Nike, Nokia, Audi and IBM.
The segment with most responses was Electronics, followed by Food and Drink and Apparel (out of all responses).
However, regarding top of mind, the strongest segment was Electronics, followed by Food and Drink and Automotive. So these are segments people are thinking of more naturally when they're considering which brands they're evangelistic for.
Interestingly, there were strong divergences in the top 10 with regards to the ranking of segments, and even segments included in the top 10. Apparently, most people that considered themselves as recommending apparel to their peers, only thought of this after some thinking.
Surprisingly, 53% of respondents don't visit the websites frequently of the brands they endorse.
In total, 68 people mentioned that they don't generate content on the websites (however, this number includes the ones that don't visit websites at all. The respondents that generated content are almost equally distributed among the possibilities offered, but never above 10 responses.
It can be concluded that there is still a huge, untapped potential for customer evangelism even among our group's peers, which can be considered a sample of literate and heavy internet users.
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