How to leverage social media to market your business. |
With money tight these days, businesses need to find new ways to market themselves without spending a lot. Online brand evangelism is one way to advertise your products, and it costs little or nothing. |
Brand evangelism is a word-of-mouth marketing tactic in which the ardent supporters of your service or product feel so passionately about your offerings that they act as unofficial spokespeople on your company’s behalf. |
By reading the conversations–the blog posts, the forum discussions, the tweets and the other public dialogues–that relate to your brand, you can find out who feels strongly about your company and product, you can assess who might have a neutral stance toward your service, and you can gather information about those who dislike your current offerings. |
Spotting your brand ambassadors should not be too hard. If you have a Facebook Fan page, look at what people are saying. Subscribe to service-specific alerts (e.g., get Twitter mentions of your brand via RSS or e-mail) or use a service like Backtype to see comments across blogs and other social media sites, such as FriendFeed. Google Alerts can also help you dig into the wider search space and may help you spot mentions of your company that may not otherwise be caught by other services. |
Once you gather these sources, contact the people who can’t stop singing your praises. (By the same token, you should also contact those who don’t like you and try to determine what is pushing them away.) Gather your fan’s user names or contact information. You’ll need this to proceed. |
Now you know who your brand loyalists are. Offer them benefits, such as free products, samples or gifts, that will prompt them to continue singing your praises. Sure, they might do this by themselves anyway, but embracing your supporters can keep them promoting you for much longer. |
| You can also provide your supporters with inside information, such as upcoming product lines or new services. But remember, you might need to issue non-disclosure agreements for such information. |
| It is also important to ensure that your brand evangelists are completely transparent and open about their involvement with your business. Full disclosure of their representation as it relates to specific perks is important. This is especially true as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission plans to police sponsored conversations, and brand evangelism programs fall under the jurisdiction of sponsored content. |
As for your detractors, take them under your wing as well. These people feel strongly about something associated with your company, so you should reach out to them and discuss their issues. Giving these people a voice and letting them know that you value their opinions can turn around their perception of your business. What do you have to lose? It’s amazing what talking to people can do. Could you turn these people into brand ambassadors? Maybe. |
Ultimately, there will be overhead “costs,” such as monitoring how your evangelists represent your brand. In some instances, depending on the type of role you want your evangelists to play, it may be necessary to provide training about your brand’s practices and culture so that your evangelists don’t come across as clueless people being paid to promote you. |
Therefore, you may want to have someone from your company act as a point of contact for your brand ambassador program. This task can be delegated to a community manager who corresponds directly with the evangelists and distributes special perks. The community manager should also keep an eye on the blog posts and other comments from your evangelists. Internally, the overhead is minimal because your “marketing” team has just been outsourced, clearing your company’s paid marketing team to work on more exciting projects. |
A possible downside to brand evangelism is the folks who think the practice is questionable and deceptive. While this holds true for sponsored programs, only a small minority of individuals have questioned such practices, and you likely will end up seeing returns on your investment despite this small bump. And taking your biggest supporters under your wing may instill such loyalty that they come to your aid in the future when a problem arises. |
Does brand evangelism really work? In 2007, Royal Caribbean
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) ran a campaign called Royal Champions, inviting 50 of its most vocal and ardent supporters on cruises and to face-to-face meetings with company executives. This campaign sparked higher levels of word-of-mouth marketing from influential community members, and Royal Caribbean deemed it a success. |
If you are looking for a fun way to empower your customers and encourage positive discourse, brand evangelism programs are a great way to promote your brand. Give your customers a voice in the communities where they already have influence. There isn’t much to lose and a whole lot to gain. |
Tamar Weinberg is a writer and Internet marketing consultant specializing in blogger outreach, viral marketing and social media. She is the author of The New Community Rules (O’Reilly). She maintains a personal blog about all things social media at www.techipedia.com. She is based in New York City.
Read more at www.forbes.com |
| Do you own a small business? Are you having a hard time understanding Twitter? |
As a small business owner and social media user going on two years now, I can honestly say that initially I did not really see the point or power of Twitter at all. |
However, after sticking it out passed the learning curve, picking up a couple of followers, and following really intelligent people, thanks to Twitter, I get to make connections and learn something new every day. In fact, at this point I feel like Twitter is a tool that all small business owners should use as part of their overall efforts to build a distributed social media footprint. |
Nevertheless, if you are like many in the small business community who have tried Twitter without success, then you might be fond of saying, “I just don’t get it.” |
For numerous small business owners (including myself at one point in time) who are new to Twitter, and social media in general, there appears to be a common misconception that as soon as you sign up customers are going to fall from the sky in droves and you will immediately be inundated with more business than you can handle. |
Small Business Twitter Frustration
Amongst the business people that I discuss Twitter with there appear to be two types of discouraged small venture owners who give up on Twitter at rapid rate. |
Frustrated business owner number one feels like Twitter is analogous to entering a large cocktail party or hotel lobby where she doesn’t know a single soul. Yet, conversations are happening all around her and rather than trying to ease into the discussion, she gives up without talking to anybody because the sheer numbers are overwhelming. |
Disgruntled Twitter quitter number two is the complete opposite of number one. He will get on Twitter, see all of the conversations going on, and assume it is the customer “candy store.” This leads to the sending out of many spammy messages, which spew forth details about his great products and prices. He will typically stop using Twitter when to his surprise nobody follows him back and he doesn’t receive one @ reply. |
Twitter Tips to Help Small Business Owners
Recently, a friend asked me to help him with that “Twitter thing” because he wants more customers for his niche jewelry business. |
After our very long discussion and Twitter run through, I thought that perhaps there might be other business owners out there who are beginners on Twitter and could use some help. Here are the 20 tips that I passed on to my friend: |
| Twitter is first and foremost a place to connect, learn, and listen. |
| Define your goals if you have any (e.g. business promotion, socializing, etc). |
| If you’re confused about where to begin on Twitter, but are interested in learning, take a look at the previously done Twitip post that highlights key people for beginners to follow. |
| Twitter allows you to interact with individuals who you might not normally come into contact with. If you want to interact with a celebrity or a person with a huge following then send a simple @ message or comment on something they are doing. If you get a response you can then take it from there. |
| Don’t be offended if folks don’t follow you back. It’s not personal. (Even if it is, it doesn’t really matter.) |
| Use a photo of yourself or your business logo in you profile. |
| If you’re interested in connecting with someone you might want to try ReTweeting some of their messages before you introduce yourself. |
| It’s probably going to take a good 3 to 6 months to get a following. |
| Find out who the influencers are in your industry and see if they are on Twitter. If they are, follow them. |
| Always follow Jeff Pulver’s rule of giving 95% of the time and asking only 5% of the time. |
| Utilize a Twitter photo-sharing site like TwitPic or Yfrog to share cool photos from your typical business day, or while plying your craft, so that people get to know you. It helps to build social trust. |
| Use Twitter Search with keywords to find information and conversations that are relevant to your business. It’s also a good way to find out if anyone is talking about you or your company. |
| If you are not part of a particular conversation that concerns your area of business, but you would like to participate, approach with caution. |
| If you are sending DM’s to your followers with something related to your business, make sure to use your social capital wisely. Overwhelming folks with DM’s can result in a rapid loss of followers |
| Don’t Tweet anything that you would not want to see on the front page of a newspaper or wildly famous website. |
| Do interact and connect and don’t hesitate to @ message folks who have 10x or 100x the number of followers you have. |
| Employ sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit to find, and share amongst your followers, interesting stories from your particular area of business. |
| Create connections don’t spam. You most likely would not just walk into a crowded venue where you don’t know anyone and say, “Hi my name is Bob and I replace window screens and have great prices.” This method does not work very well on Twitter. (Should be a given but you still see it every day!) |
| Twitter is only one area online where you can begin to build a distributed social media footprint for your business. Do NOT rely solely on Twitter as your social media business promotion tool. |
| It takes a long time to build up a following and develop trust, but it only takes one Tweet to alienate every one of your followers. |
To be sure, on a daily basis we are all trying to figure how best to utilize Twitter effectively as a small business tool. Certainly, this is not a be all end all list, so your thoughts and input on how small business can better tap into Twitter are appreciated. Read more at www.twitip.com |
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24% of Tweets are created by automated bots, not humans, according to a recent study. Meanwhile, it was found that 5% of Twitter accounts generate 75% of Tweets.
