10. The Rise of Customer Advocacy
President Obama was elected in 2008 because he knew how to create and mobilize advocates. Through authentic community engagement, he was also able to raise half a billion dollars online in his 21-month campaign for the White House, dramatically ushering in a new digital era in presidential fundraising and advocacy.
In 2008, the Washington Post provided insight into Obama’s online operation based on the numbers: Three million supporters made a total of 6.5 million donations online, adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. The average online donation was $80, and the average Obama supporter gave more than once.
More than 13 million people provided their email addresses to the “Obama for America” campaign site and opted in to receive email messages about campaign news and events. They also created more than 2 million user profiles, wrote more than 400,000 blog posts, hosted more than 200,000 events, and established more than 45,000 volunteer groups throughout the United States. And just before Election Day, Obama supporters made more than 3 million phone calls to citizens advocating his election.
The number of Obama’s Facebook fans or Twitter followers is irrelevant in this example. It wasn’t the quantity or size of Obama’s online community that helped him get elected. One of the primary reasons Obama was elected was his ability to inspire action. His supporters believed in his vision. They trusted in the “Change we can believe in” positioning statement. His supporters rallied behind him and told their friends, followers, co-workers, family members, and neighbors—and even called strangers every day for months to share his vision for the country. The volume of online conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and the entire social web sparked a groundswell of supporters for his vision. And the end result of this level of advocacy, on November 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States.
This is a valuable lesson and case study for business.
Most companies, products, and brands have advocates. An advocate is a person who loves or believes in something so much that he or she tells anyone and everyone about it. Advocates are influential and passionate, and they talk about the brands they care about even if no one is listening.
Advocates also play these roles:
• The brand’s most satisfied customers
• Trusted sources of information
• Promoters and defenders of the brand
The term influencer is often used synonymously with advocate, but there is definitely a difference between the two. Advocates provoke action because of the level of trust they have with their circles of influence. They are trusted because they are authentic, and people trust their friends when seeking product advice. Advocates also play a significant role in consumers’ purchasing behavior and are always willing to go the extra mile to answer questions about the brand or product. Companies need to think long term about creating programs specifically designed for their advocates.
An important distinction needs to be made here. The mere action of becoming a friend or fan and then following or just liking a brand inspires action. Imagine for a minute how a brand could put just a little effort in harnessing those potential relationships and invest in time, resources, energy, and creativity to build a program focusing on this relationship. Advocates are everywhere—they’re dormant and just waiting to be activated.
The Difference Between Influencers and Advocates
Many companies don’t understand the difference between an influencer and an advocate. Although some advocates can surely be influencers, not all influencers are advocates.
An influencer is someone with significant social capital—that is, influencers have a sizable audience on the social web. Many bloggers, analysts, and journalists are considered influencers because of their level of influence over the community reading their content. Many organizations create influencer outreach programs in an effort to reach an influencer’s community by offering up products before they hit the market or giving the influencer insight into a product road-map. The relationship between a brand and its influencers is usually built upon incentives—for example, a brand sends an influencer an early model of a pre-released product, and the influencer writes about it on his or her blog.
Influencers may not necessarily care about the long-term health of the brands that consistently reach out to them to pitch a product. Instead, influencers generally have their own agendas, and the brand doesn’t usually play a significant role. Influencers might have a short-term crush on a particular product or find it useful in some way, but they’re being pitched all the time by companies looking to get some level of coverage. They certainly enjoy receiving free trials and new products before everyone else, and they’ll very rarely say no when a company wants to send them a new shiny object.
The reality is, there are no guarantees when dealing with influencers. This situation is similar to working in media relations. Public relations teams pitch stories to journalists day after day; nine times out of ten, they get little to no results.
For influencers to stay influential within their community, they need to remain impartial to brands. Because they’re often journalists, analysts, or bloggers, their readers expect them to stay above the marketing fray—or suffer the consequences of selling out to corporate America. The untold reality of many influencer outreach programs is that when a company stops sending influencers the latest products or stops flying them to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) or other industry events, the conversation stops. Then the already infrequent tweets completely disappear, and the influencers might even criticize the brand because their ego was somehow compromised. With many influencer outreach programs, companies are merely renting the conversation, and the conversation isn’t always authentic. If it was, companies wouldn’t have to keep sending influencers new products to keep the conversation alive.
Advocates Love the Brand and Tell Others About It
Reciprocal altruism, as defined by Steve Knox, CEO of Proctor & Gamble’s word-of-mouth division Tremor, is “[giving] to someone without any expectation of getting something in return.”
This is a powerful statement that’s not too common in business today. Companies need to adopt this thinking if they truly want to tap into the power of advocacy and create a groundswell of loyal and vocal customers. If they can take off their direct marketing hats and spend time valuing their customers, their customers will value them back—and they won’t be afraid to tell others about it, either. Tapping into the emotional equity of customers will result in a long-term (and possibly profitable) relationship with them.
Advocates will still love the brand even when engaging in a one-sided conversation. Advocates will continue to praise the brand when it seems like the company isn’t listening or responding to tweets or blog posts. They love the way a brand makes them feel, or look, or they like the value it brings to their lives. They may even love the brand because it feeds their own egos or makes a fashion statement. Whatever the reason, advocates are vocal, passionate, and unafraid to praise the brand (both online and offline). In some cases, advocates even defend the brand against criticism and negative feedback. And even though they might not have hundreds of Twitter followers, Facebook fans, or RSS subscribers, the conversation with advocates about the brand is always authentic. Why? Because they’re being real and aren’t trying to impress anyone.
Advocates can even serve as a powerful “virtual” sales force for any company—bringing in new customers; generating referrals; and spreading positive word of mouth on Facebook, Twitter, shopping sites, review sites, and more. Even better, this is all done merely through authentic conversations. As mentioned throughout this book, trust is key when making purchasing decisions. Consumers have a low level of trust in marketing communications, advertising, and corporate website content. They do trust people like themselves. Several credible resources, including the Edelman Trust Barometer and Forrester Research, have validated this numerous times.
The reality is that every company makes claims about the benefits of its product and services. But these claims become more meaningful and believable when existing customers are the ones saying it.
When a company can tap into advocacy, empower advocates to tell their stories, and then amplify those stories, the overall impact for business can be great for sales, awareness, or simply the brand story. Nothing differentiates a company from its competitors more than positive customer reviews. Reviews can simply be conversations on Facebook and Twitter or official product reviews on third-party commerce websites such as Amazon. The competitive landscape is growing, and new products are coming to market everyday. No one can relate that message of product differentiation better than a company’s existing customers.
Smart companies are tapping into the collective intelligence of their advocates and innovating their product offerings. Dell, Starbucks, and Lego are doing this successfully and changing the customer experience for millions of people. In doing so, they’re also strengthening their bond with their advocates.
Measuring the Reach of Influencers and Advocates
When comparing one influencer to one advocate, the result is clear: Influencers reach more people with their messages. When an influencer speaks, his or her voice travels far across the Internet, through a series of retweets, Facebook shares, or blog posts.
Advocates, on the other hand, are just as influential, even though they don’t have the same size community or the same reach that an influencer has. In a one-to-one comparison, the advocate loses the battle against the influencer, but this changes if a brand can create customer advocacy and make it the core of a social media marketing strategy. When a company can create an advocate program that taps into the emotions of their customers and empowers them to share their stories across the social web, the aggregate reach of all these conversations becomes exponential.
Companies should not completely ignore influencers, because they can certainly provide value. Influencers can play an important role in any social strategy when it comes to events, product launches, or quick coverage on an important initiative.
On the other hand, advocates provide much more business value because through their natural conversations, they are aiding and influencing their micro communities down and through the purchase funnel.
The “Advocate” Purchase Funnel
The traditional purchase funnel, described in Chapter 6, “Establishing a Measurement Philosophy,” consists of five phases: awareness, consideration, preference, purchase, and advocacy. For years, marketers have spent millions of dollars and countless hours trying to understand which marketing tactics are the most effective at each phase of the funnel. They also spend time testing and hypothesizing about what type of messaging or advertising copy drives purchases within these phases. The traditional sales funnel is still important for marketers to understand and measure, but companies need to shift their focus to consider their advocates.
From an advocacy perspective, the purchase funnel is changing. It’s no longer a funnel, coupled with a linear process of consumer buying patterns. Figure 10.1 illustrates that the advocate purchase funnel is more cyclical in nature; advocates are in the center, aiding and influencing their friends down the purchase funnel through natural conversations.
Figure 10.1 Advocates are at the center of the purchase, aiding and influencing their circles of influence with purchase decisions.
The advocate purchase funnel is important for many reasons. First, trust is key when making purchasing decisions. A 2009 Forrester Research study titled “How Customer Experience Drives Word of Mouth” found that 94 percent of consumers trust their friends when asking for product advice. This is compared to 34 percent for search engines, 28 percent for direct email, 18 percent for personal blogs, 18 percent for display advertising, and 16 percent for corporate blogs. Consumers commonly ask their friends for advice before they make any purchasing decisions.
Furthermore, people are more likely to recommend a brand or product after becoming a Facebook fan or Twitter follower, according to Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies. Their 2010 study titled “Consumers Engaged Via Social Media Are More Likely to Buy, Recommend” found that 60 percent of Facebook fans and 79 percent of Twitter followers were more likely to recommend those brands after becoming a fan or follower. In addition, an impressive 51 percent of Facebook fans and 67 percent of Twitter followers were more likely to buy the brands they followed or were a fan of.
The result of this data is clear: Advocates buy more when there is a mutually beneficial relationship with the brand, and that relationship usually exists on Facebook, Twitter, or both. And because advocates are trusted, they are influencing their own micro communities to buy as well. So in this scenario, it’s a win–win for the consumer and the brand.
That said, companies need to focus on creating an advocacy program because that’s what is going to get them “elected into office.” Before they do so, however, they need to understand how consumers become advocates.
The Various Segments of Customer Advocacy
Similar to Forrester’s Social Technographics Ladder of Participation, whereby consumers are segmented by social media usage and behavior, Zuberance, a company that specializes in identifying and empowering a brand’s advocates, has classified advocates into similar groups:
• General consumers—Regularly read product reviews or stories, listen to podcasts, and read and engage in online forums.
• Sharers—Share their owns reviews (or reviews written by others), offers, videos, whitepapers, and event invitations; retweet “brand” tweets; and add tags to content such as photos and videos.
• Creators—Create their own reviews or stories, publish a blog, respond to other blogs and leave comments, actively tweet, and contribute to an online forum.
• Power advocates—Actively engage in the same behavior as the other segments, but also influence new customers down the purchase funnel through conversations, help organize events for the brand, give new ideas and offer feedback to the brand, and actively participate in formal customer advocacy groups.
Consumers follow a natural progression as they evolve from one type of advocate to the next. That is, as they interact and engage more with the brand (and establish a level of trust), they move from general consumers up the ladder to become sharers, creators, and then power advocates. This journey can be accelerated when a company opts to pay attention to customers and create formal advocacy programs.
How to Create a Customer Advocacy Program
Advocates congregate all over the Internet. They spend their time on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, and other, smaller community sites. Before a company can find these advocates for its brand, it must be ready to scale its programs internally (budget, management, and a formalized documentation on how the program will function). Additionally, companies must ensure that the entire organization is fully vested in the program and ready to support it at all levels. When the program is in place, companies also need to be prepared to take action; merely listening and engaging with advocates isn’t enough.
Organizational Readiness
Companies must not only commit to an advocacy program, but must also be ready to scale internally. Scale implies that organizations need to be prepared to allocate time, human capital, and budget to ensure the program has the right resources to grow. When a company has a large customer base, its programs will grow naturally over time, so it’s important to have a plan of action that’s supported by its company leaders. In many organizations, the marketing teams take “ownership” of customer advocacy programs and make them a part of the broader social media strategy. However, this requires tight collaboration with IT, customer support, and various product organizations.
Additionally, marketing also owns the advocate outreach and should develop a program that engages the advocates with fresh, relevant content. If applicable, IT must support the web infrastructure, assuming that the advocates will be invited to participate in an online branded community. The product groups will be involved if the advocacy program is centered on a specific product (such as Photoshop) instead of the corporate brand (such as Adobe).
Organizational readiness is the key in scaling a program such as this. Marketing, PR, legal, IT, customer support, and product groups all need to be involved when developing such programs. They should be a part of the planning process from the beginning and should also be key decision makers for issues that relate to their respective areas of responsibility. An effective advocacy program can have a positive impact on the entire organization through product innovation, feedback for customer support, word of mouth, and so on.
After a company allocates its budget, puts a team in place to manage a program, and secures complete support from the organization, it can take the next step in finding its advocates.
Finding the Right Advocates
The next step in developing an advocacy program is to find the right advocates for the program. Only a few technologies can help companies achieve this. Simply Measured is a startup that builds social media measurement and reporting tools. Two products can help businesses of all sizes find advocates on Twitter and Facebook: RowFeeder and Export.ly.
RowFeeder performs keyword-based monitoring. It can track relevant topics, brand names, and trends, and create reports in Excel. It then can identify the most active participants and the most influential participants in any conversation relevant to the organization. By tracking a range of conversations over time, companies can build up deep knowledge about advocates that they can use to craft personal outreach.
Whereas RowFeeder provides a broad view of conversations, Export.ly narrows the scope. Export.ly exports and analyzes any Twitter account or Facebook fan page. This is useful in finding advocates within a company’s owned media channels. Export.ly peels back the layers to learn about the audience, how influential they are, and how and when they are engaging.
Social media listening software, discussed in Chapter 2, “Surveying the Technology Supermarket,” can also help find advocates beyond just Facebook and Twitter. By adding relevant brand- or industry-related search queries, most of these tools can find and report on the conversations happening around the web.
After collecting data and identifying advocates, companies have to determine the specifics of the program. Some companies invite advocates to private Facebook pages where they solicit their feedback, give advocates special offers or discounts, or offer advocates early exposure to new products. Other companies leverage LinkedIn and white-label community platforms such as Jive or Lithium.
Choosing the Right Advocate Platform
The last step is to find a platform that allows the company to communicate with its advocates and also allows the advocates to communicate with each other. Some companies create password-protected private communities where discussions are facilitated and managed. Other companies use existing platforms such as private LinkedIn groups and Facebook groups. In either case, it’s imperative that these communities stay actively engaged with fresh content and discussion, to ensure active participation from the advocates. Examples can include weekly or monthly round-table discussions, feedback sessions, recognition programs, badges, and so on.
It’s also important to give advocates insight into the business operations, provide product roadmaps, and extend invitations to events and to the corporate headquarters, provided that the advocates have signed a nondisclosure agreement (NDA). This level of engagement solidifies a long-term relationship between a brand and its advocates because the advocates feel valued. Chapter 1, “Human Capital, Evolved,” highlighted a study that showed that 79 percent of consumers expect a brand to engage in social media. This level of engagement not only meets expectations, but exceeds them.
It’s important to choose wisely when selecting a platform for an advocacy program—it’s not easy to switch once the community is active and engaged. The advantage of creating a private community using a platform such as Jive is that it can be customized with widgets and badges, to essentially match the look and feel of the company brand identity. The disadvantage is that startup costs, development work, and monthly hosting fees add up. The alternative is to leverage existing platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn groups, to build advocacy programs. The advantage of this approach is that it’s a free solution, most people are already comfortable with the platform, and it wouldn’t require people to create yet another profile. The disadvantage is that a company cannot customize anything and is essentially at the mercy of a third party.
Some companies are jumping into advocacy programs—not only finding advocates and inviting them to private communities, but also empowering them to share offers with their friends, write reviews, and tell their brand story to others through Facebook, Twitter, or social media platforms such as Zuberance.
Zuberance is one of the only hosted social marketing platforms available that enables companies to identify advocates, mobilize them to share content, and track metrics in real time (see Figure 10.2).
Figure 10.2 The Zuberance user flow finds and mobilizes brand advocates to write reviews and share stories, and then tracks the program in real time.
Zuberance has a three-step process for advocate programs that includes identification, mobilization, and sharing.
Advocate identification involves using a company’s owned media properties, such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, corporate website, and email database, to reach out to existing friends, fans, followers, and customers. Through a series of calls to action (using a banner advertisement on the corporate site, direct email, or a link in a Facebook status update) that simply says, “Hey, we want to hear from you!” or “Your feedback is valuable to us!”, companies can find and segment their advocates. The call to action can be accompanied by a link to a branded page that asks the following question: “How likely are you to recommend my product?”
Similar to the Net Promoter Score management tool that’s used to measure the loyalty of a company’s customer relationships, users can choose between 0 and 10 to determine the next step in the flow. Consumers who choose 0–6 are considered detractors. Their feedback might not be exactly what a company wants to hear, but it’s just as valuable. In this case, they can be easily routed to a page that captures their feedback, which can be stored and sent to the customer support department for follow-up.
Consumers who choose 7–8 are considered passives. It’s impossible to determine how passives really feel about the brand. They might not necessarily hate the brand, but they don’t love it, either. In the passive flow, companies can do just about anything, perhaps inviting them to other communities or sending them a discount code for a new product.
If the users select a 9 or 10, they are considered advocates. These are the customers that a company really needs to pay attention to. Within the flow, a company can ask them to write a review or share a story. A company also can offer a discount code and then enable them to share their story, review, or experience within their social circles.
One example of a successful deployment of the Zuberance platform was the Adobe Premiere Elements Customer Advocacy Program. In November 2010, Adobe approached Zuberance with a business problem. Very few Amazon reviews of the product were online, and they weren’t very favorable. The product review average was about two out of five stars, and Adobe wanted to acquire more reviews before Black Friday.
Using the Zuberance platform, the Elements team identified advocates using direct email to their existing customer base. The team asked the question “How likely are you to recommend our product?” and then segmented the customers who selected 9 or 10. The next part of the user flow included asking the advocates if they would be willing to write a review on Amazon; many of them did.
The results speak for themselves. In early 2011, the product had more than 134 customer reviews, with an average star rating of four out of five stars.
Eloqua Case Study on Brand Advocacy
Joe Chernov is the vice president of content for Eloqua, which develops demand generation software, and also the co-chair of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) member ethics panel. In 2010, Chernov decided to shift the focus of Eloqua’s marketing efforts away from just growing the quantity of its followers on Facebook and Twitter, to instead learn more about its existing community and the nature of its followers.
The company conducts quarterly surveys of half of its more than 900 clients, capturing the Net Promoter Score (NPS) data on each client twice per year. Eloqua studies NPS trends across customer segments, products, user roles, renewals, and growth, and it cross-references patterns with changes in the company’s product and service offerings. It develops, refines, or terminates programs depending on their impact on customer satisfaction.
In January 2010, Eloqua closely examined the patterns and conversational drivers in 500 tweets mentioning Eloqua, the dialogue within its 1,500-member Facebook fan page, and the discussion in its LinkedIn Groups. The company uncovered some compelling statistics.
Consumers who engage with Eloqua on social channels have a much higher NPS than the “average” customer. Overall, the NPS for customers who engage with the company is more than 450% higher than the NPS for the total customer base. Eloqua had assumed that the NPS for its Facebook fans would be the higher than for Twitter or LinkedIn. However, although Facebook fans registered a staggering 700% higher NPS score than the total client base, Twitter stole the show. A customer tweeting about Eloqua was nearly nine times as likely to be a brand promoter than the average user. Other data uncovered included the following:
• The company’s blog was the number one trigger for customer tweets.
• Social CRM initiatives and customer support requests accounted for only 1 percent of all the customer tweets.
• Small to medium-sized business (SMB) clients were nearly 2.5 times as likely to create online content than enterprise clients.
• The more engaged the company was with a particular social network, the higher the NPS of the customers who were active in that community.
The key takeaway of this example is that when a company such as Eloqua actively engages on Facebook and Twitter in a two-way dialogue with its customers, those customers are more likely to recommend Eloqua to their friends, colleagues, and business partners.
Taking the Next Steps
Investing in an influencer outreach strategy is good for short-term promotional bursts. What company wouldn’t want coverage on the home page of a powerful tech blog with millions of readers, fans, and followers?
Advocates, however, are passionate about the brand and don’t require any incentives to tell others about it. A strong emotional connection drives them to share their experiences with their friends, their family members, and the communities they belong to. Advocates affect the purchase funnel in two ways. They buy the product or service repeatedly, and they aid and influence others with their purchase decisions. Organizations must recognize this early and create programs specifically for their advocates.
No matter who is driving the customer advocacy program, team members need to enlist support from other functional teams within the organization. Advocates need to be included and recognized by everyone, not just those in marketing. Besides, advocates might give excellent feedback on future product iterations, provide tips and advice to customer support, and even serve as beta testers for products that haven’t yet been released to the general public. Advocacy programs are real-time focus groups, so the conversations extracted from them can prove insightful and actionable.
Listening to feedback from advocates is only half of the battle, of course. Companies need to be prepared to take action as well—within reason, of course. If advocates are vocal about wanting a new product feature and it makes smart business sense to build it, companies need to put their money where their mouth is and get it done. Otherwise, what’s the point of having an advocate program?
Finding advocates on the social web takes time. An initial investment in tools that can help find those advocates is a wise decision. If a company already uses a social media listening platform, it can certainly use that as a starting point. In addition, companies can use tools such as RowFeeder and Export.ly to get more granular data.
Additionally, companies need to develop a content plan to keep their advocates engaged. This content plan can include monthly roundtable conference calls, overviews of upcoming product releases, feedback sessions, or general discussions on how to improve certain processes, such as customer support.
Finally, companies that choose to create customer advocacy programs must stick with them for the long haul. The last thing a company should do is abandon a community of advocates, because they’re essentially the ones on the front lines of communication and telling their friends and families about their experiences. An advocacy program helps companies engage directly with their customers in a safe environment, and it also allows them to appear more human.
That said, for an organization to humanize its brand, it must first humanize its business operations, which is core to the social business evolution.