Rob Fuggetta, founder & CEO of Zuberance, will be the guest speaker at the upcoming Northern California chapter meeting of the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG.)

Date: Thurs, Jan 19, 2012

Time: 6:30pm

Location: Parc 55 Wyndham Hotel, San Francisco

REGISTER NOW

Customer advocacy is the #1 priority for Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) worldwide, according to a recent IBM study. Fuggetta’s presentation, which is entitled “Turning Advocates into a Powerful Marketing Force,” will feature real-world case studies about how companies like Intuit, CDW, Rubio’s Fresh Mexican Grill and many others are leveraging their most enthusiastic customers to spread positive Word of Mouth and drive sales.

About the Speaker

Rob Fuggetta is the leading expert on brand advocacy and has more than 20 years of marketing leadership experience.  He is a former partner at Regis McKenna, the legendary Silicon Valley technology marketing and communications firm, where he co-led the global Apple account.  He later became the CMO at Genuity, a Verizon spin-out which went public in June 2000.  Fuggetta is the author of “Brand Advocates: Turning Enthusiastic Customers into a Powerful Marketing Force” to be published by John Wiley & Sons in 2012.

The Marketing Power of Brand Advocates

A rock star collection of mind-blowing stats about your most enthusiastic customers (AKA Brand Advocates.)

Use Your Advocates’ Reviews as Marketing Copy

CDW’s Senior Segment Marketing Manager, Lauren McCadney, on Advocate reviews: You can hire the best copywriter, but they’ll never beat an Advocate when it comes to authenticity. (Clip taken at the Chicago Brand Advocacy Series.)

How JetBlue Built Long Lasting Relationships on Their 10^th Birthday

If you want to make an impact on someone, and create Brand Advocates, do something unexpected and delightful.  For example, what if you were to give away gifts on your birthday? 

That’s exactly what JetBlue did on its 10th anniversary, as Morgan Johnston, Corporate Communication Manager, explains in this clip taken at the New York Brand Advocacy Series.

How Do You Energize Brand Advocates?

At the New York Brand Advocacy Series, attendees and panelists were asked, “How do you energize Word of Mouth?” Here are their answers.

The Adventures of Brand Advocate Man

It’s a bird..it’s a plane..no, it’s BRAND ADVOCATE MAN! Watch the story of how Brand Advocate Man helped a struggling marketer energize her Advocates and become a social marketing Superhero!

-Cara Fuggetta, Marketing Manager, Zuberance

3 Case Studies in 30 Minutes: How Three Hotels are Increasing Sales and Ratings by Leveraging Their Brand Advocates

Date: Thursday, December 15, 2011

Time: 11:00 AM PST/2:00 PM EST

Join the conversation on Twitter: #zuberance

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER NOW

Hotels and resorts spend billions on marketing and sales promotions trying to lure travelers to their properties and keep them coming back through loyalty reward programs. However, an influential and powerful segment that is often overlooked is Brand Advocates. The value of energizing Brand Advocates goes beyond loyalty. Brand Advocates are highly satisfied customers that pro-actively recommend your properties to their social networks online and offline. Mobilizing Brand Advocates turns your enthusiastic guests into a cost-effective marketing force, boosting ratings and reviews and driving sales.

Register now to attend this free webinar featuring real-world success stories from:

• Motel 6
• Tryp by Wyndham
• Atlantis

Participants will learn how to:

• Identify and energize your best customers (AKA Brand Advocates)
• Boost ratings and increase positive reviews on TripAdvisor and other review sites
• Generate leads and drive sales via social media
• Measure the impact of mobilizing Brand Advocates

All participants will receive a free whitepaper, “How Hotels Can Turn Word of Mouth and Social Media into Sales.”

Expert Speaker: Rob Fuggetta, Founder/CEO, Zuberance (@robfuggetta)

Rob Fuggetta, the founder and CEO of Zuberance, has more than 20 years of experience in Word of Mouth marketing, His WOM strategies have created marketing success for Apple, Intuit, Norton, and many others. Fuggetta is a frequent speaker and author of an upcoming book, “Energize! How to Turn Social Media & Word of Mouth into Sales by Energizing Brand Advocates.”

REGISTER NOW

5 Case Studies in 30 Minutes: How Five Software Companies are Increasing Sales and positive Word of Mouth by Mobilizing their Brand Advocates

Date: Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Time: 11:00 AM PST/2:00 PM EST

Join the conversation on Twitter: #zuberance

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER NOW

Word of Mouth is the “world’s most powerful sales tool,” according to Nielsen. In fact, many software companies get more than half their business from Word of Mouth. In today’s social-media-connected world, the voice of your customers on blogs, social networks, and third party review sites such as Amazon is more influential than ever. But how do software marketers harness the power of social media and Word of Mouth to drive sales and positive reviews?

Register now to attend this free webinar featuring real-world success stories from:

• Intuit
• Microsoft
• Webroot
• NetApp
• Corel

Participants will learn how to:

• Identify and energize your best customers (AKA Brand Advocates)
• Boost ratings and increase positive reviews on Amazon and other review sites
• Generate leads and drive sales via social media
• Measure the impact of mobilizing Brand Advocates

All participants will receive a free whitepaper, “The ROI of Energizing Brand Advocates.”

Expert Speaker: Rob Fuggetta, Founder/CEO, Zuberance (@robfuggetta)

Rob Fuggetta, the founder and CEO of Zuberance, has more than 20 years of experience in Word of Mouth marketing, His WOM strategies have created marketing success for Apple, Intuit, Norton, and many others. Fuggetta is a frequent speaker and author of an upcoming book, “Energize! How to Turn Social Media & Word of Mouth into Sales by Energizing Brand Advocates.”

REGISTER NOW

3 Case Studies in 30 Minutes: How Three Health and Fitness Companies are Increasing Sales and Positive Word of Mouth by Leveraging Their Brand Advocates

Date: Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Time: 11:00 AM PST/2:00 PM EST

Join the conversation on Twitter: #zuberance

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER NOW

Word of Mouth is the “world’s most powerful sales tool,” according to Nielsen. In fact, most health and fitness companies get more than half their business from Word of Mouth referrals. In today’s social-media-connected world, the voice of your members on blogs, social networks, and third party review sites such as Yelp is more influential than ever. But how do health and fitness marketers harness the power of social media and Word of Mouth to drive sales and positive reviews?

Register now to attend this free webinar featuring real-world success stories from:

• 24 Hour Fitness
• Club One
• Anytime Fitness

Participants will learn how to:

• Identify and energize your best customers (AKA Brand Advocates)
• Boost ratings and increase positive reviews on Yelp and other review sites
• Generate referral leads and drive sales via social media
• Measure the impact of mobilizing Brand Advocates

All participants will receive a free whitepaper, “Club One Gets 9X ROI by Energizing Brand Advocates.”

Expert Speaker: Rob Fuggetta, Founder/CEO, Zuberance (@robfuggetta)

Rob Fuggetta, the founder and CEO of Zuberance, has more than 20 years of experience in Word of Mouth marketing, His WOM strategies have created marketing success for Apple, Intuit, Norton, and many others. Fuggetta is a frequent speaker and author of an upcoming book, “Energize! How to Turn Social Media & Word of Mouth into Sales by Energizing Brand Advocates.”

REGISTER NOW

NBA player Bob Lanier had big feet. Imelda Marcos has a big shoe collection. Founder of Blippy, AdBrite, and F*cked Company, Phil Kaplan, a.k.a. “Pud,” has big feet and a collection of 40 Adidas sneakers all at the same time.

With that kind of collection, Phil Kaplan is undoubtedly an Adidas Advocate. He participates on the Adidas boards explicitly, and wears them all the time so you know he loves these sneaks.

-David Spark, Social Media Journalist, Spark Media Solutions

Below is the recording from our recent webinar on “Secrets of B2B Social Media & Word of Mouth Marketing” during which top marketers with a breadth of experience running B2B marketing shared social media success stories from brands like Intuit, Adobe, Microsoft, and CDW.

We also conducted a poll during the webinar and asked the audience, “How much of your business comes from Word of Mouth?” ANSWER: 48% say that 50% or more of their business comes from WOM. (See results below.)

Make sure to download our “Top 5 Myths of B2B Word of Mouth” whitepaper.

-Cara Fuggetta, Marketing Manager, Zuberance

My biggest inspiration at Zuberance has always been our customers like Intuit, Rubio’s, and CDW and their fanatical Brand Advocates.

Now, I’m putting their stories in a book, entitled “Energize! How to Turn Fans, Followers, and Enthusiastic Customers into Social Media Marketing Machines.”

In the coming weeks, you’ll get sneak previews of the book here on the ZuberRants blog.

WHY ENERGIZE!?

There are lots of books about social media.

(My friend Michael Brito has a new book called “Smart Business, Social Business.” I highly recommend it.)

But until now, there hasn’t been a book on how to turn Advocates into a marketing force.

Energize! fills that gap.

BEYOND SOCIAL MEDIA

Energize! isn’t a social media marketing book, per se.

It’s about passionate Brand Advocates like George Hamma, an avid BMW Mini Advocate whose enthusiastic recommendations have inspired five friends to buy their own Mini’s, worth about $200,000 to BMW; Melody Overton (AKA “Starbucks Melody”), a Seattle attorney who is a walking Starbucks encyclopedia and who knows more about Starbucks than its baristas; and Justin Dorfman, a CDW Champion, whose enthusiastic recommendations have driven several hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales for the online IT retailer. (Read: Extreme Brand Advocate Stories.)

And it’s about innovative marketers and visionary business leaders that are transforming their companies and delivering ground-breaking marketing results by activating their Brand Armies. People like Lauren McCadney, who is championing advocacy at CDW; Porter Gale, a social media rock-star and former CMO at Virgin America; and Eric Ryan, the CEO of Method Products, whose avid customers (“People Against Dirty”) have turned household cleaners into a social movement.

A HANDBOOK FOR BRAND ADVOCACY

Today, as the power has shifted from marketers to social-media powered consumers, getting more “social recommendations” (recommendations on the social web) has become the Holy Grail. Seventy-one percent of marketers say advocacy is now a top priority.

Energize! will show you how.

You’ll learn how to energize your Brand Army by getting them to recommend your brand and products via reviews, stories, answers to prospects’ questions, sharing promotional offers and content, and more.

Energize! will feature more than 100 real-world case studies, profiles of Brand Advocates and marketers, plus tips and tricks on how to build and activate your Brand Army.

I hope you have as much fun reading Energize! as I’m having writing it.

Stay tuned.

-Rob Fuggetta, Founder/CEO, Zuberance

Title: Secrets of B2B Social Media & Word of Mouth Marketing
Date: Wednesday, September 21
Time: 11am PST/ 2pm EST

Twitter hashtag: #B2BWOM

Click here to Register now!

As a B2B marketer, are you harnessing the power of social media and Word of Mouth to drive leads and sales?

Register now to attend this free webinar featuring real-world case studies from leading B2B companies like Intuit, Adobe, Microsoft, CDW and more!

What You’ll Learn

• How to generate referral leads and boost sales via social media and Word of Mouth
• How to turn Facebook fans and Twitter followers into a powerful marketing force
• The Do’s & Don’ts of social media marketing involving customer advocates

Expert Presenters

Laura Messerschmitt, VP of Marketing, Outright (@ljmesser)

Laura Messerschmitt is the Vice President of Marketing at Outright, an online bookkeeping solution for small businesses.  Prior to Outright, she spent seven years with Intuit, where she led social media marketing efforts and advocacy programs.   She holds a B.S. in Mathematics (Summa Cum Laude) from UCLA and an MBA from Stanford University.

Rob Fuggetta, Founder/CEO of Zuberance (@robfuggetta)

Rob has more than 20 years of experience in Word of Mouth marketing. His WOM strategies have created marketing success for Apple, Intuit, Norton, and many others. Fuggetta is a frequent speaker and author of the upcoming book, “Energize! How to Turn Fans, Followers, and Enthusiastic Customers into Social Media Marketing Machines.”

Register Now!

Laura Messerschmitt, Senior Marketing Manager at Intuit, discusses how Intuit is leveraging Zuberance’s Social Recommendations Service to systematically energize Intuit Advocates at scale.

Questions discussed:

• What was Intuit’s marketing problem? (Beginning)
• How is Intuit identifying its Advocates? (:28)
• How is Intuit energizing its Advocates? (1:15)
• What are the benefits for Intuit? (1:49)
• Why Zuberance? (2:24)
• How is Zuberance different? (3:01)

Intuit identified Advocates through newsletters, in-product touch points, Facebook, Twitter, and their private community, the “Inner Circle.” They mobilized them to write and publish reviews to Amazon (with an estimated revenue impact in the millions), and to share offers like their “Love a Local Business” campaign, a program that gives out $100K in small business grants.

The Results:

• Intuit has identified 69% of their customer base as Intuit Advocates
• 30% Intuit Advocates have created a Social Recommendation in the form of writing a review or sharing an offer.
• On average, Intuit is getting approximately 2.3 in-bound clicks from prospects from Advocate shares. That’s a 231% Social Recommendation Click-Through Rate (CTR), which is hundreds of times higher than typical CTRs.

Click here to learn more about how to drive Social Recommendations for your brand.

-Cara Fuggetta, Marketing Manager, Zuberance