Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM) is what it’s all about. It’s cool. It’s current. It’s authentic. It’s the reason you go to recommended, local hot spots when you travel and not where the outdated guidebooks tell you to go.

Among these hot spots, are hotels, clubs, and restaurants. In fact, our very own Marketing Manager, Cara Fuggetta and CEO Rob Fuggetta blogged about their “dynamic customer journey” to GT Fish and Oyster in Chicago. It was the positive WOM surrounding this place that guided the pair to their seafood destination. It is this advocacy that businesses within the service sector and beyond crave, as they know how powerful it is.

But how should the car dealerships and the software companies of the world go about utilizing Word of Mouth Marketing? Do they need to create more buzz or harness it where it already exists? Which route is easier and which route boosts sales faster?

Harnessing it!

WebCanada blogged about getting consumers to interact with their brands to increase engagement. For example, Banana Republic hosted a live photo shoot featuring actual customers doing their shopping in the store.

Getting consumers to interact with what you’re selling is important. Anyone who has taken their picture with the shirtless eye candy outside Abercrombie and Fitch stores will understand this process.

But how far does this approach actually get you in terms of driving sales? I’d say just to third base. Engagement is great, but it doesn’t get you all the way home. Banana Republic might get a bunch of “likes” based on their photo shoots, the ripped models outside Abercrombie might get shoppers excited, but the energy, money, and time it takes to search for man babes or organize a photo shoot, all in an effort to create buzz, is not as easy, not as quick, and not as powerful as honing in on pre-existing, die hard Abercrombie/Banana Republic Advocates and giving them the tools to spread the word for you!

Listen up marketers! Energize your existing Brand Advocates. Find them, engage them, and take it all the way home by giving them the tools to spread their excitement for your brand.

Please share your thoughts about advocacy, WOMM, or even shirtless men.

-Beau Cowan, Marketing Coordinator, Zuberance

(This post was originally published on WOMMA’s “All Things WOM” blog.)

A key takeaway from this year’s WOMM-U is that brand advocacy is hot! Not only was it a topic of many of the panel discussions, but also a recent IBM study stated that advocacy is the #1 priority for CMO’s worldwide. Let’s take a look at a key principle of brand advocacy: Don’t incentivize Advocates.

Here’s why:

1. It’s inauthentic. Paying for recommendations (whether it’s cash, discounts, or rewards) is basically telling your customers, “Look, since our product isn’t worth talking about genuinely, how about I give you some rewards points for an endorsement and we’ll call it even?” Don’t enlist your Advocates as mercenaries. You’re compromising your credibility and reputation.
2. It’s unnecessary. The top reasons that Advocates recommend is to help others (Comscore, Yahoo!, Dec. 2006) and because they’ve had great experiences with a product or company (Zuberance, 2012). In fact, only 1% of Advocates recommend after being incentivized with rewards or discounts. The key to energizing Advocates to create recommendations is to simply make it easy for them. No incentives necessary.
3. It turns your customers into spammers. We all have that one friend who constantly shares Living Social deals, for example, on Facebook and Twitter. Why? Because if they get three friends to buy the deal, they get their deal for free. The frequent spam causes us to tune them out, possibly defriend or unfollow them, and definitely devalue the sincerity of their recommendation.
4. It creates unwanted expectations from your customers. If you continue to offer rewards or money to customers for their referrals, you’re conditioning them to always expect something in return. The minute you stop compensating them, is the minute they stop showing the “love.” 
5. It’s LAME. Before investing in paid recommendations, focus on improving your company and products so it’s worthy of true praise. Do you think Apple has ever paid their customers for a recommendation? No way! Their products are brilliant, and therefore they’ve created millions of genuine Advocates.

Now, that being said, recognizing and thanking your Advocates is an advocacy best practice. However, it should never be a quid pro quo i.e. IF you write a positive review, THEN I’ll give you a pony. Ponies should only be given as a thank you when there was no expectation of receiving something in return for positive reviews.

Here are some ways to recognize and thank your Advocates:

• Invite them to exclusive events
• Engage with them on social channels (sometimes a simple “Thank you” is all Advocates want!)
• Ask to them to join a focus group
• Highlight their recommendations on owned media channels
• Give them sneak previews of a new product or feature

Take the high road and keep your advocacy strategy authentic. TRUE Brand Advocates are more trusted, more influential, and more effective in driving real business results.

-Cara Fuggetta, Marketing Manager, Zuberance

I get asked many times by customers and others how often they should be communicating with Advocates. Marketers are rightfully concerned about appearing spammy and about “wearing out their welcome,” especially with an audience as valuable as Advocates.

Here are three things to consider when engaging with Brand Advocates:

1.      First, keep in mind that these are Advocates, not average customers. Advocates are your most engaged, most loyal, and most enthusiastic customers. They crave engagement with the brands they love and recommend. They even name their kids after you (like the Rubio’s Advocate who named her daughter Ruby.) If they don’t hear from you, they wonder where the love has gone. Therefore, the rules about how often you should communicate with Advocates (vs. other customers) are very different.

2.      There is no fixed formula (like once a month) on how often you should communicate with Advocates. You should communicate with Advocates when you have something of value to communicate. That can include news about a new product; an invitation to share an offer or a piece of content with friends; a request to express themselves via a story or review; an opportunity to help a prospect by answering a question; etc. The question really is: “Is this something our Advocates would find value in?”

3.      Measure response rates and adjust accordingly. If response rates drop, take heed and adjust. Online marketing is all about measurement and testing. So is advocacy marketing.

-Rob Fuggetta, Founder/CEO, Zuberance, Author of “Brand Advocates: Turning Enthusiastic Customers into a Powerful Marketing Force”

According to a recent IBM study, Customer Advcocacy is the #1 priority for CMO’s worldwide. As more and more brands begin to create a brand advocacy strategy, it’s important to consider these five best practices.

1. Identify Advocates using multiple touch points. If you want to build your brand army, you should be identifying Advocates every which way. Plot our your customer experience and wherever your customers touch your product, service, or brand, ask “How likely are you to recommend us to your friends?” Place this question on your website, in emails, on social channels, in-product, etc.

2. Give Advocates lots of ways to recommend. Brand Advocates like to spread the love in various ways. Some are active content creators; some are avid sharers. Give  Advocates the opportunity to write reviews, rate products, create testimonials, share offers, whitepapers, and other content, answer prospect’s questions, and more.

3. Leverage Advocate content smartly. Advocate-generated content is pure digital gold. Lauren McCadney, Senior Social Media Manager for CDW, says that this content is better than any copywriter could write. Take advantage of your Advocates’ enthusiasm and place their content on your website and product pages, integrate it with email marketing campaigns, use it in advertising, and more.

4. Create an ongoing advocacy program, not a campaign. Advocacy should not be considered a one-off campaign. It’s an ongoing strategy and that builds over time and strengthens the brand-Advocate relationship. Advocates can support and amplify many of your marketing initiatives such as product launches, company announcements, community membership, etc. They’re even willing to give you feedback on new products, defend you from detractors, and answer prospects’ questions on your behalf.

5. Don’t pay or coach Advocates. Keep recommendations for your brand authentic and genuine. Giving customers incentives taints their recommendations and is just plain lame. If your company makes great products, there’s no need to waste precious marketing dollars on inauthentic advocacy.

To read about brand advocacy success stories, download “Turning Your Enthusiastic Customers into a Powerful Marketing Force.”

Do you have any best practices to add? Let us know by leaving a comment!

5 Do’s and 5 Don’ts of Effective Word of Mouth Marketing  - Cara Fuggetta 
An article for the SocialTimes summarizing key takeaways from our New York Brand Advocacy Series panel discussion.

Social Media Revolution: 2011 Edition
Another Erik Qualman video that’s chock full of social media stats, 2011 edition.

Social Media Becoming Social Business - HBR- David Armano 
Social Media is turning into Social Business to most organizations.  Harvard Business Review suggests that there are areas of Social Business that are poised to explode: Organizational Design, Social Business Intelligence, and Cultures of Collaboration, Co-Creation & Shared Value.  Social Media and Social Business must be linked – the expectation for real-time responses is only increasing.

13 Startups that Wowed Us
Catalyst S+F’s Jim Nichols offers a list of companies that appear to have the stuff to move the needle for marketers.

Small Businesses That Understand Social Media
At this point, it is almost irresponsible to not have a social media presence as part of your marketing mix.  However, many businesses continue to be behind the trend.  This NY Times article highlights two small businesses who are successfully harnessing their social media.  Their approaches are interesting, inexpensive, effective, and easy to reproduce.

-Lucy Arnold, Marketing Intern, Zuberance

By leveraging Zuberance…

• Chili’s identified a brand army of nearly 1 million strong who published 50,000 reviews on Yelp and shared 320,000 offers on Facebook, Twitter, and email.
• Each Advocate of Blurb (a print-on-demand publishing service) that recommend the company, brought in 1.6 new customers.
• 30% of Intuit’s Advocates have written reviews and shared offers with their social networks.

When I tell people what Zuberance is all about and the results we’ve seen from companies energizing their Advocates, here’s most common response I get (from marketers and non-marketers alike): “So how exactly do you incentivize people to make these recommendations?”

The answer is simple: We don’t! (As explained by Zuberance Founder/CEO, Rob Fuggetta, here)

The last time you went to an exceptional restaurant, you probably went to work on Monday and raved about the best steak you’d ever had to your colleagues. What did that restaurant give you for the recommendation? What about the smart phone you suggested to your cousin or the bottle of wine you recommended for your sister-in-law? How much did those companies pay you?

So what motivates a recommendation? Take a look:

Recommending brands and products is not a selfish action. However, if you encourage your customers to talk about you by leveraging a selfish motive (such as referral programs), it taints the recommendation. This makes your customer look bad because he’s trying to score some cash or reward points at their friend’s expense; and it makes you, as a brand, look bad because it’s basically telling your customers, “Look, since our product isn’t worth talking about genuinely, how about I give you some rewards points to do it and we’ll call it even.”

Keep recommendations for your brand authentic by going above and beyond to please your customers (becoming “customer-obsessed” as Josh Bernoff put it in a recent Forrester report.) Then, you won’t have to worry about paying or incentivizing your customers to talk about you. Because let’s be real, that’s just lame anyway.

-Cara Fuggetta, Marketing Manager, Zuberance

In an effort to juice conversations, Intuit gives grants to small businesses to get people talking about small business, explained Laura Messerschmitt of Intuit.

This is not a “pay-for-play” solution which is a major “no-no” when seeking out recommendations for Advocates. Intuit is just trying to show general support for a community, especially at the local level.

-David Spark, Social Media Journalist, Spark Media Solutions

It is true that Brand Advocates have value in part due to the reach of their relationships within and across their social networks.  When they encourage their friends and colleagues to buy our products, our brand’s buying power increases exponentially, and it simply makes good business sense to leverage those opportunities.

The risk here is that we can become so focused on our Brand Advocates’ social reach that we see them only as a means to an end (sales) and stop seeing them as people.  We might get greedy and start looking right past them to market directly to their networks, ignoring our Advocates themselves.  While that marketing method can still be somewhat effective, it costs more, it is more difficult to implement and maintain, and it is dangerous to our brand.  We cannot de-value our Advocates and expect our brands to thrive!

No matter how great a buying power their networks provide us, we still need to value our direct 1-1 relationships with our Advocates.

Research shows that Brand Advocates are more likely to repurchase after recommending brands and products:

76% percent of Brand Advocates said they were more likely to repurchase after recommending a brand or product to someone else, and 79% said they would be more likely to repurchase in the future. (source: the Harris Poll, June 2009).

In other words, with our Brand Advocates, the ROR (Return on Relationship) is high.  A strong relationship with a Brand Advocate is likely to not only increase the Word of Mouth impact, but also to increase their own likelihood of repeat purchase.   And if we continue to delight our Advocates with each of their own purchase experiences, they have even more reason to recommend our products and services to others.

Don’t get greedy and interact with your Brand Advocates just to “mobilize” them for the buying power of their networks.   They are valuable in and of themselves. Treat them that way!

I’m an Advocate of Tommy Bahama, the fashion retailer. I enthusiastically recommend Tommy Bahama to my friends. I love their relaxed, Island style of clothing. In fact, I could probably buy an island with the money I’ve spent at Tommy Bahama.

The problem is this: nearly every day in December, Tommy Bahama’s marketing department has been sending me emails urging me to buy more now. This annoying, non-stop email blasts is exactly the wrong way to treat Advocates.

What should Tommy Bahama do?

Well, first they should ask me whether I’m a Tommy Bahama Advocate. They should then engage me in ways that feels like Tommy Bahama understands that I’m a highly valuable customer, not a “target” in an email database.

Maybe they could give me an exclusive promotional offer for me and my friends. Or maybe they could invite me to a gathering at one of their stores, where I’d be delighted to give them some feedback about their clothing. They should definitely ask me about my favorite Tommy Bahama story or my favorite Tommy Bahama shirt.

Meanwhile Tommy, please live up your brand mantra, especially when it comes to your Brand Advocates like me.

Relax

In “The Ultimate Answer,” author Richard Owens, the CEO of customer satisfaction company Satmetrix, says a single Advocate of an enterprise software company is worth $565,000, based primarily on the Advocate’s lifetime referral value.

So how much are your Advocates worth?

Here’s an easy way to calculate this. Many companies track the Average Customer Lifetime Value or CLV. To simplify this, this is often calculated as follows:

There is now a growing body of evidence (Yahoo!, Comscore, others) that Advocates are a minimum two to three times more valuable than average customers based on referral value. We believe these estimates do not reflect the true value of Advocates because many of these studies were conducted before the rise of social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and therefore don’t reflect the ability of Advocates to reach and influence thousands or even millions of prospects.

So a simple way to calculate Advocate Lifetime Value is by multiplying CLV by 3X. Via Zuberance’s real-time analytics, you can get more precise measurements of Advocate Lifetime Value.