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 created a social recommendation, 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

How has the meaning of “influence” changed in the age of Twitter and Google+ hangouts and LinkedIn discussion groups? Who are the influencers of today and how can marketers identify them and encourage them to put their status to work as Brand Advocates? These are some of the questions tackled by Barbara French, Guy Kawasaki, Don Bulmer and Mike Fauscette in Influencers to Brand Advocates, a live panel discussion recorded at the BrightTALK San Francisco office, available on demand here:

With the explosion of social media tools and their increasing incorporation into business practices, the fundamental meaning of “influence” has changed. What used to be an amorphous concept—abstract individual authority dictated by status, entitlement or ideological power—is now defined in practical terms that are easy to measure and study. In fact, the numbers are readily available and speak for themselves: 55,000 people “like” Guy Kawasaki on Facebook, almost 11,000 follow Mike Fauscette on Twitter and Don Bulmer’s blog enjoys an active readership that averages a thousand reads per entry.

Empowered by accessible and effective Internet tools, social technologies have created a democratic system that identifies influencers in niche communities and generates circles of followers around them. It is no longer solely up to the individual to gain influencer status—it is up to the community to determine that the work of an individual is relevant, valuable and trustworthy to many.

These three concepts are the key focus for marketers as they try to understand the power of influencers and how they can harness it to build their brands. Mike Fauscette emphasized that, just like company brands, influencers-turned-Advocates have to be and stay relevant to their respective communities, and that their influence is not guaranteed outside of that context. To this idea Guy Kawasaki added that an influencer must enjoy a high level of trust based on the value they are able to share with their followers.

Don Bulmer referred to SAP’s sales-focused approach and stressed the importance of studying the client’s decision-making process and habits to identify ways to shorten the buying cycle and strengthen the client-vendor relationship.

As marketers explore a community and identify the key influential figures, they need to keep asking questions that will bring them closer to their audience:

• Who are the people who make decisions?
• What is their decision process like?
• Who do they listen to and learn from?
• What do they care about and how do they consume this information?

By using social media to answer these questions, marketers will be able to single out those key figures that cause shifts in client behavior. Identifying the influencers and encouraging them to become Advocates for products or services is one of the most efficient ways to get access to and target a niche audience that has already been recognized and engaged.

Even though all three speakers are influencers in different areas and use different tools to reach their audiences, one point is clear: engaging an audience online and closely following the ongoing web conversation is an invaluable resource of information and insight that can be used to inform a brand’s marketing efforts and help achieve more by eliminating waste and focusing on tactics that work.

In unprecedented ways social media provides marketers with the ability to measure influence and put it to work with accuracy and efficiency. Whether marketers are looking at number of webinar views, Twitter followers or blog comments, it has never been easier to identify audiences and gain insight into their interests and behavior. With the emergence of social media influencers who singlehandedly affect client behavior, being effective at social media becomes even more crucial to any company or brand. These shifts of behavior—and their causes and frequencies—are the bits of information marketers pursue, and in that respect social media is one of the best tools in a marketer’s toolkit. To quote Guy Kawasaki, “What else is fast, free and ubiquitous?”

- Savina Velkova, Marketing Associate, BrightTALK

About Savina:

As a recent addition to the BrightTALK team, Savina executes email marketing programs that drive thousands of attendees each month to online events and contributes to the BrightTALK blog.  Originally from Sofia, Bulgaria, Savina recently graduated from Pomona College in Southern California, where she studied English and Spanish and ran an online magazine.

Download: Consumer Electronics Company Gets 5% Conversions By Energizing Brand Advocates

This case study highlights a leading consumer electronics company that was recently facing a marketing crisis. Negative Word of Mouth for their new flagship product was hurting their reputation and sales. So they turned to their most enthusiastic customers (AKA their Brand Advocates) and energized them to create social recommendations for the brand and product.

In only a few months the company has:

• Energized thousands of Brand Advocates to create social recommendations
• Increased its star ratings on a leading shopping site from 2.8 to 4 stars
• Recorded a 5% sales conversion rate, 10x higher than normal

Download the case study and learn how to:

• Identify Brand Advocates by name and email address
• Mobilize Advocates to create social recommendations and drive sales
• Track results from social recommendation programs in real-time

We want to hear from you!  Feel free to share your thoughts on the whitepaper below.

It’s a whole new year – literally and figuratively.

Social media is quickly changing the way we need to think about our brands and marketing.  We can no longer expect to be successful if we just focus our marketing efforts on telling our target market how great our own brand is.  What we – the brand – say about ourselves is no longer what matters.  It’s what OTHER people say about our brand and their experience of our brand.

Brands have a challenge having effective external conversations with consumers and then truly activating them as Advocates unless they evolve internally into a socially-focused organization.

Advocates are your goldmine!  They are the people who go out there and “sell” your product simply because they want to — by passing links around, posting product reviews, getting the word out through all of their social media channels.

A quick way to become invisible as a brand (or worse yet, highly visible for negative reasons) is to keep your organization internally-focused.  You can work 24×7 talking within your marketing group about what makes your product so fantastic … and then creating all those ads and marketing materials to try to convince everyone else the same… but unless people outside your organization are talking up your product, your work (and time!) is wasted.

In this age of social media, it’s relationships that matter:  your brand’s relationship with its customers, friends and colleagues, and with the entire social network of anyone who believes in your brand.

Why?  Because good relationships naturally lead to people wanting to share their excitement about great products with their friends and the rest of their network. Good relationships – those built on trust, transparency, and honesty – create your Brand Advocates.

And conversely, bad relationships (or nonexistent relationships) naturally lead to people wanting to share their frustration about poor products.  Be careful!

If your organization doesn’t evolve with the marketplace into a socially-focused organization, you will be left behind (if you haven’t been already).

Evolve.  Your brand depends on it.

Tuesday’s #techchat topic was “Leveraging Social Media for Influencers and Customer Advocacy in the Enterprise,” run by Ann Handley of MarketingProfs with special guest, Michael Brito (VP of Social Media at Edelman Digital.) Part of the discussion addressed the difference between Brand Advocates and influencers, which Micheal does an excellent job explaining in his latest blog post.

He says that influencers “may have a crush on you or find your product useful; but they are too busy being influencers – tweeting, blogging, and recording webinars to really care. Of course they love getting free trials and new products before they hit the market; and very rarely will they say no when you offer to send them that new shiny object.”

Influencers have their own agenda. When your company is the hot new brand on the block, they want to be associated with you; that is, until the next hot new brand moves in and shortly after, you’re left scratching your head wondering what happened to the influencer’s new born enthusiasm for your brand.

Michael goes on to say, “the reality is that with many influencer programs, brands are just renting the conversation; and unfortunately the conversation isn’t always authentic. If it was, you wouldn’t have to keep sending them products to fuel their conversation.”

This is why brands need to shift their focus onto their authentic evangelists, their Brand Advocates. Unlike influencers, Advocates love your brand unconditionally. OK, don’t take that completely literally. But what I am trying to say is that, for the most part, Advocates will stick by your side even when you’re not the hot brand at the moment or come out with a product that maybe you shouldn’t have.

I always like to think about Advocacy in relation to music, because most of the “brands” I advocate are music artists. I am a huge Advocate of B.O.B. (He’s a Hip Hop artist, and if you don’t know of him, check him out.) There are definitely a few tracks of his that I’m not really into, but that doesn’t make me any less of an Advocate; and I am sure the same goes for all of you Pearl Jam, Tim McGraw, and Madonna Advocates out there.

While we’re on the topic of differentiating Advocates from other segments, it’s important to point out that loyal customers are not always Advocates. Think about the airline that you normally fly. Are you an advocate of them? Probably not. I have been an AT&T customer since the Nokia snake-playing days, but I am far from an Advocate.

Similarly, Advocates are not equal to Facebook fans and Twitter followers. Again, these people may have a “crush” on you, or are interested enough to simply click a “Like” or “Follow” button. But that doesn’t mean they would recommend, write a review, share offers, or do anything on behalf of your brand voluntarily.

*Note: There can be (and surely are) Advocates within each of these segments (influencers, loyal customers, fans, and followers.) In fact, it is very likely that Advocates will be a fan of you on Facebook, follow you on Twitter, and continuously purchase your products. It is the Advocates within these segments that need to be recognized and treated like VIPs, because that’s what they are.

Make sure to tune in to #techchat everyday Tuesday at 5pm PST.

Don’t forget to register for our upcoming webinar with WOMMA, “Turning Facebook Fans into Brand Advocates” on Sept 22 at 9 AM PST.

We’re proud to let you know that Rob Fuggetta, founder and CEO of Zuberance, will be a featured presenter at the Computer Market Analyst Group (CMAG) meeting on August 28, 2009 at the Seagate campus in Scotts Valley, CA.

Rob will be giving a presentation titled, “Brand Advocates: Understanding the World’s Most Influential Consumers,” that gives attendees insights into how they can energize their company’s advocates to help drive sales.

Many of the sessions at the August 28th meeting are geared toward consumer engagement and social media, which Rob builds on with his insights on how companies can identify and mobilize highly influential brand advocates.

We’d love to see you there. For more information on the CMAG, contact Jeff Young of IPR at 541-552-9410 or jeff.young@iprcorp.com.