See full post at Social2b

Social media is now giving customers an interesting alternative to telephone customer service and the lines at the in-store returns desks.  Many who are getting shunned by traditional customer service are now getting satisfaction through … Twitter.

See full post at Social2b

The #1 reason Brand Advocates recommend brands and products is that they want to help others (source: “Engaging Advocates Through Search and Social Media,”comScore, Yahoo!, Dec. 2006).   In other words, there is an emotional component to their advocacy.  The emotional component is not just important for Brand Advocates and their social graph, it is also key to the marketer and brand relationship with their Brand Advocates. If you can make an emotional connection with your consumer, that will go far in building long-term advocacy.

Empathize with your consumers’ frustrations, celebrate their successes, and give them memorable experiences when they interact with or around your brand.  Show you’re human by sharing, caring, and interacting.  Ask your Advocates questions, then respond to their answers and respond every time and listen, then ask them more questions and respond again.  If you want to see what that looks like in action, follow me on twitter (@TedRubin).

There is a catch.  You actually need to CARE about your consumers, or all of the actions I just listed will yield very little, if any, emotional connection. Even though you don’t actually know or interact with many of your consumers as individuals, you still need to treat them as though you already have an emotional connection with them.  That perspective is what will encourage you, as a brand/marketer, to be even more attentive and responsive… and your consumers WILL notice and WILL love you for it.

Add the emotional connection… it will enhance your relationship and insure long-termadvocacy.

Originally posted at ZuberRants

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 teffective, 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 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 do get his point that social networking has a big “broadcasting” component to it, and I understand his reasoning of trying to place it in that basket so advertisers can see it as the same as other media buys,    but in my opinion, that’s just trying to fit a square peg in a round hole simply to make it sell better. It will sell when, and the key word is when, the marketing community wraps it arms around its true value… and not before.

I don’t think “broadcasting” is the right word because it only addresses the most basic aspects of connections and is primarily a numbers game of how many people you can push your message out to. 

Social networking, on the other hand, fully uses the powerful sharing aspect of social media (and the social graph) to rely on and build relationships between people.  These relationships then provide you the ability to spread a message through your network and into the network of others due to the true value of the message — value that continues to increase simply by the fact that you have approved and recommended it by passing it along.  

Take, for example, Twitter.  Most in the marketing community misunderstand Twitter …when used wisely, it is not a broadcast tool or a standalone tool for marketing, it’s an enhancement to your marketing strategy and an extremely valuable networking, experimenting and seeding tool.  While it allows you to provide a broadcast-like tweet to all your followers, most will never see a single tweet and the real value is that it also allows you to interact directly with one person in plain sight of thousands of people and allows them to pass along to others in their network.  Think about how much we learn about someone by watching their interactions with others, and you can understand how this feature of Twitter quickly creates (or destroys!) trust throughout your social network.

Social networking is also different from broadcasting in that it isn’t just a one-time send-out of information.  Powerful social networking includes a back and forth exchange between you and your audience (network members), and their audience, giving you more than one chance to make an impression, clarify your message, and most importantly, build trust.   Let’s not forget that it’s trust that builds customer loyalty! 

Bottom line:  social broadcasting gets you a glance, but social networking gets you loyalty.  Which method are you using??

It’s the women who will take the time to ask for and give product recommendations.  It’s the women who will tap into their networks to find the good deals.  It’s the women who will gladly make sure all their friends hear about a wonderful new product they discovered… or a terrible product they would never buy again. 

However, these relationships are meaningless for you and your brand if you don’t have ways for these women to easily talk with you.  They want to know they can trust you, and how do they figure that out?  They build a relationship with you, the “influencer” (seller) just like they do with their friends and other trusted information sources.   You absolutely must make sure that women find it easy to talk to you and about you!

1. Make sure social media tools and your own online communities are as easily accessible as your online product information.  This shows that you are not afraid to have your customers / clients talk with each other, so you must not have anything to hide. 
2. Interact publicly with individuals of your audience.  You know that the most successful relationships are two-way streets, so keep that in mind as you interact with your “audience.”  Social media allows you to build very visible relationships (2000 Twitter followers? 2000 possible observers of any of your interactions) so every single interaction counts.   An information push won’t get you anywhere – you have to ask questions and answer them!   Then ask follow-up questions and answer those also.  Follow me on twitter (@TedRubin) to see what I mean.
3. Communicate consistently.  Don’t expect to build trust if you are only responsive to your audience every now and then.  Build social media response time into every day and your consistency will pay off.  Only pay attention once in a while, and you have no chance to build a relationship.  In other words, just like you can’t disappear in non-digital life and expect to keep your relationships in tact, you can’t just disappear online. 

So take another look at your product and your brand offering.  Are you talking with the women?  You should be.  You need to be.  If you’re not, start making changes TODAY – your brand success depends on it.

Now it’s a whole different world with social media, with almost instantaneous personal connections to people all around the world.  Instead of just one-to-one connections, we get one-to-very-very-many connections as we can now tap into the extensive networks of everyone on our own social graph. 

If I need a contact in a particular company, or city, or country, all I need to do is post a question on Facebook or better yet, Twitter, asking if someone has a trusted contact in that company or location, and I will soon have a name and contact information.  If a colleague across the country needs help in their own town, a quick tweet will likely reach at least one person who can either directly provide that assistance to my colleague, or at least provide the right connection.

We also need to remember that bloggers are an important part of social media’s reach.  Just recently, I had two different situations of helping bloggers reach other bloggers in another part of the country – due to the broad social media reach I have created by putting relationships first, I was able to help them connect and get the assistance they needed within minutes by simply tweeting out a request for a contact in a very specific community. Complete strangers tied together through one trusted connection, and time and distance were immediately condensed through the use of social media.

At OpenSky, we are all about the relationships and social reach of our trusted influencers (bloggers, authors, editors, celebrities, social media mavens) and their communities (networks).  Instead of just offering products for sale, we offer connection and community to influencers who have products they believe in (from innovative suppliers) and want to share with (sell to) their network. This is the new way the world will connect, where relationships matter. 

The world is now your oyster, use social media to find the pearl(s)!