Creating advocates for your brand and products

“In times of uncertainty, the best response is to stop ‘shouting’ and start a conversation. Now, what are you going to talk about?” – What’s Next Report, STW Communications Group (June 2009).

The most successful companies over the coming years will be the ones who don’t shout at customers. Instead, they will listen to them, be honest with them, empower them, build relationships with them, and connect them with other like-minded people.

If companies do these things well then they will turn their customers into powerful advocates for whatever it is they are trying sell. They’ll create tribes of influencers, rather than demographics of consumers. They’ll create a movement of passionate supporters, rather than dispassionate participants.

Achieving this requires intent, effort and investment – but it is not beyond the reach of any organisation or brand.

Creating advocates

Marketers have long understood the power of creating advocates for their brands or products. Today, it’s easier and more powerful than ever. The rise of social networking tools has made it much easier to identify potential supporters and turn them into advocates, as well as massively increasing their reach.

For every organisation there are a million different specific ways they can turn their customers into advocates, but I think we can break them down into three basic steps:

1. Listen to them
2. Talk with them, honestly and transparently
3. Build relationships with them

Listen to customers

This is where it becomes particularly important to stop shouting at your customers. The first step to turning customers into advocates it to really listen to them, and it’s much easier to listen to them when you’re not shouting.

Customers are talking about your brand every day whether you like it or not. Chances are that they’re talking about your brand online. This means you can listen in on the conversation – in fact you’ll probably find they are happy to know that you are listening.

Sometimes they’ll say great things about you. Sometimes they’ll say bad things about you. Customer compliments and complaints used to happen behind closed doors. Now they are broadcasted to the world and recorded forever online.

Keeping track of these conversations is easy. Subscribe to Google Blog alerts for your company and product names. Subscribe to the RSS feed of a Twitter search for terms relating to your organisation. Join forums where people talk about your industry and see what they’re saying about you.

Organisations can also benefit from investing in commercial tools such as Nielsen BuzzMetrics which can provide a single, unified view of the conversations that are happening about your brand, products and industry. These can uncover valuable insights that would have otherwise been missed.

Talk to customers honestly and transparently

People love being listened to. But they love it even more when someone listens to them, takes what they’re saying seriously and responds back to them in some meaningful way. They love it even more when a company does this, because this is such an unnatural thing for companies to do.

One of my favourite examples of this is Marque Restaurant in Sydney. They are engaging in active, intelligent, human conversation with their customers. After only two months they are already starting to gain quite a following.

Achieving this will be extremely difficult if you keep your staff locked up behind your corporate firewall. It means letting the people who create your products or deliver your services talk directly to your customers. Companies often find this much scarier than it really is.

I absolutely agree with Tony Hsieh, the CEO of online shoe retailer Zappos (which was recently acquired by Amazon for more than US$900 million). He says: “If you don’t trust your employees to tweet freely, it’s an employee or leadership issue, not an employee Twitter policy issue.”

Build customer relationships

Once you’re listening to your customers and talking with them in a meaningful way, over time you will start to build meaningful relationships with them. I don’t mean relationships in the traditional “we sell you stuff sometimes” terms. I mean relationships in the “we would both go out of our way to help each other” sense.

A great example of this is Barry Judge, who is the Chief Marketing Officer at U.S. electronics retailer Best Buy. Every day he takes the time to talk to customers on Twitter and on his blog. He listens to them. He helps them when they need help. He takes their feedback and uses it to drive change in his organisation. Every time he does this he builds stronger and more meaningful relationships with his customers.

Finally, it is more important than ever for companies to try to avoid doing things that could upset customers. To paraphrase Mark Twain for the social media age – a bad story about a company can travel half way around the world, while a good story is putting on its shoes.

Alex Campbell is a strategy and planning consultant at digital agency, DTDigital.