Recently I have been eating lunch with my buddy Gary. Gary attends upwards of 100 concerts each year and is woven within the local music scene. During our lunches, he enlightens me about an upcoming show, and like clockwork proceeds with an invitation to join him. Persistent doesn’t describe Gary. He is relentless. The average person would have given up on me by now, but not Gary. Eventually I caved in, as I ran out of excuses and agreed to attend a show. Though it wasn’t my typical music scene, I actually had a fantastic time and heard some great music.
Gary is the perfect example of a brand advocate for the local music scene in the area. Like Gary, there are thousands of advocates that are intimate with a specific industry, cause, or product—and they can do wonders for your brand. These amazing people are an additional voice of your company. They are the PR team you didn’t know you had, and the “Mom” that hangs your work up on the fridge.
This transitions into the roles of earned, owned and paid media efforts and the trust level consumers have when being influenced by these media types. In a March 2013 study by Forrester, research confirmed that earned media efforts (recommendations and reviews) were found as a more trusted source in comparison to a brand’s owned or paid media efforts (company website or respective company controlled marketing facets).
With a priority of creating positive word of mouth influence, herein lies the question: How do you build a social community to support your brand voice while harnessing your brand advocates?
…How do you find your Gary?
Launching a Social Community Strategy
Before the journey to building a social community begins, your brand needs to do a little “company soul searching” if you will. Ask the following questions:
- What are your company objectives? How can your social efforts be used to meet these objectives?
- How can you deliver value to your users via social media?
- Do you have the time and resources to provide the “love” that these social media efforts require?
Step One: Find Your Communities of Interest
Communities of interest (COIs) are passionate people, interacting around a common topic within a given space. These COIs can be in a variety of different channels including forums, blogs, wikis and of course social media forums that are not within your company’s control. The trick is to pinpointing communities of interest is to user social listening tools, and basic discovery techniques to understand where the conversations are taking place.
Step Two: Pinpoint Brand Advocates within the COIs
What does a brand advocate look like? Do they have to have 10 or 10 million Twitter followers? What specifically do they say about the brand, and how often? To effectively grade each of your brand advocates, create a scoring guide based off of influence, engagement, popularity, as well as other engagement metrics that relate to your particular brand.
Once you tally the score and identify who’s who amongst your COIs, take the necessary steps to empower your brand advocates. Embrace them, and reward them for their support.
![Content Calendar]( "Content Calendar")
Step Three: Stay Relevant Within Your Community
Step Three: Stay Relevant Within Your CommunityR2i consistently pushes the ideology that “brands are publishers.” Set yourself up for success by continually circulating a buzz with exciting new content.
To stay organized, create a content calendar by mapping when, and with what channel, you plan on publishing content. Running short of ideas? Try doing a content gap analysis exercise to identify where you could create additional content.
Make a plan for how you can enter the conversations. Rule of thumb: never enter into conversation to simply sell your brand. The key is to add value to the community in order to be effective.
Step Four: Listen and Evolve
Take advantage of social tracking tools to identify where your content is being shared. Tools like Hootsuite, Seesmic and Twitterverse can all be used for little to no cost to find out where your voice is moving.
Take a high level approach to what the community at large is talking about with more advanced social listening tools. Programs like Sysomos, Sprinklr, Radian6 and Vocus are robust programs that provide the listening platforms and metrics necessary to staying relevant within the community.
Earning brand advocates is all part of the customer lifecycle. We all strive to take our customers from the initial awareness phase all the way through to the loyalty phase to where they are not only empowered but rewarded for their enthusiasm of our brand. With the right social strategy you can find and keep your Gary.
