Unleashing Your Brand Advocate Weapon, Consumer-Generated PR

Every so often I read an article or blog post that cuts through the digital clutter and states something intuitive, but not entirely obvious.

An article in The Next Web by Henriette Weber gave me my week’s “ah-ha” moment so kudos to her. Happy Friday!

As a PR professional I speak (and write) frequently about the need for content generation. Whether through social media, blogs, original thought leadership articles, client interviews and tweets, feeding the content beast is a never-ending assignment. And as we expand our client list, the beast grows hungrier still. Brands, too, face similar challenges. The larger they become the more they have to write about their expanding enterprise. According to Rob Fuggetta, founder and CEO of Zuberance and author of Brand Advocates: Turning Enthusiastic Customers into a Powerful Marketing Force (citing his own sources), 28%-33% of marketing budgets goes toward content marketing.

Brand advocates, as Fuggetta rightly argues, can become a brand’s most important and cost-effective weapon. How? True, brand advocates work for free and do some of the heavy lifting for you. But too often marketers today think of their brand advocates as people who require expensive loyalty program catering. Or that outsourced IT teams must design highly engaging gamified portals. While all of these techniques are a legitimate form of marketing and customer nurturing outreach, it’s important that technological wizardry doesn’t trump the fostering of genuine experiences – or obfuscate brand failures.

I’ve written about a number of my genuine brand experiences and so have several ThinkInkers (Honda, BlackBerry, etc). I was once a BlackBerry diehard, eager to defend against all naysayers. Even after I made my bittersweet goodbyes, it wasn’t until I received an absurdly belated email asking for my returned business (nearly a year after I left) did I fully renounce my brand advocacy badge. But I’ve also received personalized emails of late, actual handwritten letters and, yes, even sample perfume from other companies.

None of these outreach methods are expensive. In fact, they’re right in line with what traditional customer retention budgets go toward. But unlike in decades past, where I might have only told a select few people about my positive experiences, via phone or word-of-mouth, I’ve freely given brands hundreds of words of free online publicity. Do I expect something magnanimous from them like a Birkin handbag or a Cable Heart Chain Necklace in return? Absolutely not – only that they empower me with the brand advocacy tools I require. And yes, I would appreciate an engaging loyalty program too. But that’s not what I’m looking for first and brands need to remember that.

Instead of brands banging their proverbial heads against walls trying to figure out what to write and how to afford the effort, why not empower brand advocates to blog, vlog, tweet and post about their most positive brand experiences? Of course, you’ll still need a professional staff to vet and review copy. But if properly engaged there’s a literal army out there of consumers looking to continue your brand’s unique conversation across multiple channels.

And I’m one of your loyal foot soldiers – armed and ready to serve.

Are you a brand advocate? If so, what about the brand inspires your spreading their good word and how do you do it? Share your thoughts with the ThinkInk community in the section below.

A Life Before Email? Does Not Compute

Our tablets, phones, and laptops of 2011 chug away in harmony, not unlike J.C.R. Licklider’s 1960 vision of human-computer symbiosis. Licklider—a veteran of Harvard and MIT computing-based endeavors—maintained that the human-computer connection would allow machines to address mundane, time-consuming tasks in a highly efficient manner. For the field, his work was outstanding; for a trained psychologist, his contributions were absolutely incredible.

Licklider saw computers as tools with tremendous capability, even convincing his employers to purchase a $25,000 computer in 1957. Imagine? He imagined future work desks as command stations tethered to the wall, with the essential “umbilical cords” completing a “telecommunication-telecomputation system.” Much like his conceptual sketches of electronic libraries and information retrieval (hello eBooks!), Licklider was years ahead of his time.

In fact, Licklider's ideas were accurate enough that they seem basic to us today. Using a computer for essential tasks? Sure. Plugging in at work for the ultimate human-machine team? Done. We use our “machines” to handle the mundane and necessary, and that includes email, which originated with two geeks leaving “Read Me” notes on disk files in the '60s. They wanted electronic mail for practicality's sake, and we still do today – despite the naysaysers who claim that email is dead. But were we productive back when we weren't answering emails every few minutes? We were, but just not as concerned with hearing back from someone a few seconds later. Others argue that we're getting worse in the productivity department: according to a recent study, American office workers spend up to three hours daily on tasks that aren't work-related (44 percent of that time “playing” on the internet), with lost productivity cost employers an estimate of $750 billion last year.

It's also about expectations—and memory retention. Once we know what our machines can do, it's easy to decrease acceptable communication waiting time, permanently. But while Grandma still says that handwritten thank-you notes are more considerate (and, of course, human), there's another reason to turn to paper occasionally: permanence. If you don't want your words to be edited, muddled, or misconstrued in the digital age, making hard copies wouldn't be the worst idea—this New York Times piece says it all. Plus, with new studies showing a 15 percent to 20 percent increase of memory retention in 3D digital media, we're in for a wild ride in advertising.

And I don’t care what anyone says, email is definitely not dead.