In the previous post in this series, Scaling Social Media with Infinite Touches, we talked about brand evangelists (don’t call them ambassadors) and a bit about our Infinite Touches™ process. Let’s take a look at  how you can find brand evangelists.

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Finding Social Media Brand Evangelists

As we’ve seen in this series of posts, social media can scale by creating a web of relationships mediated by your most fanatical fans. And that’s great because research shows that people really listen to friends when making buying decisions.

In a June 2010 Harris Interactive poll, 71 percent claimed reviews from family members or friends exert a “great deal” or “fair amount” of influence.^[1] Similarly, a Nielsen study found 90 percent of consumers surveyed noted that they trust recommendations from people they know, while 70 percent trusted consumer opinions posted online.^[2]

The stats about evangelists are even better: They write more than twice as many posts about brands and forward between two and three times more of other people’s online communications. They are also are 50 percent more likely to create a post that influences a purchase. ^[3] Wow!

Preferred Source of Product Information – Nielsen

So if you want to multiply your business’ social media efforts, forget about Facebook page likes or numbers of Twitter followers or even numbers of pins on Pinterest and focus on the people your company delights. Figure out how to enable them to spread the joy and you’ll be able to scale social media no matter how big you become.

To do this, you need to not only reach your loyal fans, but you must deputize them and enable them to find and develop other loyal fans, whom you need to enable to find even more fans, and on and on. How are you going to find your brand evangelists? You can start by doing the following:

• Google “I love [your product, organization]” — If you’ve got the nerve, and want to know your enemy, also Google “I hate [your product, organization]”
• Google Blog Search your product, organization — You can use Google Blog Search^[4] or other blog monitoring tools
• Search Twitter and Facebook — Twitter’s search has gotten a lot better. Facebook search is OK.
• Set up Google Alerts and Twitter Alerts — Google Alerts^[5] can send you daily updates based on your keywords. You can set up and save a keyword search on Twitter but you’ll need to manually run it. You can set up automated alerts using TweetBeep.^[6]
• Use Sentiment Analysis — Tools like the free Social Mention or Salesforce.com’s expensive Radian6 can help find people who are saying nice things about you

This last technique – sentiment analysis – involves automated determination of the meaning of social media posts. The best we can say about this evolving field is that it can be interesting, if not definitive. This video of a presentation by Kate Niederhoffer, ex-Nielsen BuzzMetrics and principal of Knowable Research is a good introduction to the concepts and limitations of sentiment analysis. It’s long, but well-worth watching.

Sentiment Driven Behaviors; Sentiment Driven Decisions (Kate Niederhoffer, Knowable Research) from Seth Grimes on Vimeo.

However you do it, the first step in assembling an Infinite Touches network of brand evangelists is to find some likely candidates. We talk about how to activate this network in the next post.

Next up: Infinite Touches—Activating Social Media Brand Evangelists

In the previous posts in this series, beginning with Social Media is Not Advertising. Duh!,  we talked about the proper uses of social media (not traditional advertising), the lessons of Obama’s 2012 campaign (microsegmentation), and a little bit about our Infinite Touches™ process for using social media to create mass relationships. This post takes a look at the problem – creating relationships with thousands, millions, or billions of people – and how brand evangelists can help.

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Brand Evangelists Are Key to Scaling Social Media

Let’s say you’re Coke (Congratulations! Can I borrow a couple hundred grand?) You’re one of the most savvy social media marketers on the planet, and by your own count, you deliver 1.7 billion “servings” per day. That’s billions of opportunities to engage. (My spreadsheet refuses to display the yearly number as anything other than 6.205E+11.)

Like many businesses, one way you can manage lots of fans is by using community managers—saintly folks who respond to comments and questions, create and nurture the relationships, and keep order online. But even if you ignore those billions of potential engagement points, think of the scale of trying to manage just the main Coke US beverage sites: You have 41.1 million Likes on Facebook and 800,000 Twitter followers. And don’t forget the other 200 countries you do business in. How many community managers, then, do you need?

There’s a social science theoretical concept called Dunbar’s number^[1] that posits a limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. The generally accepted value for Dunbar’s number is 150. This means the average human can maintain up to 150 stable social relationships.

Coke Zero mention map

But, you’re Coke, and you have, let’s say for the sake of making the math easy, a billion customers. Your community managers need to have relationships online with many more than 150 customers each. Either that or you’re going to have to hire 6,666,666 community managers.

So how are you going to do that? Well, if you accept the concept of Dunbar’s number, and you want to maintain relationships with huge numbers of supporters, you’re going to need lots of people: like you, your management, and your employees. Well, let’s see. Coke has 146,200 employees. So each needs to handle 6,849 customers. Sure, you could argue that not everyone on social media needs personal attention. In fact, many experts subscribe to the 90-9-1 rule of social media:

• 90 percent are lurkers who read but don’t contribute
• 9 percent contribute infrequently
• 1 percent participate a lot and create most of the posts

Fine. Coke employees only need to worry about handling the 1 percent – 68 customers each. And do their other jobs. You see where this is going. It’s impossible to scale the kind of social media practices that today are the most prevalent, and most effective.

All is not lost, however. There is an answer to the problem of scale: evangelists, also known as brand ambassadors. We talked a bit about brand ambassadors in the first post in this series, Social Media is Not Advertising. Duh! We prefer the term brand evangelist because, frankly, ambassadors are stuffy, bound by protocol, and not generally gonzo about anything.

Brand evangelists are people who love your product or service and already tell their friends about it. According to Jeremiah Owyang, formerly of Forrester Research and now with Altimeter,^[2] “An evangelist’s role is to go beyond understanding and get others to believe in your product or service. This is beyond just communication and advertising and gets to the fundamental root of human communications – building trust.”

You want to find the people who are in love with your company and your products. You want to treat them well, and reward them for beating the bushes for customers. Often it’s quite enough just to give them recognition, or perhaps small discounts. Sometimes just encouraging them is enough. You have evangelists already, if your product doesn’t stink.

The trick is to find them, cultivate them, and enable them to spread the word and, of course, find more evangelists, enable them to spread the word and . . . you get the picture. Using evangelists is really the only way you can scale the relationships you need if you’re a company of any size, with thousands or hundreds of thousands of customers.

Coke understands this, but even as savvy as they are, they are making a mistake by ignoring their huge social media franchise and instead expanding their tried and true real world brand ambassador program. We briefly described this type of approach in the first post in this series as “paying some schmo off the street to distribute samples and ‘generate awareness and excitement.’”

To be fair, Coke also pays local, national, and international celebrities to be ambassadors. Coke’s idea is to push this celebrity-endorsement-cum-brand-ambassador program down into the grass roots, and they’re doing quite a bit of it in India. Google the term Coke brand ambassadors and see what I’m talking about.

It remains to be seen whether this effort is successful, but I can tell you for sure that it misses the opportunity that social-media-based online evangelists present for their business, and for yours.

Of course, you’re not Coke (perhaps that’s a relief after reading the preceding!) Your business may not even be able to support a single community manager. But using our Infinite Touches approach, you can deputize your most rabid fans and create a network of evangelists to create that gold of social media: relationships with real people that deliver bottom line results. How? That’s the topic of tomorrow’s post.

Next up: Infinite Touches—Finding Social Media Brand Evangelists

In the previous posts in this series, Social Media is Not Advertising. Duh!, It’s the End of Segmentation As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) and Infinite Touches – Segmentation on Steroids we talked about the proper uses of social media (not traditional advertising), the lessons of Obama’s 2012 campaign (microsegmentation), and a little bit about our Infinite Touches™ process for using social media to create mass relationships. This post begins to examine current social media practice vs. our Infinite Touches approach.

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Advertising and Social Media

The article that inspired this series of posts is entitled Brand Engagement Rate Still 1%, But Facebook Is OK With That which appeared in Ad Age on 11/15/12. In addition to the implications in the title, several comments in the article got my blood boiling. Foremost among them was this assertion:

Facebook is becoming more and more like traditional media. It may be time for advertisers to move on from worrying about how many fans they have to instead explore how many category buyers Facebook can reach, for what cost, and to what effect.

That’s a rubbish idea.

There’s some truth in the first part of this statement – Facebook  is being used by advertisers like just another channel. That doesn’t make it right, and it doesn’t make it effective.

But the conclusion trots out the old advertising paradigm: there are channels and you address them by the shadows cast on the wall^[1] by customers, known as demographics.

Yes, advertisers should stop worrying about how many fans they have and start measuring the intensity of their fandom and their effectiveness. I can’t tell you how many brand pages I’ve liked on Facebook never to return. So what was my contribution to Facebook’s People Talking About This algorithm’s score worth? Zip.

The Ad Age article hits several other interesting, if not entirely believable points, like:

[The] concept of brand loyalty is a myth and that marketers should worry less about reaching a few loyal fans and heavy buyers than hitting a large amount of light and medium buyers. This orientation leads to a rejection of the notion that social media should be privileged over other media that can help the marketer in its central quest of reaching as many people as possible.

Notice that the quote talks about “reaching” people. Not engaging. Not creating a relationship. Just reaching. That’s all that advertising, as currently practiced, can hope for: If I put the right message in front of you enough times, you might buy my stuff.

You’ll hear marketers talk about how they can measure the effectiveness of a direct mail campaign but can’t measure results from Facebook. There’s a good reason for this. Facebook is not direct mail.

Direct mail is a proven but extremely wasteful way of creating sales. A great direct mail campaign might get a response of 5 – 7 percent. The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) claims that direct mail boasts an average 4.4% response rate, compared to email’s rate of 0.12%, according Yory Wurmser, director of marketing and media insights at the DMA.^[2] So their message is don’t use digital; kill more trees wasting 95 percent of your advertising mail to get a weak response.

The only good thing about that approach is it’s predictable. And that’s why some advertisers look at social media as a giant direct mail campaign.

Create and Enable Evangelists

We feel that the way to use social media for marketing is not via an advertising approach. For the first time in history, you can truly know your customers on a mass level. That’s the incredibly valuable capability that social media puts in your hands. Like the shopkeepers of old who greeted you by name and asked you about your kids when you entered their stores, you can finally begin to know your customer as something other than a demographic.

The idea of social media is not to segment and categorize customers into various demographic piles, but to find a way to create relationships with them. Using social media, you are not limited by advertising approaches, but can have Infinite Touches™ of your customers.

Wait, you say. I have millions of customers. How can I create relationships with all of them?

That’s the challenge, isn’t it?

And we’ll examine that question in the next post.

Next up: Scaling Social Media with Infinite Touches