MackCollier.com

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Your Brand Is the Sum of the Stories We Tell About You

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Facebook has just launched an elegant mobile reader/app called Paper.  Facebook is trying to position the app as less of a reader and more of a way for users to share and create ‘stories’.  Jay has a great write-up on the direction Facebook may be heading with the app.

Over the last few years, our ability to create content and weave multiple medias has increased dramatically.  Our smartphones are becoming computers that are far more powerful that the klunky desktops from just a few years ago.  The ability to create pictures, high-definition video and text has all been fused into a small item no bigger than our hand.

While our ability to tell stories via digital content has greatly increased, many brands are still missing what an opportunity they have in letting customers speak on their behalf.  It’s scary for many brands, I get it.  You spend millions in carefully orchestrated marketing messages designed to communicate specific points to a mass market.

What you miss is that we don’t care about that.  Well we do, but not to the degree you think.  Every customer has their own connection to your brand.  Many customers have complete indifference to your brand.  Some have slight levels of affinity and loyalty, and a select few are raving fans.

We are all telling stories about your brand.  And if you don’t connect with us, we will tell the stories on our own.

But if you do connect with us, two important things begin to happen:

1 – We begin to understand you, and the story you want us to tell

2 – You begin to understand us, and the stories we want to hear

The thing to remember is this:  While most of us have the ability to tell stories about your brand, most of us don’t have any desire to.  Unless we either love you, or hate you.

And again, either way it pays to connect with us.  If you connect with your fans, the customers that love you, those fans will work with you to make sure they tell the story about your brand that you want other customers to hear.  Read that again until you understand just how important that is.

On the other hand, when you connect with your fans, they will come to your defense against customers that are telling negative stories about your brand.  Truly a win-win situation.

Keep in mind that when you empower your customers to tell stories on your brand’s behalf, your customers tell your brand’s story in their own voice.  This is incredibly powerful because customers respond more to a message that’s delivered in a voice they recognize and trust.

Their own.

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Brands, You Have to Build Your ‘Trust’ Muscle

Steve Jobs was probably the greatest business orator and speaker of the last 50 years.  Jobs had a wonderful talent for delivering amazing presentations and captivating an audience.

With that in mind, watch this short video of Jobs prepping for his first on-air appearance in 1978:

Isn’t it interesting to watch a fidgety and obviously very nervous Jobs say “You need to tell me where the restroom is too, because I’m deathly ill, actually, and ready to throw up at any moment.”  Then he adds to someone off camera “I’m not joking!”

Yet 40 years later in 2007, he was delivering the presentation to launch the iPhone, considered to be one of the greatest business presentations of all-time.

Experience is a wonderful teacher, and it molded Jobs from that fidgety computer geek in 1978 to a polished professional that became the gold standard for delivering compelling business presentations.

Today, we’re asking brands to do something equally scary on a scale they’ve never had to before: We are asking brands to trust their most passionate customers.

One of the things that struck me the most while writing Think Like a Rock Star was to delve into the differences between how rock stars approach engaging with their customers versus how brands do.  While many brands are reluctant to connect directly with their customers and give them any control over messaging or promotion, rock stars literally view their customers as marketing partners that they trust to act in the rock stars’ best interest.

This graphic explains why:

InteractionsInteraction leads to Understanding which leads to Trust which leads to Advocacy.  Rock stars are constantly seeking interaction with their fans, because they not only want to better understand their fans, they want their fans to better understand them.  Because rock stars know that when their fans understand them, they can then trust them, and advocate for them.  Also, since rock stars understand and trust their fans, they know that these fans will act in the rock star’s best interests.

Most brands never start on this path because they don’t seek to have those interactions with their customers that are freely available thanks in great part to the rise of social media tools.  If brands would interact more with their fans they would begin to understand them more, which leads to trust, which leads to advocacy.

Which is also a two-way street.  When your brand purposely shuts itself off from your customers, you are also restricting the customers’ ability to interact with you, and then to trust you as well as deadening the chances of having that customer advocate for your brand.

And here’s why it’s an unfounded fear:  Because when you interact with your customers and they understand you they also trust you.  So not only will they advocate for you, they will also spread your message and trust you to spread the message that you give them.  This is what so many brands misunderstand about their fans, they believe their fans will spread a message that’s inconsistent with their ‘messaging’.  Instead, fans will want to work with your brand to make sure they are spreading the message that you want them to.

But it starts with your brand taking the first step to reach out to your customers and trusting them if you want them to trust you.

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How to Expand Your Reach in Social Media When You Have No Budget

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Last night I was thrilled to join Full Sail University for a special Think Like a Rock Star webinar.  It was an amazing turnout, and I wanted to talk about one of the questions that an attendee asked.

Someone wanted to know how you can expand your reach in social media when you have no budget.  The answer is that you reward the behavior you want to encourage.

Years ago when I first started blogging, I had a nice little community reading my blog.  I would only get 50-100 visitors a day (This was 2006) but every post I wrote had comments, sometimes 15-20.  A blogger friend that was writing for a site that at the time got about 10,000 visitors a month (far more than my blog) left a comment saying ‘I just want to know why you get 10 or more comments on every post and I don’t get any’.  I told him ‘because I respond to my comments’.

I didn’t have many readers, but my level of engagement was much higher than blogs with huge readerships.  If you want to build your reach and engagement then start by rewarding the behavior you want to encourage.  If you want to get more comments on your blog, then start by responding to every comment.  Communicate to your readers that if they comment, that you will respond.  This seems like a no-brainer but you wouldn’t believe how many bloggers never respond to comments, then wonder why they get so few.

No matter how ‘small’ your blog or social media presence is, you’ll have some fans.  People that enjoy your content and that follow you because of it.  Cherish these people.  Even if there are only 2 of them, treat them like rock stars.  Because they are.  And these 2 fans will tell their friends to check you out and before you know it you have 5 fans.  Then 10, then 50, then 100.

The two most powerful words in social media are ‘Thank you’.  Whenever you see someone interacting with your content or sharing your content or recommending your content, then thank them, because they just did you a favor.  And since we all like to be appreciated, when you thank them that encourages them to keep sharing and interacting with your content.

Start small, grow big.

Pic via Flickr user aleske

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In Defense of the ‘Silent’ Experts…

I wanted to go slightly off-topic today to discuss ‘experts’.  For the last several years in the social media space there’s been constant hand-wringing over how we vet who the ‘real’ experts are.  One of the common themes is that when people claim to be experts that really aren’t, it makes it more difficult to find and value the true experts.  The ‘fake’ experts are drowning out the voices of the ‘real’ experts, as it were.

Honestly, this is a problem.  And it does dilute the value (or at least the perceived value) of ‘real’ experts.  But it also creates another problem that I don’t feel we spend enough time talking about.

In order to deal with this idea of people promoting themselves as experts when they really aren’t, we’ve come up with a qualifier:  The larger group has to identify you as an expert, you can’t promote yourself as such.  The logic is that the true experts don’t need to promote themselves as being experts, because the larger group recognizes their expertise, and promotes them accordingly.

So by extension, if the group doesn’t call you an expert, then you aren’t one.  This addresses the ‘fake’ experts that promote themselves as being experts while the larger group does not.

But what about the ‘silent’ experts?  The people that have a level of expertise, and aren’t aware of it, or they are, but don’t feel comfortable promoting themselves as being experts?  I see this constantly in the social media space.  Often, these people are smart enough to qualify as being experts on some subject, but don’t feel comfortable speaking out as such or speaking out period, because the ‘group’ has told them that if they aren’t identifying them as experts, then they aren’t.  This leads to some people that truly are experts not voicing and sharing their expertise, because they don’t have the confidence in their own abilities.

A few years ago I was talking to someone in this space about #Blogchat on the phone.  She was telling me how much she loved the chat and I realized that she would make the perfect co-host for #Blogchat.  She was an expert in a certain area of blogging, so it made perfect sense to have her co-host on that particular topic.  She was delighted and we started talking about what her topic could be and how the #Blogchat she would co-host would be structured.  She just kept thanking me for the chance to co-host, and I tried to thank her for agreeing.  She then paused and I’ll never forget what she did next.

She started crying.  She started crying because she was so grateful to be put in a position of being acknowledged as an expert.  She felt this was truly an honor that she didn’t deserve.  But she did.

This period was an expert.  The ‘group’ wasn’t identifying her as such, but it was obvious to anyone that knew her and what she had accomplished, that she was an expert.  But because the ‘group’ didn’t feel she was, by extension she didn’t feel as if she had the ‘right’ to be treated as an expert.  She felt I was doing her a huge favor that she didn’t deserve by letting her co-host #Blogchat, when in fact she absolutely deserved to co-host, and I was thrilled that she would.  She was actually doing the #Blogchat community a big favor by agreeing to share her expertise with us.

It worries me that there are so many people out there, so many smart voices like my friend, that are afraid to share what they know, because we are telling them that their voice is not worth sharing.

Here’s some of the rules we are creating:

There’s a problem with ‘fake’ experts.  You can’t promote yourself as an expert, so if the group doesn’t tell you that you are an expert, then you aren’t.

There’s too much content out there.  So you should ONLY create new content that is original and that creates value for others.  Never never NEVER create content just to be creating content.  If your content isn’t epic, don’t share it.  IOW, don’t share your content unless you are an expert…..but remember that you aren’t an expert unless ‘we’ tell you that you are.

 

I say this is bullshit.  Instead of being worried about how many ‘experts’ are out there (real or claimed), instead we need to create an environment where everyone feels comfortable sharing their voice.  Where no one feels that they need permission to share their thoughts and ideas.  No one should feel like their ideas aren’t ‘good enough’ or don’t pass muster with someone that others have identified as being smarter than they are.  There’s no one arbiter of what ideas are and are not worth sharing.

Yes, that means there will be more ‘clutter’ and there will also be more ‘experts’.  There will also be more content and more distractions.

This is ultimately about what we value.  If we push for less ‘clutter’ and less content, by extension we will also get less expertise and less thought leadership.  Less means less of everything.

I say we should strive for a space where everyone feel comfortable sharing their voice and ideas.  When we start to throw up rules and boundaries to idea and information-sharing, then we all lose.

What do you think?

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Stop Chasing Shiny Objects, Invest in the ‘Classics’

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A few years ago an agency approached me and said they had figured out a plan to get ahead.  They were seeing at the time that Twitter was growing like a weed in the South in August, so they were going to hire a ‘Twitter person’.  This person would be an expert at using Twitter, and she would train the entire agency on how to use Twitter, so that they would have an agency full of Twitter experts.

She concluded by asking ‘what do you think?’ with a confident tone that told me that she fully believed she had just cracked the code on successfully propelling her agency into the next decade.

I told her the same thing that day that I will tell you today: Stop trying to understand the tools, and instead invest in learning how your customers are using the tools.  Earlier this month it felt like every marketer in the world was jumping on Jelly.  Marketers were infatuated by a new social tool and more importantly, a new sales opportunity.  These marketers had no clue who was using Jelly or if it would ever be relevant to their customers.  They rushed in at the promise of finding a hot new social channel to sell their wares via.

The true sales opportunity lies in figuring out where the customer is headed and then clearing a path to help them reach their destination.  The customer will eventually reach her destination with or without us, but the value we bring to the equation is to help the customer reach her destination as effortlessly as possible.  Helping the customer do this IS the sales opportunity.

There are two areas you need to focus on in 2014:

1 – Understanding how your customers are using these tools

2 – Understanding how customer behavior is changing because of emerging tools and technology

Over a decade ago, The Cluetrain Manifesto was published, and the work is perhaps best known for presenting the idea of markets as conversations.  The idea that the markets that companies sell to are actually made up of human beings having conversations with each other, and if you wanted to connect with these markets, you needed to understand the conversations they were having, and even participate in those conversations.

Marketers heard the ‘participate’ part, but they missed the ‘understand’ portion.  No matter how many shiny tools you master, none of that will help you if you don’t understand your customers.

BTW anyone notice that all the talk about Jelly died down as soon as it started up?  That’s because marketers got there, spent a few days with it and didn’t see an immediate sales opportunity, and left.  Agency folks camped out there long enough to see if they could sell their clients on ‘Jelly Management’ projects, and left when they realized everyone else was.

Which leads to another classic: There are no silver bullets.  Roll your sleeves up, invest in understanding your customers.  Do the work.

Pic via Flickr user dylan garton

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Is Your Blog Still Your Front Porch? Tonight’s #Blogchat Topic!

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Here’s the transcript for tonight’s #Blogchat

Tonight (Jan 26, 2014) we’ll discuss if your blog is still your front porch.  Recently, I went back through the archives of The Viral Garden, which was my blog before this one.  I started blogging there in 2006, before we all found Twitter or Facebook and years before there was a Google Plus.  In 2006 and 2007 if you wanted to share an interesting blog post or article, you didn’t tweet it or post it to Facebook, you shared it on your blog.  I did this as well, in fact once a week or so I would post a ‘Viral Community News’ that would have a roundup of 4-5 blog posts that readers of The Viral Garden had wrote that I thought were interesting.  It was also a great way to build readership.

But over time, I discovered Twitter, and then Facebook, and my linking behavior changed.  I stopped linking on my blog as much, and moved to sharing content via other social media channels and tools.  I think most other bloggers have done the same thing, but at the same time, it seems that bloggers are more worried today about building readership.  In my opinion, part of the reason why it’s more difficult to build readership is because of that change in linking behavior.  Years ago when linking was primarily confined to blogs, that meant traffic bounced back and forth among those blogs.  Today, linking has moved off blogs, and additionally a lot of our thoughts that years ago would have been shared as a blog post, are now shared as a Facebook update.

I wanted to talk about this tonight at #Blogchat, and specifically three areas:

1 – Has the way you use your blog changed in the last few years as Twitter and Facebook have become more popular?

2 – Are the things such as linking and content sharing that make social media as a whole more valuable to you, actually making blogging less valuable?

3 –  What can we do to make sure that blogging stays the centerpiece of our social media presence?  Should it be?

Hope to see y’all tonight at 8pm Central on Twitter!  If you are new to #Blogchat you can learn more here.

Pic via Flickr user YellowstoneNPS

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The Power of Integrating Customer Service Across Your Organization

While many companies are struggling to use social media as a channel to drive sales, some companies have discovered the power of using social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to provide effective and efficient customer service. For example, look at this recent exchange on Twitter between Ekaterina Walter and Nikon:

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EkaterinaNikon2While the end result might be a customer service ‘win’ for Nikon, it also raises some glaring issues for the brand.  For example, if there’s consistently a disconnect between the level of customer service that Nikon offers via phone and Twitter, what happens when customers try the phone and don’t know to contact Nikon on Twitter?  In that case, Nikon likely doesn’t have a chance to redeem itself as they did here with Ekaterina.

Another byproduct of this is that by providing better customer service via one channel, you are training your customers to go to that channel first for customer service.  Which can be a plus assuming you have the bandwidth to support additional customers.  But if not, that likely means that the level of customer service provided by one channel (Twitter in this case) may fall lower and more in line with what customers are seeing via other channels (such as the phone).

So what’s the answer?  Try comparing notes.

Think about all the channels customers can use to contact you with support issues.  Email, social media, website, phone, even snail mail, maybe even in-person.  It’s important to remember that different customers prefer to use different tools.  So it’s entirely possible that each customer service channel you use is seeing complaints and questions from a completely different segment of your customer base.

For each customer service channel you use, you should have your employees that man these channels regularly provide every area of your customer service team with the following information:

1 – What is the nature of customer contact?

2 – Are customers inquiring about a particular product or service?

3 – Did the customer mention attempting to contact your company via another channel first?  If so, which one?

4 – Who was the customer?  Share any information you can about who they were, their age, location, how they used you product or service, etc.

If you can better communicate and integrate your customer service experience then the total quality of customer service you provide will increase.  That means more satisfied customers, and it increases the likelihood of creating more fans of your brand.  Most brands don’t understand this, but one of the easiest ways to create new fans is to give a frustrated customer excellent customer service.  That will often convert an upset customer into an advocate for your brand.

Share your successes, and your failures

No matter how many touchpoints your company offers customers to contact you with a service issue, the employees manning the frontlines should be in constant contact.  If your support team on Twitter, for example, is having success providing customer service, you want to share with other areas of CS what’s working.  Reverse-engineer why the CS experience on Twitter is better for customers so you can share what’s working with the rest of your organization.  That way your team that handles the call center may be able to apply some of the lessons learned from the Twitter support team to improve the experience callers see with customer support.

It’s equally important to share your failures.  Let other members of your customer support team diagnosis your efforts and give you insight into how to improve, based on what’s worked for them.  A fresh set of eyes are often necessary to spot shortcomings that can be corrected.  Another good idea is to have a private message board or forum just for your customer support team so they can bounce ideas off each other and share thoughts.

The bottom line is that just as communication with your customers facilitates understanding, the same process works internally.  The more communication between all areas of your customer service department, the greater the chance to improve the experience for your customers.

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The Death Knell for Social Networking Sites: Mainstream Usage

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The first online portal I joined was Prodigy in 1991.  It was actually a great experience, there was just no one there.  But the few people that did use the mostly text-based service were very friendly and it wasn’t unusual to interact with someone on one of the pseudo-message boards and share your home address with an invitation for others to write a letter.  Different times.

From there I went to CompuServe in the mid-1990s and AOL soon after that.  Both CS and AOL were also internet providers, and at the time it was some outrageous amount, like $25 for 10 hours online.  For a month!  I often spend more than 10 hours online in a day!

Then around 1997 or so, AOL announced that it was changing it’s price structure and removing the hourly cap on online access.  They rolled out the $25 for unlimited access and it was a total game-changer.  Unfortunately, it also totally changed the experience on AOL.  Suddenly, there were kids everywhere!  I feel like the old man shaking his cyber-fist but suddenly I had to learn what ‘LOL’ and ‘OMG!’ meant, along with ‘trolling’, ‘noobs’ and the endless string of 🙂 😛 XOXO.

AOL had gone mainstream, and in the process, the experience that it’s core users had become accustomed to had changed greatly.  Ironically, we are now seeing the same thing happen in reverse with Facebook.  Facebook started out as a site for only college students.  Then the restriction of having an edu address to access FB was lifted, which meant that recent college grads and soon-to-be college students (IOW the younger and older siblings of current FB users) started checking out the site.

The social media geeks found FB in 2007.  Over the next 2-3 years its userbase grew at an astronomical rate.  Suddenly it seemed like every kid from the age of 14-24 was on Facebook.

Then the parents found out that their kids were on Facebook.  Suddenly parents everywhere that had little to no idea what their kids were up to, only had to go on Facebook at it was all there!

As you might expect, Facebook is quickly becoming ‘uncool’ to these kids. In fact, Facebook recently verified that young teens are leaving the site.  Where are they going?  To sites that their parents haven’t discovered yet like SnapChat, Instagram and Path.  Which are now growing like crazy, that is until mom finds out about them…

It’s truly the paradox of growing an online site or portal: You need to reach a certain mass of users to attract more users.  And you need to monetize those users, which is another reason you want more users.  But the simple fact is that adding more users changes the overall experience.  It has for every social media site I’ve used for the last 20+ years.  And when the overall experience changes from what made the site appealing to begin with, people leave.

If you are trying to create an online community site, or even if you are trying to build a blog readership, always focus on delighting and retaining your first users.  These are the builders of your base, the people that love your experience and tell others about it.  When you get in a rush to bring in new users too quickly, you change the experience, which means you lose those first users that are really the foundation for you entire community.  It’s like building a pyramid, you have a strong foundation, then you start slowly building the pyramid.  Then suddenly you start to quickly add on and going skyward with the pyramid, while at the same time you start removing the foundation.  Obviously the pyramid will soon collapse under its own weight.

Never pursue growth at the expense of user experience.  Facebook’s growth was driven by kids.  Kids that are now deciding they don’t like being on the site anymore.  When the foundation is removed the collapse isn’t very far behind.

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The Greatest Marketing Lesson: Passion Trumps Control

We all want to be rock stars, even brands.  Because rock stars have fans that love them like this:

Fans that so passionately love their favorite rock star that they literally break down and start crying when they talk about them.  And brands don’t have that. Except, when they do:

So if we accept that brands can have fans that love them just as passionately as rock stars do, then the question becomes why don’t more brands have such devoted fans? 

When I started writing Think Like a Rock Star, the question I wanted to answer is why so many rock stars like Lady Gaga have fans that love them, while most brands do not.  I expected to learn that rock stars simply have an innate advantage when it comes to creating and cultivating fans.

In fact, I learned that rock stars aren’t doing anything to create and cultivate fans that brands can’t do.  Instead, the answer to why rock stars have fans and brands don’t lies in what brands aren’t willing to do.

The Greatest Marketing Tool Ever Invented

The rock concert.

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I just love this photo.  Look at those smiling faces!  Happy people in the audience, and on the stage.  Everyone happy, happy, happy.

Think about what a rock concert is.  It’s a way that rock stars have created to:

1 – Give a special experience to its biggest fans (that helps validate why they are fans to begin with)

2 – Sell that experience to its fans

3 – Sell merchandise to its fans

4 – Bring its biggest fans together in one place and connect them to each other

That fourth and final point is what makes concerts so valuable to rock stars.  Sure, the ticket and merchandise sales create a huge direct benefit to the rock star, but bringing all those fans together is an incredible driver of positive word of mouth for the rock star.  Think about it, thousands of people that share a common interest are placed in the same area for several hours.  What are they going to do before and after (and during) the concert?  Interact with other fans and talk about how and why they love their favorite rock star.  It helps validate why they are fans, and when they leave the concert, those fans will feel better about being a fan of the rock star and by extension better about themselves.

In essence, the fans are marketing for the rock star.  Those fans are going to go home and tell all their friends about what an amazing experience the concert was and they will encourage their friends and family to attend a concert as well.  So the simple act of connecting fans to each other is incredibly powerful.

And it’s backed by facts and science.  First, there are a plethora of studies that word of mouth is a more effective and trusted form of communication than any type of communication that originates from a brand.  IOW if you want to sell your widget to my friend Tim, the odds are that my telling him to buy your widget will result in a sale long before your commercial will.

Additionally, science backs the power of letting passionate people spread your message.   Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute concluded that it only takes 10 percent of a population holding an unshakable belief in order to convince the majority to adopt that same belief.  In fact, the scientists found that this will always be the case.  This study speaks to the power of letting your most passionate fans spread your message.  It’s no coincidence that two of the most popular business case studies for building fans (Maker’s Mark, The Fiskateers) both have elements built into it that connects fans to each other.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the average brand won’t trust its marketing messages with its most passionate customers even if that brand understands the business value of positive word of mouth.  Because even though most brands understand and appreciate the power of word of mouth, they value and covet having control over the marketing messages they send their customers even more.

So then the answer to why rock stars have fans and brands do not goes back to simple marketing.  But not so much the message itself, but how that message is conveyed to others.

If we accept that the average customer views another customer to be more credible than the average brand, then we also must accept that the average customer views marketing messages from another customer to be more credible than marketing messages from the average brand.

What you gain in control, you lose in credibility.  We talk about how brands need to build ‘relationships’ with their customers, but healthy relationships are built on trust.  If your brand doesn’t trust its customers, you probably won’t keep them very long.

Pic via Kmeron

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How to Mobilize Your Brand Advocates Through Storytelling

With the decline of traditional media and it’s effectiveness, brands have been turning to brand advocates to get their message across to potential customers.

Brand advocates are existing customers of a brand who are the biggest fans of that brand and who are passionate about the brand and its products. They don’t need an incentive to spread their love and ignite a word of mouth (both online and offline), because they are emotionally invested in brand’s mission and its story.

Neilsen’s 2012 survey of global trust in advertising found that 92 percent of respondents trust recommendations from people they know, and 70 percent trust consumers’ opinions posted online. And this isn’t the only data point that speaks to the power of advocates. At BRANDERATI we have put together a deck of the 26 stats marketers should know about advocacy that you might find interesting.

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The most powerful thing about organic advocacy is the story behind customer’s experience. And because the endorsement is not paid for by the brand, and the story is something others can truly connect with, it becomes a great motivator in getting others to act on the endorsement. Advocacy, done right, becomes true influence. And influence is what impacts behaviors. Because the ultimate goal of marketing is to not just to tell a great story, but tell a story that would make people want to get to know a brand and buy the product. And that’s what advocacy is all about.

Many brands have been turning to customers, asking them to tell their own stories and putting their own fans center-stage. By giving their most vocal advocates a platform to share their own experiences the brands are effectively turning their brand love into authentic influence. Brands are able to spark engagement around real stories from real customers in real-time, thus massively increasing the reach of their message and driving impact to company’s bottom line.

Let’s take a look at several examples.

Buick

Buick wanted to change perception of its brand, and they thought the best way to do this was to ask their own advocates why they love their Buicks and to share their stories. In only a few weeks, Buick advocates had written over 1,600 love letters and 16% of advocates had shared them on Facebook. The individual stories were magnified, thanks to the brand power of Buick – individuals were given a corporate platform and their stories reached further than they would have on their own.

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Google

One marketing problem that faces a brand like Google is that, although it is a truly massive, global brand, it is very hard to represent their services in a visual way. To give their marketing a human quality, Google asked customers to tell their own stories of the ways in which Google had changed their lives, their organizations or their businesses.

The results were commercials that were inspiring, touching and emotional – quite a feat from a software company. This one from Mark Kempton, whose survival of the Queenland flooding depended on his rescuers using Google Maps, has been viewed over 5.5 million times on YouTube, and brings an individual story to a global audience.

Weight Watchers

EkaterinaPicWWFor Weight Watchers, sharing customers’ stories is about inspiring others and giving credibility to their diet plan. They use celebrities for many of their campaigns, but they also give a platform to their ‘ordinary’ fans who have used their plan to shed the pounds. Their website, magazine and marketing all feature many stories of real people who have lost weight through Weight Watchers – so you can find someone just like you to use as a role model. The company is always on the look-out for success stories so that they can provide a constant stream of positive messages to inspire their customers through their online and off-line channels.

 

 

Conclusion

To tell customers stories effectively you need to connect with fans and ask them to tell you about the difference your product or service has made to their lives. Sharing their story widely can help their individual tales reach a much larger audience than they would ordinarily. Your brand platform combined with your customers’ inspirational stories can lead to a winning combination of advocacy and influence. But to do so effectively and in a sustainable way, you have to build authentic relationships with your advocates and fans long-term. Without that you will just create another short-term marketing campaign, whereas what you are really looking for is inspiring a movement around your brand, your mission, your story.

 

033Ekaterina Walter led strategic and marketing innovation for brands such as Intel and Accenture, and is currently a co-founder and CMO of Branderati. She is an international speaker and author of the WSJ bestseller “Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook’s Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg” and co-author of “The Power of Visual Storytelling: How to Use Visuals, Videos, and Social Media to Market Your Brand.” You can find her on Twitter: @Ekaterina or her blog: http://www.ekaterinawalter.com/.