First, please read this post on 10 Things to Remember When Creating a Brand Ambassador Program.

This post is based on the framework that I introduced in my book Think Like a Rock Star: How to Create Social Media and Marketing Strategies That Turn Customers Into Fans.  So if you already have a copy, this post relates to Chapter 9.  The framework discussed in this post is independent of  whether or not your company has a brand ambassador program.  It can work with or without one.

There are two many teams to focus on creating and inter-relating:

1 – The Brand Advisory Panel.  This is an internal team within your brand made up primarily of select employees.

2 – The Customer Advisory Panel.  This is an external team made up primarily of selected customers.

The key is that both of these groups have their own responsibilities, but they also work together and are in constant contact.

Core Responsibilities:

Brand Advisory Panel:

• Working with the CAP (Customer Advisory Panel) to ensure that it receives all relevant information from the brand
• Works with the CAP to ensure a flow of feedback in both directions
• Works to distribute all relevant customer feedback from the CAP within the brand to make sure that the feedback is distributed to the areas within the brand that are best suited to act on that information.
• Works within the brand to create a structure so that employees that connect directly with customers are able to collaborate and share ideas
• Responsible for educating employees on how to properly communicate with customers, including handling complaints, etc

Customer Advisory Panel:

• Ensuring that the brand hears and understands the voice of the customer
• Works with the BAP to ensure a flow of feedback in both directions
• Provides the BAP with all relevant feedback from customers, including complaints as well as praise
• Receives feedback from the BAP based on previously provided feedback from the CAP as well as new information, and communicates feedback to customers as appropriate

Basically, both groups are designed to encouraged a flow of feedback and information.  The CAP connects with customers directly and receives feedback from them.  This feedback is then relayed to the BAP.  The BAP then takes that feedback from the CAP and distributes it internally within the brand as appropriate, and/or supplies the CAP with feedback based on its feedback.  By facilitating this flow of information from the brand to the customer and vice versa, both brand and customer has a better understanding of each other.  Which means the brand can more effectively market to the customer, design products and services it is more likely to purchase, etc.

How to Staff the Brand Advisory Panel and the Customer Advisory Panel

To a great degree, the size of both the BAP and CAP is a direct function of the brand’s resources.  There are a few considerations regardless of the available resources:

1 – There should be at least one employee who is a member of the CAP and there should be at least one customer that is a member of the BAP.  For example, you want a brand employee to be a member of the CAP so that employee can work with the customers that are a part of the CAP to give them the brand’s point of view.  Likewise, you want a customer to be a member of the BAP to ensure that the voice of the customer is heard and understood by the BAP at all times.

2 – If you have a dedicated Brand Ambassador Program, the BAP will oversee this program.

3 – Customers who are selected to the CAP should be considered at minimum part-time employees and should be compensated.

I cover this process in much greater detail in the book including a breakdown of the exact employee roles on both the BAP and CAP, and how to vet potential customer candidates for the CAP.

But the main points to remember if you want to create a similar structure for your brand:

1 – Create an internal (brand-side) and external (customer-side) group, each of which is responsible for collecting feedback from the brand/customer and relaying it to the other group, and vice versa.

2 – Have a specific feedback flow within your brand, so that your brand can take feedback from your customer group and communicate that feedback internally to the area within your brand that is best suited to act on that feedback.

3 – Work with your customer group to ensure that the brand’s point of view is understood and relayed to the customer, and vice versa.  Again the overarching goal of this structure is to facilitate the flow of feedback and information between the customer and the brand.

Last week I keynoted the Social Media Tourism Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.  It was a fabulous event and one of the recurring themes covered was the importance of giving up control of marketing to your destination’s fans and advocates.  Obviously I was thrilled with this, but at the same time I realize that this can be scary as hell for many marketers regardless of the industry you’re in.

What it comes down to is changing your mindset, and understanding the mindset of your fans and advocates.  Let’s tackle each area separately:

Changing Your Marketing Mindset

As a business/brand/destination/organization your marketing mindset is to promote yourself.  To get the word out about who you are and what you do.  Because people can’t and won’t buy from you until they know who you are and what you can do for them, right?

But in recent years the advent of digital content creation tools has changed the game for marketers.  Now there is an incredible amount of content being created every single day.  In the days before social media it was far easier to buy attention.  Today, it has to be earned.

So how do you earn attention?  By creating useful content.  Look at the content I have created here.  Hopefully you’ll look at the posts and view them as useful posts that can help people.  But when you get down to it, these posts are marketing.  I am marketing my ability to work with companies to help them better connect with their customers and cultivate advocates via social media and other marketing channels.  There’s not a lot of directly promotional content, in fact I probably should have more.  The idea is to create useful content that you will use and share with others.  In doing so, the content spreads to people that can hire me and it also helps to establish my expertise.

So instead of creating content that directly promotes your business, create content that’s customer-centric, that focuses on problems that your customers are having.  Becky McCray suggests that you should think of every question that your customers have about your products and business, and answer those questions on your blog.  In short the rule is this:  The more valuable your content is for your audience, the more it will spread and the more it will promote you.

Understanding the Mindset of Your Fans and Advocates

Many marketers view their fans and customers as being more or less the same.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Customers feel little to no natural affinity for your brand, while fans have extremely high levels of loyalty toward your brands.  Fans want to interact with you and will in fact seek out ways to do so.  On the other hand, your average customer could care less if it ever interacts with you unless there’s a problem or issue it wants you to address.

Additionally, it’s important to know that fans consider themselves to be owners of your brand.  They consider your brand to be their brand, which is a big reason why they love your brand.

This also means that they will act in what they perceive to be the best interests of your brand.  They will actively promote it to others.  They will bring what they feel are potential problems to your attention (and be happy to help you fix the problem).

The bottom line with your fans is that they are the good guys.  They literally want to work on your behalf to help your brand, so instead of keeping them at arm’s distance, you should work with them and make sure to thank them.  Early and often.

 

So here’s your plan for changing your marketing and your mindset:

1 – Focus on creating content that creates value for your current and potential customers/donors/visitors/partners.  If your content creates value for others then they will use it and share it.  Which means more exposure and opportunities for you.

2 – Don’t ignore your fans, view them as your partners.  They want what’s best for you, so connect with them and give them the attention and respect they deserve.

First, consider your typical brand advocate.  This person is going out of their way to sing your praises to other customers.  They view themselves as owners of your brand, so they are acting in what they perceive to be the brand’s best interests.  Here’s four examples of how your brand advocates are saving you money:

1 – Brand advocates lower your marketing costs.  Marketing communications are utilized to generate sales, typically via acquiring new customers.  But brand advocates do that for you.  Brand advocates are spending every day promoting your brand to other customers, and encouraging them to buy from your brand.  And given that it costs your brand 6-7 more to acquire one new customer than it does to retain an existing one, the marketing cost savings add up quickly.

2 – Brand advocates lower your customer service costs.  As brand advocates interact with other customers, they are also answering their questions and helping them with any issues or problems they have.  Additionally, brand advocates create content that can help solve questions or problems that other customers have.  Every problem that another customer solves for a brand saves your brand the time it would have taken to work with that customer individually to help them.  And since time is money…

3 – Brand advocates can help you diffuse or avoid a social media crisis.  This is a critical benefit that your fans provide that most brands miss.  If your fans encounter people attacking your brand, they will defend it.  This greatly decreases the chance of other people ‘piling on’ and it also tends to ‘scare off’ the people that launched the attack.  Think of your advocates as having a guard dog in your yard.  If someone comes into your yard starting trouble, they will start barking and scare them off!

4 – Brand advocates lower your market research costs.  Advocates proactively connect with your brand,  They look for reasons to reach out to your brand, and often they do so while providing feedback.  They tell you what they like and dislike about your brand.  Remember that advocates view themselves as the owners of your brand, so if they see something ‘wrong’ with your brand, they will notify you of that problem.  Of course, since they love your brand they will also offer a solution to the issue and want to work with you to make that solution become reality.

 

Why working directly with your brand advocates makes sense

Take all of these benefits that your advocates provide for you naturally.  Now if you had a program in place to work directly with your fans, you accelerate each of these benefits.  And since we are discussing cost-savings, then you increase the amount of money your brand saves by working with its fans.  So the effort can easily pay for itself!

Here’s a few examples of how brands are working directly with their fans to see big benefits:

Pitney Bowes set up a user forum were its users provide customer service directly to other customers.  PB has tracked that every 5 visits to a forum question averts one customer service call, which PB places an internal value of $10 on.  You can do the math, but this is a huge cost-savings to the brand, that only happened because Pitney Bowes created a forum that allows its fans to more effectively help each other (see point #2 above).

Paper.li has set up a program where its members are given advance access to new features that the publishing platform will be rolling out.  The advantage here is that when Paper.li makes these new features available to everyone, its fans can go out and help other members realize the potential of the new features and why they make Paper.li better.  So this generates a marketing cost savings (point #1) as well as a customer support benefit.

The Red Cross avoided a potential disaster of a social media crisis a few years ago when an employee made a mistake and accidentally tweeted a personal tweet from the Red Cross account!  But since The Red Cross does such a great job of engaging its fans on Twitter and quickly addressed the situation, it turned out to be a big positive for the brand.

 

If you’d like to create a formal program to work with your fans, check out this post on creating a brand ambassador program.  Want more help?  Then check out Think Like a Rock Star.

Not sure if it pays to connect with your fans?  Try this very simple experiment:  For the next five people that tweet something positive about your brand on Twitter, reply to them and tweet the following: “Thank you so much, we really appreciate that!”

Now track the responses you get to those 5 tweets.  The responses you get were generated by you responding to your fans.  It’s that simple to do, and even if you only have 1 response, if you do that every time then you’ve just increased positive tweets about your brand by at least 20%.

Love the people that love you.  It really does pay off.

 

I’m not a huge fan of crowd-sourcing marketing content or campaigns.  The reason is because typically such campaigns attract an audience that has little or no loyalty to the brand, but instead wants to win a prize.

But I love the campaign that the Philippines conducted last year to drive interest in tourism.  The pacific island country launched an app called More Fun in the Philippines.  The app lets you overlay the slogan More Fun in the Philippines over a picture you take, but let’s you add an explanation of why ‘It’s More Fun in the Philippines’.  Here’s a few examples:

Once the pictures are taken and your caption added, they can be shared on Facebook, Twitter or as you see above, on a blog.  What I love about this crowd-sourcing effort is because it puts the content in the hands of people that have a passion for the brand.  This is key, because the people that will be interested in participating in this campaign are proud Filipinos that want to showcase the Philippines and let the rest of the world see their country as they do.

The Philippines took the content created by its citizens and used submissions on its website as well as in advertising.

“In a very real sense it’s a people power campaign because you can’t imagine how spontaneous this has all been. There’s this latent love of country that we have been able to unleash” explains Ramon Jimenez, Secretary of Tourism for the Philippines.

This campaign was incredibly popular, in fact the hashtag #morefuninthephilippines became the top trending topic on Twitter and visitors to the Philippines increased by 16% during the campaign, to record levels.

So if you want to do a similar crowd-sourcing campaign, keep in mind who you are appealing to and what their motivation is for creating content about your brand.  You want to put the content creation in the hands of people that have a natural affinity and loyalty to your brand, not those that are only encouraged to participate in order to win a prize.  Or worse, people that want to participate in order to mock your brand.