Selling Your Colleagues on the Importance of Connecting With Your Brand’s Fans

Thanks to Kelly Hungerford for suggesting today’s #RockstarChat topic: How to Get Colleagues and Employees Involved in the Process to Better Connect With Your Fans.  #RockstarChat will be on Twitter today at 1pm Central.

This is an important topic because as you are trying to build out programs to help your brand better connect with its fans, you will probably encounter some internal resistance.  You may need to convince some of your colleagues of the value of connecting with your brand’s fans.

So to get skeptical co-workers on board, let’s show them how connecting with your brand’s fans will actually help them be more productive and better at their jobs.  If we can show them how connecting with your fans will directly benefit them, your co-workers are far more likely to help you with your efforts.

In Think Like a Rock Star(In Chapter 5), I talk about the four different ways you can work with your fans:

1 – To help you promote your brand

2 – To help you drive sales for your brand

3 – To help you provide customer service

4 – To help you collect customer feedback

So when you are trying to sell a co-worker on the value of connecting with your brand’s fans, ask yourself ‘How would connecting with our fans help this person do their job more effectively?’  For example, if you are trying to sell a marketing manager on the importance of a brand ambassador program, you might point out how connecting with your fans will mean more promotion and exposure for your brand.  If you are trying to get a customer service manager on board, you might show them how your fans can help other customers with their problems, potentially saving your brand money and time dealing with customer service issues.

We’ll have a lot more advice and ideas at today’s #RockstarChat, on Twitter at 1pm Central!  Also, if you haven’t pre-ordered Think Like a Rock Star yet, Amazon has dropped the price to an even $11.00!  The book will be released sometime within the next 3 weeks, and I am proud to say it has 5-star reviews on Amazon!  If you’ve already read the book via NetGalley, please post your review on Amazon so your insights will help other people decide if the book is right for them.  Thank you!

UPDATE:  So we just finished our fabulous #RockstarChat discussion.  Here’s the transcript.

In the chat, we came up with a three step process for helping your co-workers get on board with the value of connecting with your fans:

1 – Educate your co-workers on the value of engagement.  Teach them the importance of engaging with fans and customers.  Show them what happens as a result of that engagement.  It’s also a great idea to show them past examples of where you have engaged with fans and the positive outcome (this also helps answer the ‘what’s the ROI?’ question).

2 – Educate your co-workers on HOW to engage.  After they see the value of engagement, work with them to learn HOW to properly engage.  If you have the resources, a formal training program for the company would be a good idea here, it could be similar to and compliment any social media training programs your brand may have.

3 – Educate your co-workers on the value of building relationships with your fans.  You don’t want them to just engage with your fans whenever it benefits your brand directly.  You want them to learn the value of answering fans, and helping them when it serves the fans, not the brand.  If you create relationships with fans, that simply gives them more reason to advocate on your behalf!

Thanks to everyone that joined #rockstarchat today.  Would you add anything to this list?