Do You Under-Invest in Advocacy?

Author Note: This post originally appeared in the Adobe Experience Delivers blog. You can find it here. This version has some updates and new ideas.

Often when people talk about the social media phenomenum, they seem to be focused on the risk of brand damage. People bring up stories like “United Breaks Guitars” (purposely not linked here due to the focus of the article) and cite how much more likely people are to share bad experiences than good ones. As a result, there is a tendency to focus on social “listening” activities to making sure that brand damage is not occurring.

While I am a fan of “listening”, I think focusing primarily on “brand protection” is a mistake and a missed opportunity. An associate of mine, Steven Webster (who is now with Microsoft) pointed out an interesting quote from Bill Bernbach, one of advertising’s greatest thinkers and the father of the “Think Small” campaign for Volkswagen, and the AVIS “We are number 2, so we try harder” campaign.

“We are so busy measuring public opinion that we forget we can mold it. We are so busy listening to statistics we forget that we can create them.”

The idea of “creating statistics” is reinforced by some information I’ve cited before that I found in a blog post at MackCollier.com and will quote it here again:

“Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have 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.”

These ideas make me think we may be spending money in the wrong places. While many companies have loyalty programs, those are generally very broad based and not focused on advocacy. (I am loyal to my local CVS drug store, but I am an advocate for Sonos). I never tell anyone how good (or bad) my CVS is—even with their nice prescription notification services, but I can’t seem to stop telling people about Sonos.

In fact, I’ve looked at a lot of reports on evolving marketing budgets and the general consensus seems to be that most of the money goes to advertising. Money spent on social is often about “being there” and marketing through social channels. I’ve yet to see anyone make the focus of their marketing program the development of a strong (10% or greater) base of advocates.

Do you ever here businesses talk about the number of strong brand advocates they have? Rarely, but they will talk about the number of people that “like” them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter–regardless of the level of engagement in these broad audiences.

A greater focus on advocacy might be worth a try right now.

To pursue this approach requires focus in two directions—on the advocates and on your business. For advocates, its a three step program:

1. Identify – Using tools like NetPromoter, Voice of the Customer Programs, Listening Posts, and emerging social analytics tools, seek to identify the people that are passionate about your company, products, and/or brand. Some of those passionate people may not start as promoters–but turning them around with great experiences can provide immeasurable value to your business.
2. Embrace – While not violating their trust (see below), find ways to embrace these passionate supporters and let them know that they are appreciated. Connect with them emotionally. This also requires a new way to measure customer value–its not just about how much they buy (and how much it costs to support them)–its also about how many folks they influence to buy (saving you lots of selling costs).
3. Empower – Create, or support, platforms and tools that enable them to be your voice in the crowd. Deepen those emotional ties. Then, your advocates will tout you when appropriate, defend you when needed, and generally be a front line force for your company. The exact nature and approach for these programs is more of a greenfield for some innovative company to take the lead.

Focusing on these three steps, and measuring the impact, will prove the value of advocacy to your business. But advocacy does not come easily.

People have been talking about it for a long time.

Back in 2004, Glen Urban published a paper in the MIT Sloan Management Review called “The Emerging Era of Customer Advocacy”. In it, he identified eight factors that a company needs to focus on to “become trustworthy in the eyes of its customers” (he viewed trust as the key to any advocacy strategy—something covered in other posts–including my last one on little things that can improve experiences). Those factors are:

• Transparency – Not hiding business practices and issues from impacted customers
• Quality of Product and Services – High Quality products are ones that companies have no probem promoting honestly
• Product Comparison – Helping customers find alternatives if your products don’t fit their needs
• Alignment of Incentives – Ensuring that rewards for advocate, employees, and agents promotes trustworthy behavior
• Partnering – Creating a partnership environment with customers that goes beyond the core business relationship
• Cooperative Design – Engaging customers in design practices.
• Supply Chain – Ensuring your partners behave consistent with your brand promise
• Comprehensiveness – Creating an environment where there is complete company commitment to building trust

These eight ideas are very broad based, but tie in well with customer experience. Great customer experiences deliver on brand promises (at any phase of the customer journey). Consistent delivery on brand promises builds trust. Trust provides the framework for advocacy. And, developing advocacy requires some science (to identify advocates) and art (to embrace and empower them emotionally).

Putting advocacy development at the core of your social business strategy should be a priority. Remember it only takes a passionate 10% to sway the majority, but your brand needs to find the right targets for the number of advocates it wants to develop and nurture. Establishing and tracking these goals is key to social success. It would be great to hear companies spend more time talking about the size of their advocate community more often than their broad follower numbers.

And imagine the power of a passionate 10% coming to your defense when something bad happens to someone else. Its definitely worth more proactive consideration and investment.