social reach

Long-term Advocacy Enhanced by Emotional Connection

One of the most valuable returns of the social media proliferation is the renewed fervor around Brand Advocacy. The truly remarkable thing about Brand Advocates is that they proactively recommend brands and products without getting paid…but if they are not getting paid, then what is their motivator for advocacy?

The #1 reason Brand Advocates recommend brands and products is that they want to help others (source: “Engaging Advocates Through Search and Social Media,”comScore, Yahoo!, Dec. 2006).   In other words, there is an emotional component to their advocacy.  The emotional component is not just important for Brand Advocates and their social graph, it is also key to the marketer and brand relationship with their Brand Advocates. If you can make an emotional connection with your consumer, that will go far in building long-term advocacy.

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Brand Advocates are People Too… Nurture that Relationship!

It is true that Brand Advocates have value in part due to the reach of their relationships within and across their social networks.  When they encourage their friends and colleagues to buy our products, our brand’s buying power increases exponentially, and it simply makes good business sense to leverage those opportunities.

The risk here is that we can become so focused on our Brand Advocates’ social reach that we see them only as a means to an end (sales) and stop seeing them as people.  We might get greedy and start looking right past them to market directly to their networks, ignoring our Advocates themselves.  While that marketing method can still be somewhat teffective, it costs more, it is more difficult to implement and maintain, and it is dangerous to our brand.  We cannot de-value our Advocates and expect our brands to thrive!

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“Social Broadcasting” misses the point.

Although blogger Zennie Abraham shares some interesting ideas in his post “Social Networking is Really Social Broadcasting”, I just don’t buy it.

I do get his point that social networking has a big “broadcasting” component to it, and I understand his reasoning of trying to place it in that basket so advertisers can see it as the same as other media buys, but in my opinion, that’s just trying to fit a square peg in a round hole simply to make it sell better. It will sell when, and the key word is when, the marketing community wraps it arms around its true value… and not before.

I don’t think “broadcasting” is the right word because it only addresses the most basic aspects of connections and is primarily a numbers game of how many people you can push your message out to.

Social networking, on the other hand, fully uses the powerful sharing aspect of social media (and the social graph) to rely on and build relationships between people. These relationships then provide you the ability to spread a message through your network and into the network of others due to the true value of the message — value that continues to increase simply by the fact that you have approved and recommended it by passing it along.

Take, for example, Twitter. Most in the marketing community misunderstand Twitter …when used wisely, it is not a broadcast tool or a standalone tool for marketing, it’s an enhancement to your marketing strategy and an extremely valuable networking, experimenting and seeding tool. While it allows you to provide a broadcast-like tweet to all your followers, most will never see a single tweet and the real value is that it also allows you to interact directly with one person in plain sight of thousands of people and allows them to pass along to others in their network. Think about how much we learn about someone by watching their interactions with others, and you can understand how this feature of Twitter quickly creates (or destroys!) trust throughout your social network.

Social networking is also different from broadcasting in that it isn’t just a one-time send-out of information. Powerful social networking includes a back and forth exchange between you and your audience (network members), and their audience, giving you more than one chance to make an impression, clarify your message, and most importantly, build trust. Let’s not forget that it’s trust that builds customer loyalty!

Ted Rubin

Women hold the purse strings – talk with them!

Women hold the family online shopping purse strings, so no matter what your product, you should be talking to women. Women are the ones using social media to build their relationships, and in this era of Relationship Commerce, those relationships are pure gold.

It’s the women who will take the time to ask for and give product recommendations. It’s the women who will tap into their networks to find the good deals. It’s the women who will gladly make sure all their friends hear about a wonderful new product they discovered… or a terrible product they would never buy again.

However, these relationships are meaningless for you and your brand if you don’t have ways for these women to easily talk with you. They want to know they can trust you, and how do they figure that out? They build a relationship with you, the “influencer” (seller) just like they do with their friends and other trusted information sources. You absolutely must make sure that women find it easy to talk to you and about you!

  1. Make sure social media tools and your own online communities are as easily accessible as your online product information. This shows that you are not afraid to have your customers / clients talk with each other, so you must not have anything to hide.
  2. Interact publicly with individuals of your audience. You know that the most successful relationships are two-way streets, so keep that in mind as you interact with your “audience.” Social media allows you to build very visible relationships (2000 Twitter followers? 2000 possible observers of any of your interactions) so every single interaction counts. An information push won’t get you anywhere – you have to ask questions and answer them! Then ask follow-up questions and answer those also. Follow me on twitter (@TedRubin) to see what I mean.
  3. Communicate consistently. Don’t expect to build trust if you are only responsive to your audience every now and then. Build social media response time into every day and your consistency will pay off. Only pay attention once in a while, and you have no chance to build a relationship. In other words, just like you can’t disappear in non-digital life and expect to keep your relationships in tact, you can’t just disappear online.

So take another look at your product and your brand offering. Are you talking with the women? You should be. You need to be. If you’re not, start making changes TODAY – your brand success depends on it.

Ted Rubin

The Power of Social Reach

Remember the Yellow Pages? When we needed business information or personal contact information, we would have to find the right book from a huge stack, then flip through all those pages to find what we were looking for. If we needed a contact in a different state, we had to make phone calls to find a possible connection to someone we already knew. And we probably didn’t even think about making connections with someone in another country.

Now it’s a whole different world with social media, with almost instantaneous personal connections to people all around the world. Instead of just one-to-one connections, we get one-to-very-very-many connections as we can now tap into the extensive networks of everyone on our own social graph.

If I need a contact in a particular company, or city, or country, all I need to do is post a question on Facebook or better yet, Twitter, asking if someone has a trusted contact in that company or location, and I will soon have a name and contact information. If a colleague across the country needs help in their own town, a quick tweet will likely reach at least one person who can either directly provide that assistance to my colleague, or at least provide the right connection.

We also need to remember that bloggers are an important part of social media’s reach. Just recently, I had two different situations of helping bloggers reach other bloggers in another part of the country – due to the broad social media reach I have created by putting relationships first, I was able to help them connect and get the assistance they needed within minutes by simply tweeting out a request for a contact in a very specific community. Complete strangers tied together through one trusted connection, and time and distance were immediately condensed through the use of social media.

At OpenSky, we are all about the relationships and social reach of our trusted influencers (bloggers, authors, editors, celebrities, social media mavens) and their communities (networks). Instead of just offering products for sale, we offer connection and community to influencers who have products they believe in (from innovative suppliers) and want to share with (sell to) their network. This is the new way the world will connect, where relationships matter.

The world is now your oyster, use social media to find the pearl(s)!