Category: Advocacy

Categories: Advocacy, Webinar Posted on

Webinar: Scale and Trust: Making the Case for a Formalized Social Advocate Program

Want to learn about Formalized Social Advocacy Programs? An embedded recording is below. What are some of the most advanced social media programs by companies? We see formalized Advocacy Programs like Fiskers Fiskateers, Intel Insiders, Microsoft MVPs, Walmart Moms (and Dads), and beyond (see this quora thread) as the most advanced. Why? In order to gain scale and trust, companies must give up significant control and management to allow these advocates a platform to speak. Furthermore, we found in our research that these advocacy programs often put the advocates front and center, often before the brand. Altimeter has been tracking these programs for research for over 2 years, and have conducted a handful of workshops for clients, but for the … Continue readingWebinar: Scale and Trust: Making the Case for a Formalized Social Advocate Program

Categories: Advocacy, Forbes, Social Media Posted on

Forbes: How To Create A Customer Advocacy Program

Social media doesn’t scale.  That’s right, social media doesn’t scale.  Consumers will only increase their adoption of social technologies, most social networking data shows this is going ‘up and to the right’.  You can never hire enough community managers to manage your millions of customers that are now using social channels to communicate.  You must have a strategy to scale. This article, which I originally wrote on my regular column on the Forbes CMO network explains in pragmatic steps what marketing executives must do to develop a scalable program.  I look forward to hearing what you’ve learned below. How To Create A Customer Advocacy Program CMOs must tap the voices of their customers. While marketers traditionally were the direct channel … Continue readingForbes: How To Create A Customer Advocacy Program

Categories: Advocacy, Matrix, Social Media Posted on

Matrix: Breakdown of Advocacy Marketing

The recession has been great for social marketing, in fact, I feel it’s spurred the industry on. With overall reduced marketing budgets, companies must innovate, and find new channels that are more efficient than the ‘carpet-bombing’ techniques of traditional marketing. There are a handful of goals that companies can have with social technologies, from learning, dialog, support, and innovation (see Charlene’s deck, starting at slide 8 to learn more), I want to drill down in the following matrix to focus on the goal of spreading, and word of mouth, and viral. I call this “Advocacy”. Marketers, who strive to find efficient ways of reaching customers at lower cost, seek ‘force-multipliers‘ or a method where using a small degree of energy … Continue readingMatrix: Breakdown of Advocacy Marketing

Categories: Advocacy, Community Marketing, Social Media, Word of Mouth Posted on

Checklist: Develop a Successful Advocacy Program

Recently, I attended a corporate event that showcased products related to an industry. Press, media, bloggers, and influencers were invited to attend, and meet a variety of vendors and see products. Featured were members of the company’s advocacy program, (a group of preferred clients), and were given products to demo. Some members of the this advocacy program are bloggers, in particular one with a journalistic background, who’s credibility came into question. While the event continued on, a not-impressed attendee (who claimed to be a journalist) started to make comments that some of the members of the advocacy program were not authentic and went so far as to say quite loudly during the presentation they were “shills” from the back of … Continue readingChecklist: Develop a Successful Advocacy Program