allaboutadvocacy.com

Paying for Advocates?

Forrester Research really stirred the social media pot this week when they launched their report, Add Sponsored Conversations To Your Toolbox: Why You Should Pay Bloggers To Talk About Your Brand. Their POV is that paying someone to blog about your product, provided full disclosure of the sponsored relationship, is one more communications tool for marketers to leverage. Since the release on March 2 through the morning of March 6, there have been 95 mentions of “sponsored conversation” in social media. In the entire month of February there were only two. The clamor is generally over the appropriateness of this tactic. I am not joining this discussion, rather I raise the issue because the Forrester report underscores what we at Weber Shandwick have been demonstrating through our research for a few years now - there are benefits when companies tap into their advocates who can spread positive word-of-mouth (we call it “Return on Advocacy“).

Our latest research identifies that there are also reputational returns from advocacy. Risky Business: Reputations Online^TM, conducted with the Economist Intelligence Unit among more than 700 senior executives worldwide, found that positive word-of-mouth about a company is considered almost as important as corporate transparency and is more important than financial performance and employee talent in terms of value to a company’s reputation.  

CEOs and Chairmen especially believe in the impact of word-of-mouth on company reputation. Not only is positive word-of-mouth more important to those in the corner office, the power of positive word-of-mouth to counteract negative word-of-mouth seems to be recognized more clearly by CEO/Chairs. They consider negative word-of-mouth as critical to damaging reputation as positive word-of-mouth is to building reputation. Other executives may be minimizing the “buffer” effect positive word-of-mouth has on negative word-of-mouth.

These executives acknowledge what earlier global consumer research conducted by Weber Shandwick with KRC Research found, that advocates have significant influence to spread their point-of-view and mobilize others to act. Regardless of your opinion about paid conversations, it’s impossible to overlook the influence of advocates on a company’s bottom-line, especially during these tough times.