Archive for the 'Brand/Product Advocacy' Category
The summer has been distracting with vacations and glorious hot days. Our postings have not been as frequent but we still muse about advocacy all the time. Thanks for your patience and followship.
Thinking about advocates, in an article in the recent McKinsey Quarterly on leading business and technology trends, advocacy of course came up. In the article, they mention that 70% of executives said that their comapnies created value through Web communities, the ultimate advocacy network.
One example given was from Intuit which is worth mentioning here. Intuit hosts customer support groups for its financial and tax return products where more experienced customers provide advice and support to those in need of help. These Intuit advocates build their reputation credibility by noting the number of questions they answer and the number of thank yous they get from those they help.
Thought this was a great way of using advocates to help build loyalty to products and generate good vibes. McKinsey has the numbers to prove it. They found that when customer communities of advocates handle an issue, the per-contact cost can be as low as 10% of the cost to resolve the issue through traditional call centers. That’s a good ROI for advocacy.
Worth mentioning here on the advocacy blog.
Tags: Advocacy, advocates, communities, Intuit, McKinsey
Apparently April was Advocacy Measurement Month. I collected a number of fantastic and enormously valuable reports and articles published during April or so that are highly relevant to evaluating the impact of advocacy. I’ve summarized interesting findings and stats from each piece below that I thought are worth noting but hope that you’ll find the bytes interesting enough to click-thru to read the full analyses.
1. The McKinsey Quarterly: A New Way to Measure Word-of-Mouth Marketing (April 2010)
- Word-of-mouth is the primary factor behind 20 to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions
- McKinsey has developed the “word-of-mouth equity” index which measures a brand’s power to generate messages that influence the consumer’s decision to purchase
- In the mobile-phone market, McKinsey has found that the pass-on rates for messages can increase a company’s market share by 10 percent (positive messages) and reduce it by 20 percent (negative messages) over a two-year period. [If you are familiar with Weber Shandwick’s advocacy research, you may recall that badvocacy, or brand criticism, reaches nearly twice as many people as brand advocacy.]
- Marketers tend to build campaigns around emotional positioning, but McKinsey found that consumers actually talk and generate buzz about product functions
- About 8 to 10 percent of consumers are influentials, whose common factor is trust and competence in a particular subject area. Influentials generate three times more word-of-mouth messages than noninfluentials do, and each message has four times more impact on a recipient’s purchasing decision. About 1 percent of these people are digital influentials—most notably, bloggers—with disproportionate power to influence
- Marketing-induced consumer-to-consumer word of mouth generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising in categories as diverse as skincare and mobile phones
2. AdvertisingAge: Spotting the Creators of Peer Influence, by Josh Bernoff (April 20, 2010)
Through online word-of-mouth, people make over 500 billion impressions on each other about products and services annually. Forrester Research estimates that U.S. social network users create 256 billion impressions on other social networkers per year and blog posts, blog comments, ratings and reviews, etc. generate another 250 billion impressions per year (hence the roughly 500 billion impressions)
Forrester concludes:
- People’s influence on each other rivals online advertising. For comparison, for a 12-month period ending September 30 last year, Nielsen Online estimates advertisers created 1.974 trillion online advertising impressions, compared to the 500 billion impressions people make on each other about products and services. And peer impressions are more credible than advertising, since they come from friends.
- A minority of people generate 80% of the impressions. About 6.2% of the online adults generate 80% of the influence impressions. Around 13.8% of the online adults generate 80% of the influence posts.
3. Nielsen/Facebook Report: The Value of Social Media Ad Impressions (April 20, 2010)
One common form of advocacy on Facebook is through social ads. That is, if a user’s friends are fans of a brand on Facebook, the ad unit itself will contain the names of those friends. But does this lightweight form of endorsement actually impact the effectiveness of the advertising? Nielsen and Facebook compared the responses of users who had seen ads with social context against users who saw ads with no social context from the same campaign. A user would be eligible to see social context if one of their friends had previously “Become a Fan” of the brand running the advertisement.
The result? Social advocacy impacts consumers three-fold: Ad recall is substantially higher with social advocacy with a lift of 16% (vs. 10% for non-social ads), the awareness lift is doubled, and the purchase intent lift increases from 2% to nearly 8%.
4. Altimeter Group and Web Analytics Demystified: Social Marketing Analytics – A New Framework for Measuring Results in Social Media (April 22, 2010)
This report provides methods for quantifying your social media advocates, their reach/influence and their impact. It assumes that a company already has an agreed upon definition of advocates and a process for identifying them, for example, the individuals generating positive or negative discussion about your brand.
Finally, having nothing at all to do with measuring advocacy, April saw the release of a movie called “The Joneses.” David Duchovny and Demi Moore star as a couple planted by a consumer marketing company in a gated community to spread word-of-mouth about its goods and services with the upscale community. The intent, of course, is to drive demand for the products. When I read the review for this movie (haven’t seen it), I thought of how the value advocacy has become so acknowledged by the mainstream.
Recently became aware of this very cool mobile application that lets consumers advocate for causes just by scanning certain products in stores or restaurants with their iPhone or Android. It is called CauseWorld and it is sponsored by Citibank, Kraft Foods and Proctor & Gamble who have provided nearly $1,000,000 for you to donate. No purchase of their products is necessary – you walk into a store and scan the barcode of products. Each time you scan a product you earn “karmas” and when you earn enough, you can donate them to a variety of charities with which CauseWorld partners.
A really innovative way of turning advocacy into action.
In an article by Stefan Stern of the Financial Times, I always find something thoughtful for this blog. This past week he wrote about where marketing was going (or not going) in this current economic environment. Stern was describing his conversation with the “father of modern marketing” Phillip Kotler. One part of the conversation had to do with advocacy, the mainstay of this blog. The other one was just plain funny.
Kotler was reminiscing about a book he enjoyed titled Firms of Endearment (the best title). He said that in the book they talk about how some of the most successful companies spend less on marketing than the less successful ones. Sounds counterintuitive? Kotler says, “But they used the word of mouth effect of unpaid advocates – loyal customers – to boost their reputation.” Advocates will do your marketing for you if you mobilize them, listen to them and engage them. Our research at Weber Shandwick found this to be the case. Indeed. Kotler is apparently publishing a new book on the role of advocates in marketing titled Marketing 3.0.
What made me laugh was a statement by Kotler who is 79 years wise. He is quoted by Stern as saying, “At least it’s the finance people who are getting blamed for a change.” Marketers and communications professionals are getting by without the blame for awhile.
Tags: advocates, Financial Times, Weber Shandwick
As this blog has addressed many times before, there are many ways people demonstrate their advocacy for a company or brand. They talk or act on its behalf and actively spread word of mouth. They may wear their causes on their clothes and discuss them in social networks. They might carry branded products. They will pay a premium price for brands they support. In doing so, these advocates can have a significant impact on a business’ success (or failure if the business does something to damage its advocates’ trust).
Consumers aren’t the only ones with the ability to influence company success. Employees have increasing influence (see my first post on The Employee Advocate) and more opportunities to advocate for their employers. They often set up fan or group pages on Facebook for example. Of growing importance is their ability to “vote” their companies onto acclaimed “best employers” lists. These lists, awards and rankings not only help to recruit more great talent but signify to the world that the company values employees and in turn the valued and proud employees work harder for their customers. A client once told us that her company’s salesforce uses these honors as a sales tool because their customers want to do business with a company that treats its employees well. Happy employees, happy customers.
As close observers of these rankings (Weber Shandwick’s SCOREBOXX™ database includes approximately 900 awards of all kinds, roughly 100 of which recognize companies for its employee satisfaction and/or training and development), we’re seeing the popularity of these rankings growing. Most glaring has been an increase, particularly in the past year, in the number of our clients who want to understand how their strengths can be recognized by their industry, talent prospects and other stakeholders through unbiased third party recognition. Aside from that anecdote, here are just a few facts…
- A Google search of “best companies to work for” generates 661,000 results for the 2009 time period, compared with 190,000 in 2007 and 309,000 in 2008. That’s a stunning 248% increase of the topic’s online visibility.
- 50% of chief communications officers at North American Fortune 500 companies told us in our annual The Rising CCO study that awards and recognition are an important way their company leadership measures communications effectiveness.
- CNBC dedicated a five-minute segment to this week’s release of the the Fortune Best Companies to Work For list. Perhaps one of the most well known of the best employer rankings, this list uses a rigorous method to identify the best place to work in the U.S. with employee ratings accounting for most of the score.
- Glassdoor.com’s annual Employees’ Choice Awards of the 50 Best Places to Work included reviews of 11,000 companies among nearly 75,000 employees in 2008 and 37,000 companies among nearly 100,000 employees in 2009.
Based on facts like those above, and by the growing demand from clients to better understand and leverage these lists, we think that ‘best employer’ awards will take on more significance for promoting and rewarding good corporate cultures. Companies with less than stellar environments may be pressured to listen much more closely to employee opinions.
Tags: Weber Shandwick
Yesterday The New York Times teased an upcoming Strategic Management Journal paper about the positive influence of zealous employees. Their research found that strong sales growth is correlated with an organizational culture in which employees thought more highly of their company than did the public. In other words, when staff believes in its organization, pride and loyalty shows through and customers pick up on the positivity.
The theme of employee advocacy, and its importance to business success, was one of our key findings from research we released earlier this year (Risky Business: Reputations Online™ conducted with the Economist Intelligence Unit). Our study found that global executives believe that the best way to protect reputations online is to monitor employee satisfaction levels and respond to results from employee satisfaction surveys. Many executives echoed the importance of building “best places to work” cultures when asked in an open-ended question about the greatest reputation threats facing their companies over the next three years. As one Australian executive said in response to this question: “Failure to engage the passions of employees will cause the most damage to corporate reputation in the future.” Without a doubt, no company interested in protecting its reputation can afford to have a mob of grumbling employees online. Satisfied employees who are company advocates are the best antidote for–and defense against–reputation failure. A company’s culture is ultimately its best protection both online and offline.
Looking forward to the release of the Strategic Management Journal report. In the meantime, remember: your employees are your best advocates.
Talk about advocates. Microsoft’s new campaign for Windows 7 uses customers to help it make its selling points for its new operating system. The ads say, “I’m a PC and Windows 7 was my idea.” From what I have read about this campaign, there will also be print ads, banners, mobile ads, and all the many ways to reach customers. For those customers who had ideas on how to make Windows 7 work better for them, they now have a voice in the campaign and are featured as the real heroes. Supposedly one billion people helped Microsoft improve the new Windows product. That’s many advocates. Even employees are getting into the act. Real people as advocates makes great sense in a world where listening to your supporters and enthusiasts is the newest narrative. To learn more, read this article where I found out about this new initiative.
Tags: advocates, customers, Microsoft
Jeremiah Owyang, formerly of Forrester and now at Altimeter Group, recently posted some helpful tips on building a successful Advocacy Program on his blog. They are worth reviewing for those advocates among us.
Here is a brief rundown (paraphrased) on the 9 ideas that went into his checklist.
1. Get your internal officers onboard to deal with the “raw” discussions that will be coming your way from those noisy and vocal advocates you have enlisted and engaged. It is not as easy as it may sound.
2. Find credible advocates. Make sure they are the real thing and not posers with no influence or credibility. Make sure they have a platform and are highly regarded.
3. Disclose disclose disclose. Any advocay program should be upfront about the relationship between the company and advocate.
4. It’s their agenda, stupid. This is not about your company’s agenda so make sure that advocates are fully comfortable with you because their reptuation and yours are at stake.
5. Recognize your advocates but no pay day here. Owyang recommends letting advocates you enlist be beta testers or publicly thanking them or give them access to events.
6. Give advocates platforms to speak, whether it is your web site, social networks or letting others know that they are to be trusted.
7. Listen and act. Do something about what your advocates are saying about your products and services. Take their advice.
8. Turn them into a community. Figure out how to help them band together .
9. Measure your advocacy program and provide results.
Tags: Advocacy Program, advocates, Jeremiah Owyang
Wanted to direct you to a great article written by Weber Shandwick’s own Colin Byrne, CEO UK and Europe. It appeared last week and includes practical tips for minimizing reputation damage that comes from a company’s badvocates. Colin also cites real-world examples of the kinds of damage companies have experienced when they haven’t kept “the window to sabotage” shut tightly. Enjoy the article.
Brand fans or brand advocates are not uncommon. According to research by Anderson Analytics and covered in emarketer from May 2009, over one out of two social network users (52%) are now fans of a company or brand. Also nearly an equal amount (46% ) said something positive about a brand or company on a social networking Web site. People are looking to not only connect with people but with brands and companies as well, especially the ones they support and advocate for. Let’s not forget that brand advocacy is one way for people to communicate who they are and what matters to them.
Tags: Advocacy, brand advocacy
