Today on Twitter Mack Collier saw me doing what I do best – Enabling an Influencer.
This is a Community Manager’s most important function. It’s not marketing, advertising, nor social media, it’s just plain old fashioned expressing yourself about a product that you believe in. It is word of mouth & the power is phenomenal. You can’t buy it & you can’t force it.
Mack expressed his thoughts in our Twitter conversation:
I love social media, but embracing and empowering evangelists in an authentic way is a marketing must for companies
Here are some steps:
1. Identify your influencers (evangelists, advocates, etc)
- They’re the ones that LOVE your product & tell everyone
- They’re actively talking about it & are helping everyone
2. Make contact – this is the part that requires tact
- Interact with them on the platform (wherever they are at)
- online at social networking sites, forums, blogs, etc
- in real life (that’s what started this Twitter conversation – I saw a dslr camera discussion happening informally at a conference & I took my Nikon D80 over & joined in)
- Quietly contact them in the appropriate way for that site
- Have strategies & express them clearly
- Most important – identify yourself & affiliation with the company
- Provide complimentary product for review
3. Engage & enable them
- Give them purpose by having them build out the identified strategies
- ask their opinion on projects, ideas & planning
- provide them with resources & let them run with it – their energy & ambition will amaze you!
- the more they are involved, the more they will internalize the process & strive to make it succeed
- Give them access to a private communication area so they can discuss topics amongst other enablers
- Provide encouragement & thank them
This process starts small & builds. My experience has been on both sides of the fence. I recall having lists of ideas. And now I encourage others to provide me with lists of ideas. My influencers are at a number of levels… (and that’s probably another blog post).
This post assumes that your company has a Community Manager type of position. Would you like to hear ideas on how to convince your company that you should start engaging evangelists for your company? Please let me know what would be helpful to you.
This is wonderful advice. I really need to be reading your blog more often. I think most people get confused at the engagement part – the question being, how do you develop that relationship. Most people just skip it and dive right into asking for favors…
Hi Tinu,
thanks girl! When I posted I was thinking that maybe I should build out each section. Your comment suggests that may be wise. The relationship is the key. People don’t want to be marketed to – they want customer service & help with the products. If the product is good it will sell itself.
Connie thanks for posting this. Embracing and empowering evangelists is an area of marketing that I think many companies either don’t pay enough attention to, or totally ignore. It’s a shame, because a company’s evangelists are their best marketers. I loved the point that Ben and Jackie made in Creating Customer Evangelists that evangelists can better reach your target market than you can because they ARE the target market!
You are doing companies a great service by outlining some of the ways that they can embrace and empower their evangelists. Hopefully any that read this post will be smart enough to act on your sage advice.
Connie, great post… coming from a research heavy background, I have learned that we as humans love to express our feelings and be heard. Especially if it’s something to do with ourselves.
All things social is leading us all to a place where transparency is becoming more and more obvious. Just. be. real. eh?
Hand claps to you (and Mack, of course!) for emphasizing such an important part of evangelism, brand reputation/building, etc…
thanks!
lisa
Great post Connie. Do you think the discussions of influencers have to be private? Or does it just need to make them feel special?
Mack – YOU are a great influencer & inspiration! thank you
Lisa – yes, it’s about sociology
And Nathan when I first read your comment I had a response ready, but now in rereading it I could go a number of ways.
Do you mean initially contacting them?
Or do you mean the place I create for influencers/moderators, etc to have a place to communicate? That area serves a number of purposes & I will expand in a blog post on it.
Connie,
Thanks for the reply. I’m sorry that my question was vague. I noticed you said “Give them access to a private communication area so they can discuss topics amongst other enablers” and was curious why you would make it private?
I understand the need to make it special, and to me the only reason to make it private would be to make the users feel valued and special.
Alternatively, to me that seems like a bit of a walled garden, which seems antithetical to the primary principles of the social web. Certainly there are places for walled gardens–I was just curious if a) thats what you meant and if it was b) why make it private?
Nathan
Thanks Nathan for clarifying.
It’s not meant to be a walled garden or a space to make them feel special.
The purpose of it is similar to an intranet. It serves a number of purposes – I’ll use the forums as an example:
1. a location for instructions for forum moderators (for ex)
2. a place for moderators to point to threads that need attention & the reason
3. the moderators are given advance notice on product info & if there’s a prevalent issue then some background on it
And I can expand on this too – Jeremiah had a great blog post on this.
Great points well made, this is a “gem”:
“Give them access to a private communication area so they can discuss topics amongst other enablers”.
Thanks Chris for stopping by!
[…] » Enabling your Influencers Some helpful hints on initially engaging your community members/influencers/key users. […]
As an artist with a website ;) I am learning from you how to interact with my audience. From what I see most artists have websites geared toward galleries and shows, they don’t engage in a conversation with their viewers. But to do so is a new way of interacting… so there is much to learn. Thank you for this post. I printed it out! and will be referring to it often.
[…] gewinnt, damit hat sich nun Connie Bensen auf ihrem Blog beschäftigt. In ihrem Beitrag “Enabling your Influencers” verrät sie die wichtigsten […]
[…] to approach blogging in It Counts for example. As community manager guru Connie Bensen writes in ‘Enabling your Influencers’ this job of identifying & enabling influencers is key to […]