Connie Bensen

If you’re listening then you’ll find where people are talking about your brand.

Google alerts are my favorite form of listening. I prefer subscribing to them by email rather than rss because it seems to provide more collective results. Technorati has a similar search function. And watching the pattern trends on Feedburner & Google Analytics will also indicate where your traffic is coming from.

If you’ve had a blogging presence for a long time then you’re probably going to need to go where the discussions are at. It could be on other people’s blogs, social networking sites, forums, etc. If you’re actively involved with your community, you’ll have a good sense of where the discussions about your brand are happening at.

What to do at these places?

• be helpful, answer questions about your products or services
• offer assistance
• interact & be a part of the community

When you identify people that are evangelizing for your brand, interact with them. You’ll get a sense really quickly of those that truly love your brand. The next step is contacting them.

But before you do that ask yourself: Do you have a strategy? This should’ve been decided before you started listening. If you don’t have one yet, then it’s time now to step back & decide on what it is. That will make the next steps so much easier.

If you’ve been paying attention your evangelists will talk about what they want. They will be giving feedback before you ask for it. Some options that you have:

• thank them for their support of your brand
• identify your affiliation with the company
• express what your ideas are (this comes from your strategy)
  • make sure that it is specific enough so they can respond
  • don’t overwhelm them with your enthusiasm
• offer complimentary product for their review
• make the contact in private through personal message

After the initial contact give them some time to respond. People are sometimes surprised to be contacted by someone from the company and they need to think about their response. As with any business, follow up is good. Make sure that you follow thru!

My next part in this series will address Organizing the efforts of your Evangelists.

Comments on the first post in this series made me realize that I needed to expand on how to enable your influencers.

The first step I listed was to ‘Identify your Influencers’

• Who are they?
• How will you recognize that they promote your product?
• Why do you want to engage with them?

First off, I don’t think that you can know who your influencers are if you’re not involved & interacting with them. To identify them, you must be an active part of the community. Otherwise, how can you really know the people there? This is the beauty of the role of Community Manager – we’re involved & interacting.

A quick example that’s specific to my work as a Community Manager:

• In my listening I noticed someone posting beautiful abstract images created using ACDSee effects. The collection kept growing while I watched
• I contacted the person and asked if they would consider having their work featured on the ACDSee blog & talk about how they created their art from their photos.
• The response was an absolute agreement.
• This person is an influencer thru their art & tagging the images with ACDSee

My blog is an abstract example. I have a little community here that’s growing.

How do I know?

• I’ve been ‘listening’ & know that my blog is on a number of blogrolls by other people’s choice (thank you for that!)
• My comment to post ratio is 3:1 so people are interacting

But you may ask, what is your product?

• It’s the information that I share on community management & networking.
• The resources that I link to
• People are asking for mentorship – this tells me that they trust my advice

How do I know that they’re promoting my product?

• Linking to my posts & commenting are good indicators
• New niches are connecting with me on Twitter & Facebook
  • a contingency of youth ministry people (isn’t that a great obvious profession to use social media?)
  • an artist connected & asked if artists create their art for themselves or their customers/community? What a great thought provoking question!

And speaking of that artist – I’m going to reprint Komra’s comment from my other blog post here. So is that a potential evangelist? It sounds like she’s promoting building community, so I’m glad to have her as a part of mine! She gives me the highest compliment (in my opinion) of having printed my writing.

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.

Now think about who your advocates are? Even as bloggers we have our influencers (frequently referred to as friends). And I’m thankful for all of you!

… for a Community Manager. There’s no question about that. There are so many facets to the role, but ‘damage control’ is probably the most challenging & requires a lot of patience & public relations skills.

I had practice with this in the real world. As the supervisor, unhappy people were passed on to me. What could happen in a public library? I could tell stories… but the key was to be firm, fair & consistent. And that premise transfers over to the online world. People will challenge your communication skills & my friend just had his skills tried.

When my path crossed with Shashi Bellamkonda, he was intensely interested in the Community Manager role. He had a vision of providing his company with this service & why they needed it. I sent him as many resources that I knew of. He did his homework & took it a step further & convinced the executive level to put him into that role.

Today I see that his company’s customers did some serious name calling on his blog. (I’ve been called names too – in real life & online. Common sense prevails in the end though). It seems that his company changed their policy, Shashi saw negativity on Twitter & responded to the criticisms. He quickly put a response up on his personal blog and that’s where he took the hits. I’m glad about a couple of things: 1) he engaged & dealt with it; 2) his company supported him, listened to the feedback from the customers & responded.

It reinforces the importance the role of Community Manager can play. Andrew Wright does a great job of highlighting this in his post, Corporate Social Media Rep = Ombudsman

What this incident does show is that a corporate social media representative must be more than a mouth piece for the organization – this is not simply another broadcasting channel for the organization. While not comprehensive, here are my thoughts on the ideal role this person plays:

1. They must have direct lines of communication with decision-makers at the executive level. And executives must listen. There’s no one that has their ear to the rail like the social media rep. They can smell trouble in the blogosphere and on services like Twitter well before trouble surfaces through traditional channels.
2. Similarly, the role is like an ombudsman. This person acts as a representative on behalf of the community. The organization must both recognize this and respect it and all that comes with it.
3. The role is not pure PR. The blogger can’t spin things they don’t believe. This isn’t a “brand” we’re talking about, but a real person with valuable relationships. If trust is broken, credibility is gone and is difficult to recover. A blogger with a damaged reputation is not worth much to the organization going forward. Again, organizations must respect this as well – consider it an acid test for decisions being made.
4. Organizations must take the leap of faith and keep the lawyers at bay. You can’t run this stuff through legal approval processes.

I really like your summary Andrew! And congratulations to Shashi for having handled the situation so tactfully. I’m sure that his company realizes the asset of having him listening to feedback & responding with a human voice. As companies add this position, they really need to realize that their person is out there acting in good faith. Understanding of this is crucial to the success of the person in this role.

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.