Community + Advocates = How to detect advocates and what to expect from them?
Advocates in the web space are the breed of users any company is looking for. Because they’re a salesforce you don’t pay, because they’re a salesforce that generate more confidence in your company and in your products, because they’re experts who would provide you with end users needs and desires, those people can become your trump card to speed up your business growth and build your reputation. To be able to follow the same growth FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Threadless, 37Signals, and many other companies (as well as many artists and music groups) have generated, the point is to be able to detect those advocates and to know what to expect from them.
Somes simple steps can manage your company to detect within and out of your user community who are the advocates you should rely on, feed with information, and engage with them to make your brand and your products better (I mean fit to interest users needs):
- Pitch, pitch, pitch, and listen to what’s been understood by your users: spreading the word would generate feedbacks, listen to them carefully and adjust your product and your pitch to appeal people. Never underestimate feedback, they’re your raw material to get notice of interest from people for your product, and your first filter to classify your community members (community meaning here anybody who’s taking time to share time with you).
- Adjust your communication and categorize your community members: adjust your pitch according to what’s been highlighted in your community members’ feedback and be sure to use the right pitch from your pitch deck regarding the point of interest the person you’re speaking with. That’s how you can engage with this person: don’t take time to explain about what she didn’t notice but focus on what she underlined and on her expertise field. It’s the second filter to classify your community members.
- Gather people who provided feedback and who are experts: make those people your first target of any upcoming communication: the small community of interested people you’ve managed to identify is now the pool of advocates where you would have to fish to get your advocate taskforce.
That pool would be the first destination of communication and you have to stick with that, while adding in it any new person willing to get involved (directly or not). Adjust your product and your communication to be sure they would keep on speaking about your company. The more you make these people happy and proud of what you’re delivering, the more they would have reasons to broader speak about you.
Now the identification is done, you have to understand what you can expect from your advocates. Depending of their word of mouth ability (blog traffic of their websites, forum and wiki curators, basic user level, …) you would be able to send them specific message, always according to their point of interest and their ability to deal with the information you’re sharing with them. Never mass email, always target communication: you don’t detail marketing action plan to your engineer, don’t mess with your advocates with global information if they don’t want to hear of it (if they do, they would ask for it).
Robert Scoble was the one who turned sped up FriendFeed adoption, as well as he was a Twitter power user and help the company community to grow. Louis Grey also collaborated to the growth of many companies by providing more than review of products but a location where many ideas on those products were shared. The value of the advocates is more on their ability to generate discussion and then ideas than in their ability to drive new customers to your product, then providing you the time to create a relationship with them and to turn them into customers (and maybe advocates).
Photo Credit: Gjik
