Background: Advocacy programs provide a win-win situation for any brand or product on social web. On one hand it lets you recognize that set of evangelists who would be ready to promote your brand/product free of cost and on the other hand it leads effective promotion of your offerings to your consumers. We at 20:20 Social have researched some of the most effective advocacy programs to seek out varous ways in which these advocacy programs on social web can be modeled.
Scope: In our research we have focussed ourselves in studying how advocacy programs can take consumers and visitors across different levels of Ladder of Engagement. The Ladder of Engagement involves identifying various levels at which the consumers ( or site visitors/partners/employees ) can be engaged. It begins with content consumption, then moves on to content curation ( rating, voting, commenting ) , content creation, collaboration and then subsequently to trial, purchase and finally to evangelizing and recommendation( hereby mentioned as advocacy) to others.
Our research on some of the most popular Advocacy programs shows that advocacy can be used to transition consumers across the following levels:
1) Advocacy to content consumption and curation
2) Advocacy leading to content consumption, curation and even creation
3) Advocacy leading to product trial and purchase
4) Advocacy leading to content collaboration
Advocacy to content consumption and curation:
One of the most effective strategies of modelling an Advocacy program on social web is to find a bunch of evangelists who appreciate your brand/product and are ready to write good about them. These evangelists can be popular bloggers or influencers having a lot of connections on social web. A good example of such a program is Microsoft MVP ( most valued professional ) program where the company recognizes talented influencers in the field who write about the businesses Microsoft is related to. Another case where influencial bloggers were leveraged for brand advocacy was in the marketing campaign of Chrystler's Dodge Grand Caravan where the company loaned the car to influential mom bloggers for a week for trial run, which triggerred a lot of conversation in the blogospere. Similarly Redwood Creak ( An Ameircan wine making company ) has created a community platform around passion for outdoor adventures and recognizes wine evangelists known as ‘The Trailblazers’ as their official brand ambassadors who talk about wines and adventures on the company blogs and forums. Sometime influencers need not be popular and advocacy can be leveraged from consumers who have a strong social network. Something similar was done by MTV in its 'Elite Influencer Network Contest' where members were asked to promote their obsession for the MTV culture on their blogs, websites, social networks like Facebook, YouTube and through this MTV tried to find out the most influential individuals on social web. These contest winners will now participate in further upcoming events.
Advocacy leading to content consumption, curation and even creation
Advocacy programs can even be modelled to take consumers upto creation level on the ladder of engagement, which can be used to find your next set of evangelists. A good example of such a tactic is HP 31 days of Dragon contest which is a user generated contest lanched by the company for the promotion of its HP HDX dragon notebook. The company found 31 popular blogger evangelists/ websites who created their own User Generated Contests on their personal webpages. Thus the task of planning, designing and promoting the contest was taken up by the participating evangelist websites and involved taking the consumers across various engagement levels. Another example is walmart's eleven moms community which has the popular mom bloggers blogging about money saving ways ( which is core to the brand value itself ) and the consumers interacting with them and sharing their own money saving tips etc.
Advocacy leading to product trial and purchase
Many of the cases we researched showed brands leveraging consumer and evangelist advocacy for product trial and purchase. The Indian gaming website zapak.com uses a facebook application to give the users an option to recommend the game they are playing to their freinds on facebook and also embed it in your personal webpage. Similarly the cleaning products company 'Method' launched a campaign called 'people against dirty' which aimed at finding product appreciators who were ready to share their experience of the brand with others.
Advocacy leading to content collaboration
Now the reason I took up this point last is because I am still not sure about this, but product help communities like that of Intuit can qualify as advocacy programs. This is because if somebody is ready to help you out with a solution on a product help community then that means a) he has already tried the product b) He finds the product interesting enough to make him participate on the community c) if in the future any other problem crops up then there would surely be more people like him to help you out with that product. If such a thing qualifies as advocacy then product help programs can be instrumental in collaborating efforts around a particular problem.
0 conversations:
Post a Comment