Building online brand advocacy
Editor’s note: This post is sponsored by PartnerUp.
Major organizations around the world spend billions of dollars each year building and maintaining the foundation for their brand messages, only to have them shaken by a few incidents or a small percentage of the consumer audience. It wasn’t too long ago we were being taught that one unhappy customer will tell 10 others. Today one unhappy customer can and will share his or her experience online with millions of others across the globe. Just look at examples like â??United Breaks Guitarsâ? or the Horizon Realty debacle. It’s a scary phenomenon for corporate brand managers, but the problem can be addressed successfully in a manner that in fact strengthens your brand and message.
Online postings that are unfavorable to a brand can be approached in a number of ways. One of the strongest approaches is building brand advocates who, as a constituency of customers, have an incredibly powerful voice. For example, one of the best ways to approach a negative tweet from an unhappy customer is to have other customers â?? brand loyalists â?? tweet back with their positive experiences. This will diffuse the situation while giving the company time to respond with the appropriate action.
So where do you find these brand advocates? Hopefully they already exist. They are called â??happy customers.â? The difficulty is getting them to speak up and share their positive experiences. Companies are finding, however, that by engaging in stronger, deeper conversations with loyal customers, that these customers become brand advocates.
Many companies that are ahead of the curve are finding that the best way to build and foster these relationships is by deploying their own privately-branded online communities for their customers. Here customers have the unique opportunity to discuss the company with the company. This allows companies to have open, honest dialogue with customers, openly address their concerns and become trusted advisors. This also helps these companies learn more about their customers’ needs and get great information on how to better serve them.
Even though we are still in the early stages of social media marketing, company-sponsored online communities are emerging as an effective tool for building customer advocacy, a key ingredient in brand stability. Even the best brands will have their bad days, but when those days occur it’s nice to have loyal advocates out there standing up to the adversity and speaking out on behalf of the brand.
This post was written by Megan Dorn, who manages the PartnerUp blog, newsletter, member communications, content and small business community as the Communications Manager at PartnerUp, the first and largest online community for small business. She also manages PartnerUp’s public relations efforts.
| Print article | This entry was posted by gizmodose on December 15, 2009 at 7:55 pm, and is filed under Hi Tech News. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
