Creating advocates, creating tribes
This a rough draft of a talk I’m going to give tomorrow as part of a social media seminar my work is organising. I would love to hear any feedback, ideas, criticism - if you have any please email me (alexjcampbell AT gmail.com) or Tweet me (http://twitter.com/alexjcampbell).
I’ll be presenting it as slides in Keynote tomorrow, but I wanted to write it as a blog post first to see how it flows.
CREATING ADVOCATES, CREATING TRIBES
I’m writing this because I want to talk about a strong belief that I hold: that the most successful companies over the coming years will be the ones who don’t shout at their customers. Instead of shouting at their customers, they will listen to them, be honest with them, empower them, build relationships with them, and connect them with other like-minded people.
If companies do these things well then they will turn their customers into powerful advocates for whatever it is they are trying sell. They’ll create tribes of influencers, rather than demographics of consumers. They’ll create a movement of passionate supporters, rather than dispassionate participants.
Achieving this requires intent, effort, and investment - but it is not beyond the reach of any organisation or brand.
Creating advocates
We’re all consumers that big brands try to sell stuff to. I buy things from big companies every day. Last week we tried to buy a 1-month subscription to the Australian Financial Review so we could get a PDF of an article about the resurgence of e-commerce in Australia. Fairfax made it so difficult that we finally gave up.
I hardly ever get the sense that big companies have any desire for us to enjoy these experiences. Every time we interact with their organisation in any way, these companies have an opportunity to turn us into advocates. Nearly 100% of the time they miss that opportunity.
Billions of people use Microsoft products every day. For a long time I was one of them – I’ve been a PC guy since I was ten years old. I know that Microsoft do make some great products. But when was the last time someone went out of their way to excitedly tell you about a great experience they had with a Microsoft product?
Rather than improving their products and services, Microsoft tried to buy their way out of the problem with advertising. Crispin Porter has made some great ads for them. They spent $300 million on media for just one campaign last year. But it hasn’t solved the problem, and it can’t.
Apple has achieved the exact opposite. Almost every single time Apple interacts with a customer, the customer walks away feeling happy. Even Apple’s ads make people happy. As a result of this Apple have created a huge network of advocates around the world. These advocates are now out there every day spreading the word about Apple’s products.
Let’s compare their stock prices over the past 5 years and see whose approach is winning:
Why is this important? What does it have to do with social media? The answer is that social media massively increases the reach of your advocates. Giving them good experiences that make them happy is more important than ever because now they make their voice heard around the world in an instant.
Social media also makes it easier than ever for organisations to create advocates, and in fact it should be particularly easy for big companies. Big companies have resources that individuals can only dream of. They just need the willpower to use them in ways that will make customers happy.
For every organization there are a million different ways they can turn their customers into advocates, but I think we can break them down into three basic steps:
- Listen to them
- Talk with them, honestly and transparently
- Build relationships with them
Listen to them
This is where it becomes particularly important to stop shouting at your customers. The first step to turning them into advocates it to listen to them, and it’s much easier to listen to them when you’re not shouting.
Customers are talking about your brand every day whether you like it or not. Chances are that they’re talking about your brand online. This means you can listen in on the conversation – in fact you’ll probably find they are happy to know that you are listening.
Sometimes they’ll say great things about you. Sometimes they’ll say bad things about you. Customer compliments and complaints used to happen behind closed doors. Now they are broadcasted to the world and recorded forever online.
Keeping track of these conversations is easy. Subscribe to Google Blog alerts for your company and product names. Subscribe to the RSS feed of a Twitter search for terms relating to your organisation. Join forums where people talk about your industry and see what they’re saying about you.
Talk with them, honestly and transparently
People love being listened to. But they love it even more when someone listens to them, takes what they’re saying seriously, and responds to it in some meaningful way. They love it even more when a company does this, because this is such an unnatural thing for companies to do.
Achieving this will be extremely difficult if you keep your staff locked up behind your corporate firewall. It means letting the people who create your products or deliver your services talk directly to your customers. I think in general companies find this much scarier than it really is. I absolutely agree with Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, says: ”If you don’t trust your employees to tweet freely, it’s an employee or leadership issue, not an employee Twitter policy issue.”
Build relationships with them
Once you’re listening to your customers and talking with them in a meaningful way, you can start to build meaningful relationships with them. I don’t mean relationships in the traditional “we sell you stuff sometimes” terms. I mean relationships in the “we would both go out of our way to help each other” sense.
A great example of this is Barry Judge, who is the Chief Marketing Officer at Best Buy. Every day he takes the time to talk to customers on Twitter (http://twitter.com/Bestbuy) and on his blog (http://barryjudge.com/). He listens to them. He helps them when they need help. He takes their feedback and uses it to drive change in his organization. Every time he does this he builds stronger and more meaningful relationships with his customers.
Just as there are things you can do to encourage people to become advocates for you, there are some things that will guarantee that they don’t become advocates for your organisation. Although these are obvious, a striking number of big companies still make these mistakes every day so I think it is worth looking at what can make customers turn against you:
- Lie to them - like Coca Cola
- Ignore them when they try to help or when they get angry - like American Airlines
- Rationalise your faults to them - like the Microsoft Outlook team
- Interrupt them when they’re trying to do something - like these guys
- Threaten to sue them when they’re trying to support you - like the AFL
Even better than building relationships with customers is turning them into tribes, which is what I’ll talk about next.
Creating tribes
After his TED talk in May this year, Seth Godin became the contemporary representative of an idea that has existed since the dawn of our existence: tribes. I’ll draw from Seth’s ideas but extend them into what I hope will form more some more practical steps that organisations can take to build their own tribes online.
The first thing to understand is that tribes already exist in every shape and form. Some of them are massive and obvious, like the Obama movement. Some of them are tiny and obscure, like http://fuckyesllamas.tumblr.com/. New tribes are created every day in ways and places that we can’t even imagine.
Once organisations reach a certain size, they start to attract their own tribes naturally. Sometimes these are fantastic: http://www.ozhonda.com/. Some times they are really, really bad: http://www.dellhell.net.
The reality of the internet is that you can’t control the tribes that pop up on their own. You should nurture the positive ones and ask them if there’s anything you can do to help them. You should just let the negative ones be, and focus your energy on what’s really important: creating your own tribes.
The formula for creating a tribe is pretty simple. Here’s what you need:
- A leader – THAT’S YOU
- A cause that you believe in
- Others who believe in the same cause
- A way to connect them
Now let’s look at a simple example of this in practice. A few years ago, Marc Molckovsky decided that he thought Crocs look stupid. Since then he has become the leader of a tribe of nearly 1.5 million members. He found a cause that he believes in. He found others who believe in the same cause. And he found a very simple way to connect them – a Facebook group.
Now I’d like to talk about a more sophisticated real-life example. It’s something that we are very proud to have been involved in, and I think it illustrates quite well the power of creating a tribe to support your cause.
Bringing the FIFA World Cup to Australia
Some quick background: Australia is one of a number of nations bidding to host the FIFA World Cup in 2018 or 2022. The FIFA World Cup is the biggest sporting event in the world, so this is a really big deal for Australia.
Australia fits FIFA’s requirements for a host country really well. We’re a safe, friendly place to visit. We’re an excellent place to go on holidays. We have great weather.
Given that football-crazy nations like England are also bidding against us, Australia’s challenge is to prove how passionate our country is about football. Rather than spending enormous amounts of money on buying traditional media to spread this message, we focused on creating an online tribe that would tell this story for us.
To create this tribe, Football Australia teamed up with Lawrence Creative Strategy and DTDigital on two fronts. First, we built a bespoke online community for the bid, creating a destination for Australia’s football fans to take action and contribute content that shows their passion for football. Second, we put a complete focus on driving traffic to our online community by reaching football supporters through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
The results from the first week after launch:
- Over 20,000 members joined the site and took action to show their support
- Over 50,000 actions were completed, each of contributing more content proving Australia’s passion for football
- The best of this content can shared with over 110,000 fans / followers on other social networks, driving even more traffic back to our online community
- Facebook and Twitter have been incredibly effective at driving traffic – Facebook is the #1 referrer of traffic to the site, Twitter is #5
- Visitors spent an average of 9 minutes on the site, multiplied by 70,000 visits equals over 10,000 hours of engagement with supporters
This is the first bid for a major world event that is driven almost entirely by social media. We’re looking forward to December next year to see the results.
Conclusion
At the end of Seth Godin’s talk on tribes, he challenges every member of his audience to go away and create a movement themselves. I’ve just talked about an example where we’ve built a large-scale tribe, building on a movement and passion that already existed. If your organisation sells office supplies, I understand that this might not seem particularly helpful or relevant to you.
But tribes don’t have to be built on the scale of Australia’s World Cup bid. They don’t derive their power from the number of members they have. They derive their power from the ability of their leader to lead them. They derive their power from their members’ belief in the cause. They derive their power from their willingness to take action to support the cause.
Every organisation here is capable of doing this. I think it would be great for each one of us to go away today and find a cause that our organisation and our customers have in common. A cause that we really believe in. Make the decision that we are going to lead this cause and create a movement of our own. Find a way to connect the people who believe in the cause within our organisation to the people who believe in our cause outside of our organisation.
I am quite certain that every organisation represented here has the potential to create a powerful movement lurking within. The companies who learn how to harness this potential will leave behind the wreckage of their competitors who didn’t.
