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From the monthly archives:

August 2009

Creating Passionate Customers: Brand Evangelism and What it Means to Your Business

August 26, 2009

Last week, I wrote a piece on brand building for Forbes.com. With permission, I am publishing the unedited version here.

Today, marketing your business for free may seem to be an unattainable process. But with social media marketing, it doesn’t have to be. The only investment in the act of marketing on the social web is time and energy.

Thankfully, you don’t have to go at social media marketing alone. Engagement in a process called brand evangelism is one beneficial strategy to get your brand known and to help spread your message. Brand evangelism is a word of mouth marketing tactic in which the ardent supporters of your service or product feel so passionately about your offerings that they act as unofficial spokespeople on your company’s behalf. They are cheerleaders on the sidelines and they’re rooting for your team.

By listening to the conversations — the blog posts, the forum discussions, the tweets, and the other public dialogues — that relate to your brand, you can find out who feels strongly about your company and product, you can assess who might have a neutral stance toward your service, and you can gather information about your detractors those who dislike your current offerings. In a brand evangelism strategy, you’d take note of those who feel good about what you are doing: they already represent your target audience. As such, it would be foolish not to embrace them. Their citizen marketing can boost your credibility in the eyes of their peers who are hopefully your customers.

This is a preview of Creating Passionate Customers: Brand Evangelism and What it Means to Your Business. Read the full post (1143 words, 1 image, estimated 4:34 mins reading time)
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The Blogger and Marketer’s Cheat Sheet to Getting High Profile Jobs and Blog Mentions

August 18, 2009

Sometimes you can’t tell the difference between a marketer and a blogger. A blogger might say that he wants to write for a specific publication, sending emails and instant messages asking, “Hey, I really like that you write for this publication. Can you get me a job too?” Marketing type folk, especially those representing a company’s service or product offerings, turn to blogs and ask to be mentioned in the blog. In both cases, the blogger and marketer will approach you when the timing is right for them and take advantage of these channels when they need to.

I don’t expect marketers or bloggers to have been reading specific blogs forever, but they should know about the blog’s culture before promoting themselves. There’s a pervasive theme that resonates with 99% of these email or IM requests: I expect marketers and bloggers to do a little more due diligence before they come pitching their product or themselves to a specific blog. In a nutshell, they should show that they know what the blog is about, and if they’re really looking for coverage or acknowledgments, they should be visible.

This is a preview of The Blogger and Marketer’s Cheat Sheet to Getting High Profile Jobs and Blog Mentions. Read the full post (991 words, 2 images, estimated 3:58 mins reading time)
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Social Media for Non-Profits: How One Small Charity Makes it Work

August 14, 2009

In the spirit of featuring case studies like the ones in Chapter 4 of The New Community Rules, I am going to highlight other companies that have excelled in their social media achievements. Are you a company or do you know a company that has immersed itself in the social media waters and succeeded? Contact me and share your story.

I’ll be perfectly up front when I say that I’m not very familiar with most charities and nonprofit organizations. There are a few charities and non-profit organizations that have a huge presence on traditional media — you probably can’t help but notice the UNICEF commercials on TV during the winter out here in the states — but outside of Beth’s actual blog on the subject matter, I really haven’t grasped the magnitude of just how many nonprofits exist out there (hint: there are a lot).

As small companies with limited budgets, nonprofits may feel that they are unable to dive into the wide world of social media. But small is the new big and some small businesses have seen a whole lot of unprecedented success. It’s something that may have previously been thought as impossible. Thanks to social media, anyone can make waves. Are you on board?

This is a preview of Social Media for Non-Profits: How One Small Charity Makes it Work. Read the full post (1406 words, 2 images, estimated 5:37 mins reading time)
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