Conference blog: The five drivers of brand advocacy--and where to find your brand's advocates

Sean O'Driscoll--@seanodmvp on Twitter—and co-founder of Ant's Eye View discusses how to turn fans into advocates through influencer engagement. 

Advocates are defenders of your brand. Advocates don't just love your brand, they'll go to bat for you.

There are five drivers of brand advocacy:

• Knowledge: Advocates want access to information that they believe no one else has. It makes them feel special and feeds their desire to be experts on your product or service.
• Identity: People care about differentiated recognition online. Identify them as individuals. 
• Involvement: Advocates don’t want a t-shirt or a mug, they want a relationship with the company. Listen to customers, acknowledge them and let them know when they’ve influenced a decision.
• Trust: People need to know that your product is high-quality
• Belonging: A sense of belonging with one another. Advocates want to commune with each other. Are you providing them with the ability to do this? Private meetings with product teams? Online spaces to do this?

Gibson kicked off the first session of the morning explaining that social media is an acceleration of word of mouth marketing. Social media creates more conversations through content marketing on the Web. Cisco has a powerful internal network that supports social media activity. But, as #RaganCisco attendees have heard often throughout the conference, this advocacy of social media efforts doesn't come without a strong strategy.

How does Cisco nurture social media evangelists and experts? Here are 5 tips: 

• Create a repeatable program for local execution: Does your company have a database employees can refer to regularly? Is there a clear strategy in place? 
• Offer easy access: Cisco makes it easy for employees to find information on its intranet. Is your intranet easy to access and navigate?
• Say “thank you” a lot: Recognize social champions via rewards programs to share success.
• Use gamification to recruit and retain: Volunteer SME’s across the company (vote for SME awards, earn points, badges, etc).
• Tie your efforts to events: Integrate online and offline activities to build and strengthen relationships. Find ways to bring SMEs into events to expose customers to your company's social media experts.
• Build a sense of community: Highlight key accomplishments through newsletters and other forms of recognition. 

Gibson invited Paula Wang-- @PaulaWang on Twitter-- Senior Marketing Management at Cisco, to speak about her experience creating a social media ambassador program for Cisco in China.

• Conduct one-on-one training sessions with Cisco executives. Wang emphasized the importance of getting buy-in from executives. 
• Ask executives if they are interested in speaking on behalf of Cisco as social media ambassadors. 
• Ensure that executives feel valued in their efforts.
• Depending on reach and activity,group executives into four segments:
  -The listener
  -The one who engages with followers
  -The influencers
  -The vast  ambassador who consistently engages and interacts
• On a monthly basis, track the progress of the ambassadors.
• The results? Globally, Cisco has well over 1,000 SME’s and social media ambassadors.

Brian Solis-- @BrianSolis on Twitter—and the author of Engage! The complete guide for businesses to build and measure success in the social web shares his thoughts on SMO. 

Brian Solis is incredibly quotable. So for our keynote session today, I thought I’d treat you to some inspiring—and informational—sound bites from one of social media’s top thought leaders as he shares his tips on Social Media Optimization.

On what social media isn't:

“Social media optimization (SMO) is not making viral videos!”

On what social media is:

“Social media is about creating and sharing experiences. Give people something to talk about. Create something so compelling that it stops them in their tracks.”

“SEO plus SMO is the amplified findability and shareability in the traditional and social Web.” 

“Now, actions speak louder than words. Verbs become social objects and click paths define the customer experience and journey." 

“The social effect is not the goal. The social effect is the result of good design.” 

On search:

“Search the key words in YouTube and Twitter that are related to your industry and see what comes back. Is it related to your story? Be discoverable.”

“Everything begins with search. People are always searching. What is it of yours that they find?”

“If you create a piece of media, it doesn’t just belong in any one channel. It can mutate across channels.”

On creating shareable content:

“Headlines and title tags should have keywords up front.”

“Align content/social objects with contextual search. They add relevance.”

“Become the type of publisher that doesn’t just talk about yourself, latest deals, partnerships or new products. Become a resource to your community. So much so that whenever you say something, people stop.” 

“Know the attention aperture of your audience.”

“Understand the design of your content. How is it worded? Vocabulary is important.”

“K.I.S.S. Keep it significant and shareable.” 

On achieving your goals:

"Start with the end in mind. Begin with what you want to accomplish."

Krista Canfield-- @KristaCanfield on Twitter-- Senior Manager of Corporate Communications at LinkedIn, shares hot tips for building a powerful presence on LinkedIn.

• Ensure that your spokespeople are searchable so journalists can find your company’s experts.
• Find clients.
• Find freelance journalists.
• Search by beat.

• Don’t reach out journalists you don’t know.
• If you’re reaching out to someone for the first time, send an InMail or ask a connection to connect you. Don’t ask to be connected right off the bat. “It’s like going on a first date and asking the person you’re out with if they want to get married,” says Canfield
• When you InMail someone, don’t pitch them. Find out what you can about them from their profile and connect with them on something you both have in common. 

• Email group members even if you're not connected with them on LinkedIn.
• Build out stories. If you’re writing a story on, say, moms, you can find groups about moms and use their insight.

• Find out what skills are growing and how many people are adding a specific skill to their profile.
• Build out your profile and the profiles of your spokespeople and add skills.
• People listed under "skills" tend to be well-connected to other people who have similar skills.
• You can find groups for specific skills.

• Search for companies and find employees.
• Follow a company on LinkedIn and get updates on when people join or leave companies and job openings.
• Look at statistics to see where companies usually get employees from and where they go afterwards.
• Company Pages can send status updates to followers. Share blog posts, etc with them. ‘

• Ask any business or professionally related question.
• When you ask questions, you can position yourself as a thought leader.
• A lot of small businesses answer questions.
• Make questions public or private.
• Find new clients.
• Journalists ask questions using LinkedIn Answers.

Rocco Impreveduto-- @Roccolmp on Twitter—Senior director of Consumer Marketing for LexisNexis and Lawyers.com and Jeremy Bromwell-- @JBromwell on Twitter—Account Director at Definition 6 team up to teach attendees how to develop successful B2B and B2C social media strategies. 

“Creating shareable content is what gives it legs to go viral,” says Bromwell. “It’s the content and the story that your audience cares about, social media is just the vehicle.”

He shares his top tips for creating shareable content

Creating shareable content:

• Create content that is good enough to share
• Post compelling content that will interest your fan base
• Offer exclusive content
• Don’t just talk to your community, enable them to talk to each other

• Listen to what people are saying about your content
• Do they have complaints or praise?
• Identify what they’re interested in and customize accordingly
• Use feedback to create ongoing value

Bromwell passes the mic to Impreveduto to speak about how Lawyers.com dove into social media—and came out on top, especially for such a niche market.

“You have to define what you want social to do for you and what it means to your brand,” says Impreveduto. He explains that because of the strategy Lawyers.com employed, social media became the 2^nd best conversation channel for the brand, after paid search.

• Monitor and respond in real time to questions and comments
• Added influencers to tweets
• Identify users with legal questions and join the conversation
• Shar engageing Facebook polls and trivia questions via Twitter
• Participate in promoted twitter campaigns to drive awareness

• Make it visual
• Use polls
• Ask questions
• “People want to be heard. It’s amazing what they’ll share!” says Impreveduto.

Is your company struggling with social media? Poveromo and her colleague, Maria Saltz, the Social Media Measurement Manager at Adobe, tackle the trickiest of all social media topics: Measurement.

Here are some take-home tips: 

• Increase brand awareness?
• Save money on marketing, advertising, etc?
• Retain customers?
• Increase brand advocacy?
• Encourage revenue?

Saltz stresses the necessity of "defining value in your own terms and aligning measurement." 

With that in mind, let's learn how you can measure like Adobe.

Adobe believes that listening plus data analysis equals a total measurement picture. Listening is simply monitoring channels for topics, trends and sentiment. Analytics involves deep dives to understand business impact.

• Be present on all channels, manage the content, chat with your audience
• Use tools like Tweetdeck and Adobe tools

• Key metrics: Understand basic correlations and how mentions are correlated with online posts, for example. 
• Keywords: Analyze keywords and figure out which ones to use to be found
• They also look at traffic and revenue and compare how different social channels contribute to metrics

• Who is talking about your brand? Who is driving traffic? Who is driving revenue? 
• Look at who is blogging/tweeting/etc about your product or service

Ted Sapountzis-- @sapountzis on Twitter--VP of Social Media Audience Marketing for SAP AG, shares 5 tips for social media marketing success

Business first, then social
What are your business needs? Are you trying to reduce costs? Increase customers? Once you’ve figured this out, focus on your customers’ needs. “It’s no longer about how shiny your widget is, but how it can solve people’s problems,” says Sapountzis. Enable the social experience.

Measure, but wisely
“Differentiate consistently.” It sounds like an oxymoron, but Sapountzis stresses the necessity of understading that you have to be consistent in your measurement efforts, but know how to measure differently for different things (campaigns, etc). When measuring, it’s important to measure reach, engagement, if audiences are doing what you want them to do, and whether your audience is reffering your business to their friends and family. Sapountzis notes that you should be sure to measure differently on each channel.

Less is more! Sapountzis shares his biggest pet peeve and calls for people to resists analysis-paralysis when measuring. Data is abundant in social and because of this, people get stuck on creating report after report without thinking about what’s driving the specific outcomes they’re interested in. Are you really thinking through the metrics?

Top down and bottom up
Does your CEO support your social media efforts? Without buy-in from leadership, managing a successful social media program is very difficult. Don’t start a social program until you have leadership on board. It’s also critical to have the support of other groups within the organization. Find the social media evangelists within your company and “make heroes out of them,” says Sapountzis.

Think carrots, not sticks
Think beyond governance, process guidelines and training. When you're training people in social media, reward them with information. If you give employees convoluted instructions and complex tools, no progress will be made. And make sure the technology is easy to use! "User experience is very critical," explains Sapountzis

The 'F words'
Focus: “I don’t believe there’s instant gratification in social. I think it’s a false assumption,” says Sapountzis. You must have a strategy and a long-term plan. Getting a retweet or a ‘like’ isn’t the be-all and end-all!  

Fail: You have to try things and you will fail. If you’re not failing, you’re not learning.