“The Voice” - A Recap of the Pub Club’s January Master’s Program

The Pub Club hosted the second Master’s Program on January 13. “The Voice” was a discussion about brand ambassadors. Leading the discussion was moderator, George Snell, Senior VP of Digital and Social Media for Weber Shandwick Worldwide and on the panel were Patricia Boudrot, former Director of PR for Filene’s Basement; John Burnham, Director, Communications at IBM Security Systems Division; and Malcolm Faulds, Senior Vice President of Marketing at BzzAgent.

What is a Brand Ambassador?

For a business-to-business company like IBM it is salespersons, developers, and engineers in the field of an organization. Each of these persons promote the company from within and IBM treats them as adults with the understanding that they represent the brand in a responsible way.

For BzzAgent, a company that works with many consumer brands, brand ambassadors are local customers. Brands want to be noticed and cultivate their brand advocacy. Many have come to understand the new dynamics of social media and have developed systems that can be used in repeatable brand situations. They create brand ambassadors by giving customers amazing experiences around their products with the hopes that they will remember and talk about a product even a year later. Ninety percent of word-of-mouth experiences are said to happen offline and the remaining ten percent happen online through blogs and message boards. The challenge is to integrate offline and online experiences and some do it with events.

Patricia has binders of letters from fans of Filene’s Basement. They are brand advocates who have an emotional connection to a company. Over the years, she has reached out and nurtured these fans by personally responding to their messages. She has embraced them on behalf of the brand, despite Filene’s Basement’s HR Dept. not wanting employees to Tweet or Facebook. Read a blog today about Filene’s Basement or its annual Running of the Brides event and many mention interaction with Patricia Boudrot.

Brand ambassadors are everywhere. They can be found on company message boards, customer lists, Klout scores, through shopper data (who’s buyer what, transaction history), through product experiences, and within category conversations (use www.radian6.com). Even complainers can be brand ambassadors as they can provide insight on what is working and not. At Filene’s Basement, the customers that were most upset about store closings were often the ones that loved the brand the most.

Brands spend a lot of money to create a voice but in the end, it is no longer what you tell your customers, it’s what your customers tell each other. Did you know that there are 800 million people on Facebook? One out of 3 people have an Internet connection and 1 out of 7 people in the world are on Facebook? That’s a lot of talking.

Social capital is very important to brand ambassadors. These voices want to be acknowledged for their comments and experiences. They are often the conversation starters and enders, sharing information with others because it makes them feel good. A company does not need to pay brand ambassadors but instead publically recognized them as super fan or validate their posts. 

Turning around a negative post or brand experience is equally important. If a restaurant gets a less positive review, reach out that critic, invite him in for another try, or thank him for the alert with a bottle of wine. Ultimately, the brand needs to turn the experience around so that the critic becomes a brand ambassador. Even in a crisis situation, brands need to over communicate via its social networks about what it’s doing to avoid outside assumptions and conclusions. Brands want to manage their voice so the right information flows through its ambassadors.

Here’s a fact: Did you know that only one percent are responsible for creating content online, 9% edit or modify that content, and 90% view the content without contributing. It’s not easy to write a blog or have a regular feed of content so look out for the 10% people because they are the most motivated brand ambassadors.

As brands become smarter and more sophisticated, they are monitoring more. United Airlines has a department of six persons devoted to watching and responding to social media posts. Companies should do an internal credit check to determine what social aspects they have, are utilizing and new ones that they need to create. For instance, Whole Foods has a national Twitter and Facebook page and some of its local stores have their own sites too. Not all the local sites do a great job putting out information. To help guide staff in communicating with brand ambassadors and in a responsible way, companies should created stylebooks and even social media guidelines.

For tracking and monitoring conversations, and identifying ambassadors, there is a myriad of social options to explore. Look at Google Alerts, Google+ (https://plus.google.com), Facebook, TweetDeck, HootSuite, http://instagr.am, and new media darling http://pinterest.com (an online pin board of things loved). Pinterest has an audience everyone wants: women and moms who make most of the household buying decisions. Another site is Smack, an open source client library for instant messaging and presence (http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/smack). Check out http://feedlytics.com, which creates dynamic Twitter streams, and use them as ad units, traffic drivers, or editorial features. Chirpaloo.com, allows users to instantly search for followers and conversations about topics that, are important to your brand or business. Lastly, remember to search for comments about brands through various spelling iterations. Not everyone spells or knows the correct Tweet handle for a brand.

Maryanne Keeney

Maryanne Keeney Public Relations

http://www.mkpr.net/