Understanding and Activating your True Fans

Understanding and activating your true fans is the value you can extract from many listening, researching, and conversational activities. Last week, we talked about how some brands like Ducati have created the context for tribes. During our #kaizenblog chat Friday, we looked to also identify fans of products and brands.

While tribes are connected by a vision, mission and values, fans share a common interest and may not be connected with each other. Vandana Purak said something very interesting during our Twitter chat. She said -- I almost think of tribe as the corporation; fans as the consumers, but the latter can be a subset of the former.

Why wouldn't you be able to look at it that way in 2010? Let's test this idea.

Business as tribe

A business can in fact be a tribe, where people share a lifestyle and a passion for the product and the service they provide -- think of Zappos.com, Apple, Progressive insurance. In fact, it's easier to see how you'd be a fan of a business that develops that kind of internal connection.

During the chat, David Spinks commented that he believes in the organic approach to tribe and community. If we do look at companies as tribes/communities, their organic nature stands. Yes, you will hire the right people, and communicate your vision, mission, and values so they can be embraced by those who choose to join the tribe. 

Have you noticed how peer pressure winds its way through an organization? That's precisely why you'd want to adopt collaboration tools like Yammer, wikis, and blogs, internally. We're social, we follow what we see other people do. Which is also the reason why walking the talk is paramount for leaders.

Before you push back with the argument that employees are getting paid to work there, remember that pay is not at the top of the motivational ladder.

Customers as fans

Can you create fans? When you develop a great product or service that responds to their needs, some of your customers may indeed become fans. Are there other ways? Providing content that is helpful, showing genuine interest as you interact with them, giving your customers a platform to see their peers and be helpful in turn to them.

Today, your customer base is probably more fragmented and diverse than it's been in the past. Also, the ways to connect with them have the potential to be more targeted while they're more content intensive and dispersed. That's why many organizations segment their customers.

Part of that segmentation should reveal who your true fans are. Your job is to understand who they are, what they talk about, read, find helpful in relationship to your product and service. In other words, you want to figure out what your bright spot is.

Before you push back on creating fans, consider the research Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba did when they wrote Creating Customer Evangelists. Understanding comes first.

What does activation look like?

That's what the Obama social media marketing campaign did -- it activated fans.

Sure, you may use apps or a YouTube channel to activate fans. It starts with understanding who your fans are, where do they go online, which gives you ideas on their information needs. Also discover how they use your products, which will give you an idea of what's important to them.

Give your fans a way to opt in and share your content and ways to answer calls to action. Give them also a way to provide feedback on your services. It will make them more vested in your mutual success and more eager to provide word or mouth referrals for your business.

The most powerful part of activation is the something they care about. Obama had a simple call to action -- hope for change, "yes we can" -- and understood the power of letting go of control, of how people spread the message. The key is to make the message the atom.

Think about rock and pop stars and how they build a following -- the Grateful Dead, and more recently Dave Matthews Band, Nine Inch Nails, Lady Gaga. These artists understand that it's about how their work make their fans feel, having shared symbols, and something bigger than them.

One more thing: not all your fans are the same, think the same. However, when you give them a way to see each other, like a concert for a rock star/band, a game for a soccer team, they will reinforce each other's passion for the brand.

***

It's important for a business to be able to recognize and reward both -- employees and customers, tribes and fans. What's your take?

[Italian soccer fans by Paul Robert Lloyd]

© 2010 Valeria Maltoni. All rights reserved.

Comments

[John Spence]

GREAT post Valeria -- to me this all comes down to authenticity. The willingness to put your real personality out there on the line. Sure, it will turn some people off, which is OK because they were not a good target customer anyway. But others who feel a connection with your real brand, your real values… will become real fans. I think too many companies try to be all things to all people – to not offend or turn off ANY potential customers – but that means they end up as a bland brand with no heart and soul. The killer brands that build tribes and create wildly loyal fans are honest. They tell the truth and show their real colors and let the people that resonate with that carry them to success. To me, tribes and fans come from trust and real connection.

[Tom O'Brien]

Valeria:

I think you are headed in the right direction here - but I think it is a mistake to think that the "corporation/brand owner" is the tribe and their people (consumers if you will) are just fans.

With Ducati, the tribe is owners. The role of the brand in the Ducati tribe is to serve the mission of the tribe. The brand is not the tribe.

We have done lots of (research) work on this theme in automotive, cellular, food, etc. What we try to do is figure out the issues, motivations and drivers of the tribal passion - and then help the brand to FEED that.

Tom O'Brien
MotiveQuest LLC
@tomob

[Lateef]

I think it helps to understand how and why your customers recommend you to prospective customers. Many companies don't measure their number of customer champions and don't understand what makes those champions endorse them. What's needed is better tools to track and measure customer championship.

@golateef

[Cassie Rice]

Your totally right. The best way to succeed is to understand your customers and their motivation for buying/using your product/service.

Then, if you can find out their emotional motivations, you can definitely connect to them at a higher level. That's exactly what Obama and all of the singers and bands did.

@cassie_rice

[Valeria Maltoni]

@John - for many organizations this is the hardest part. What is my personality? They ask? What if my boss doesn't like what I write? They worry. It comes down to a matter of trust. The killer brands start with tribes inside and radiate out.

@Tom - it was actually an idea Vandana had during the chat we are testing out here. Note I said business and not brand. The more I think about it, the more I'm seeing how a business first community are employees and if they're not passionate about their own work, heavens knows how hard it's gonna be to service customers. Do you do work internal to a company? Many could use some internal feeding, especially as they think about becoming active in social media.

@Lateef - or maybe we have all the tools and it's a data entry problem? Are we capturing the right information? Is it being asked or tracked? Good thinking, thank you.

@Cassie - emotional connection has resonance. Thank you for stopping by.

[Melody]

Great post Valeria! Obviously this is a topic near and dear to my heart since I actually try to be a customer evangelist. I think you could do an entire follow up blog article on giving fans ways to "opt in". I like the idea of having ways to connect with each other, but I wonder if that is too expensive for most corporations.

Back in 2008, I went to an event at the Starbucks headquarters. It was the launch of new coffee (Thanksgiving Blend). Starbucks invited fans in Washington State to come to this - Invitations went out to then-Gold Card holders (a previous version of their loyalty program) and in the middle of the day, there were about a dozen of us that met and attended a coffee tasting for Thanksgiving Blend.

For me this was totally thrilling. I couldn't believe that I was meeting other people who put my own fandom to shame. It was the next year that I started blogging about Starbucks.

Since then Starbucks has gone backwards and has fewer events. Also, once they know you're a fan, they seem to ignore you because they've already got you. It's disappointing, but absolutely for me, one of the very biggest turning points in my relationship with Starbucks was that Thanksgiving Blend event.

I wish they'd listen to you! Hahaha.

Perhaps the real issue is that putting on events for small groups of customers isn't worth the money if you're a big billion dollar corporation? Small little fans can't really affect them given the scale of having 40 million customers every week.

Sorry this is so long.