"While the work or play is on ... don't constantly feel you ought to be doing the other." -Franklin P. Adams
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Customer evangelism… marketing from ‘the bottom up’ … citizen journalists – these buzz phrases are making their way around the net on an hourly basis these days. They’re part of a new, innovative way to reach customers, and they promise to change the way we market our products and services.
-- I first discovered customer evangelism at Ben McConnell’s and Jackie Hubba’s blog, Church of the Customer; http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/ Customer evangelism involves getting customers to talk about you, because they LIKE you. One way to accomplish this task can be as easy as simply asking customers to rate your products and services. Then, take both the good and bad comments and open a dialogue – one that shows people you actually care what they think. They’ll start buzzing about how great you are, in no time. This is word of mouth marketing at its most powerful.
-- Marketing from the bottom up is similar, but different than customer evangelism. eBay is known for this – its success is based on customer reviews and comments. People trust eBay because other people – just like them – provide feedback not only on products but on customer service. Another player in this space is Amazon. How many of us are influenced by the reviews of books and products other average folk post on Amazon? All of us. As a publisher, I can attest to the power of individual voice. When readers take the time to write a book review, or a product review, on eBay or Amazon – or on their own blog – it gets noticed.
It used to be that marketing campaigns originated in the marketing director’s office, where the ‘creative’ drove the campaign. The ‘creative’ is just another term for the team of professionals charged with putting together a campaign. Often influenced by focus groups, surveys, and what the competition was doing, top down marketing was guesswork at its best.
Today – the customer is taking control of the creative. Tired of pop-ups and ‘free’ downloads requiring them to give away personal information, today’s customers are Internet savvy and well aware of their option to click out of your website, in a heartbeat. They don’t trust that “two for one” sales copy. They’re annoyed with spam emails disguised as innocent notes from friends and family.
Enter true bottom up marketing – RSS: really simple syndication. About.com describes RSS as:
Online, there are potentially millions of authors writing about millions of topics each day. It can be very difficult to keep track of [them] without some type of automated system. And that's where RSS comes in. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is an easy way for Web sites to share headlines and stories from other sites. Web surfers can use sophisticated news readers to surf these headlines using RSS aggregators.
Many people think RSS refers only to aggregating blogs, but the reality is that most news publications today have RSS feeds. FAST Company magazine, Business 2.0, Fortune, Inc.com and hundreds of others are all using RSS to give readers easier access to their content. They know that we’re busy folk. We don’t have time to click into a particular website to see what’s new. We don’t have time to open email and read long sales copy or marketing disguised as articles. RSS gives us the control to only receive content we want, delivered right to our desktop.
Evelyn Rodriquez of Crossroads Dispatches wrote a blog post on this topic October 31st. I’m a fan of hers, I admit it. That comes from learning to trust her – via our previous explanation of customer evangelism – I know Evelyn, she is open and honest in everything she writes, and I am connected to dozens of others who feel the same way about her. Visit her blog post and get a detailed account of how bottom up marketing works.
-- Citizen journalism gets a lot of undeserved bad press. Bloggers, who number in the millions (some stats go as high as 70 million, with over 100,000 new blogs being created every day), write about topics of interest to them – and to their readers.
Personal blogs post product reviews, with or without your permission – they ‘talk’ to others, online, the same way they ‘talk’ to others in the grocery store or at Starbucks. Business blogs report on who’s doing what, and why – with personal, editorial comments. These sometimes ‘unprofessional journalists’ have hundreds, maybe thousands of readers in niche communities. A smart marketer trolls the blogosphere to see what the citizen journalists are writing about today. It pays to monitor their content (are they talking about you – just maybe!), and to engage in the conversation. Ignorance is definitely not bliss, in this case.
This brave new world of innovation, online and off, demands a new focus – on the customer. For more information visit Fortune magazine’s new blog, Business Innovation 2005 and learn how other companies are getting these new forms of marketing to work for them. Then, join in the conversation. The brave new world is waiting to hear from you.
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Yvonne DiVita is the president and founder of
WME BOOKS where the company focus is on
Authors Helping Authors. Visit her new website
at http://www.wmebooks.com or go to her
new blog, http://windsormedia.blogs.com/aha
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