Social media and brand evangelism

I recenetly attended a webinar on Social Media Marketing sponsored by Razorfish, and while the webinar was less than enthralling - another Powerpoint sales presentation - it set me to thinking about the subject and how it might help us market our information discovery products better to our target audience, college students. Couple that with a recent interest in “competetive intelligence” and you have the makings of this post.

In a former dot.com corporate life long before Facebook, Twitter or even servicable chat rooms, it occured to us that the best thing we could do to foster interest in our products was to take existing clients - including those that didn’t like us, especially - involve them in product development, use them as beta testers, give them our latest products to bang on and send them into the world as evangelists to trade shows, client meetings, conferences and such, all at our expense. It worked amazingly well – so well, in fact, that several clients eventually became employees of the company. This is all fairly common today, but we really did think that up on our own more than ten years ago. Brilliant!

Tamar Weinberg has an excellent short article over at Forbes.com with several timely and on-point suggestions about how to spot opportunities for brand evangelism and word-of-mouth marketing by following the on-line conversation your customers are having about you. A good read and food for thought for those of us delivering services to a frequently underwhelmed customer base.