Author Archive for Bryan Sise

Introducing Leading Fans

By Bryan Sise · Comments (0)
Monday, January 30th, 2012

We at Dynamic Signal have been hard at work building an end-to-end solution for brands to identify influential consumers in the brand’s category, build strong relationships with them, collaborate with them for the purpose of brand advocacy, and measure the results as part of the overall marketing mix. The feedback we’ve received from our early charter customers has been extremely valuable, and is continually shaping the direction in which we take our product development. One of the pieces of feedback we frequently got when we first began calling on our brand contacts was: “All of this is very impressive. I can see the value of building a brand community of partner brand advocates. But that’s obviously a significant undertaking. How do I try out your technology? What can I do with your technology right now, to get value right away?”

I’m pleased to announce Leading Fans – our answer to the question of what marketers “can do right now” to “try us out”. We think you’ll find that Leading Fans is a valuable tool unto itself, but Leading Fans is also the first step toward building your brand community on the Dynamic Signal platform.

Leading Fans is the way to rank your fans by their influence. By knowing who among your fans is most influential and engaged with your brand, you can focus your efforts on developing the best people into brand ambassadors.

We welcome brands large and small to sign up for this product. It’s a great way to try out our technology for immediate benefit.

Leading Fans enables you to rank people who are engaging with your brand on Facebook, Twitter, blogging platforms like Blogger, WordPress, and LiveJournal, and other social channels.
• View how your fans stack up by key measures of influence and reach
• Learn who is mentioning brand-relevant keywords
• View rankings by social channel, such as Facebook, Twitter & blogs
• Control who appears in your rankings
• Adjust the algorithms that determine your rankings
• Customize the look and feel of your rankings and console
• Publish your rankings as a widget on your site and as a tab in your Facebook page

Getting started with Leading Fans is easy.
1. We’ll set up your console, a password-protected place where you can view and manage your rankings.
2. You’ll choose your keywords and configure your preferences so that the ranking process can begin.
3. Any time you like, you can adjust your inputs and preferences, and republish your latest rankings.

If you want, you can invite users to “claim their ranking” by registering and connecting their social channels. This results in your and their unprecedented ability to run deep analyses of their sharing behavior, including viewing audience reaction to each post or share on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other social channels. It’s the next step in building enduring relationships with high-influence, high-affinity social media stars, and developing them into true ambassadors for your brand.

To get started ranking your fans, visit LeadingFans.com and sign up.

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Should You Pay Brand Advocates? (Part 3)

By Bryan Sise · Comments (0)
Friday, July 22nd, 2011

In parts 1 and 2 of this discussion of how to motivate and reward brand advocates, I covered topics related to brand advocate needs and performance-based segmentation of fans. But you might be a little frustrated with me by this point, because I haven’t yet answered the question that is the title of this series: “Should you pay brand advocates?”. Now we’re ready to answer that question.

Several other social media marketing solution providers have made their opinion known: “never pay brand advocates”. They have worked this position into the advisory and education that they provide to brand clients, so that it has already almost become dogma in this industry.

Their argument goes something like this. First, they assert that this is earned media we’re talking about, not paid media, so by definition, you can’t go around paying people to mention and recommend your brand. Second, they argue that the presence of money and other material rewards damages the brand advocacy process with perverse incentives – fans and influencers should want to tell other people about your brand simply because they adore you, not because they have an “ulterior motive”. Third, they cite compliance considerations, which are increasingly top of mind since the recent advent of new FTC rules.

Though I think these arguments have merit, I disagree with the blanket conclusion. I do think that it’s smart to grant performance-based material rewards to certain brand advocates.

Reward your high-level advocates for real! If you have put in place a system of levels as discussed in my previous post, and you have run a series of brand advocacy campaigns (without material rewards) involving your chosen mix of fans and influencers, then you already know who your MVPs are. They have distinguished themselves over time by demonstrating their strong affinity to your brand, creatively achieving the goals of your social campaigns, and reflecting the values of your company. They have ascended to the highest levels in your community of advocates, and you are regularly communicating with them to get their feedback and advice on a variety of strategically important topics.

So the value of these MVPs has become clear to you, and you know they are smart people whose time is valuable. So why wouldn’t you make it worth their while to continue advocating for your brand? You will be rewarding them for their time. The distinction between earned media and paid media is not very important – more important is the distinction between social marketing efforts that succeed and those that fail.

“Reward” can mean several things, depending on what works best for your company. It can mean free products from your company. It can mean special experiences that only your brand can provide, such as meeting your CEO, or cutting the ribbon at one of your new store openings. It can mean special expense-paid opportunities to advise your marketing team on campaigns you’re considering, or advise your product team on their latest prototypes. And yes, it can mean cash payments for successful completion of a collaboration with your brand. Regardless of the form of the reward, it is important to calculate the positive impact an individual advocate is having for your brand, compare their impact with other ways you could spend your marketing dollars, and reward them in a way that brings you a strong ROI.
Your MVPs will understand how important transparency and disclosure is. It will have been ingrained in them from the start of working with you, because you have baked relationship disclosure right into the way you conduct advocacy campaigns. Compliance will never be an issue if disclosure is simply part of the way you and your advocates do business.

Social has been a mere experiment, an afterthought, for many brands in the past few years. For the leading brands that are getting serious about social, it’s also time to get serious about rewarding brand advocates.

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Should You Pay Brand Advocates? (Part 2)

By Bryan Sise · Comments (0)
Monday, June 20th, 2011

In part 1 of this piece, I began describing the Dynamic Signal team’s stance on the right way to incentivize and reward brand advocates. In this post, I’ll continue describing the tenets we take to heart.

Verify that influencers and fans have a pre-existing affinity to your brand before working closely with them in an advocacy relationship. This goes back to authenticity. A person who doesn’t genuinely like your brand won’t be convincing when they recommend it, even if you’ve motivated them to do so with incentives. Even if you have identified an influencer who holds sway over a large audience, it won’t be worthwhile to work with them if they are merely a hired gun who could care less about your brand and is only recommending it for the rewards you’re offering. They don’t need to be a fanatic who has your brand tattooed on their left arm – you’re just looking to confirm that their actions are driven more by intrinsic motivations than by external rewards.

In the case of a Facebook fan or Twitter follower, you already know they love your brand, right? Well, maybe. A new study by the IBM Institute for Business Value reveals that Facebook users’ motivations for liking a brand are not always what the brand thinks they are. Some fans become fans merely because they want to get free or discounted stuff, not because they truly support the brand.

So how can you find out which fans have a genuine allegiance to your brand? Start bringing all of your fans opportunities to participate in brand advocacy campaigns, and track their individual participation and performance. For fans who are only beginning to participate in these types of collaborations, offer modest incentives such as peer recognition, marks of distinction, and perhaps rewards that further perpetuate your marketing efforts, such as branded apparel or invites to brand-sponsored events. You’ll quickly learn which fans have a true love for your brand and an authentic inclination to recommend it.

The most important reward for your early performers should be their ascendance to higher levels in your community of advocates. That leads me to the next recommendation.

Create a system of levels for your influencers and fans, with each progressive level representing a higher degree of closeness with your brand. We feel that brands should be continually engaged in a process of evaluating their relationships with fans and influencers. Those who have distinguished themselves with consistent high performance in brand advocacy campaigns, who have shown that they can reach a large and engaged audience, and who clearly reflect the values of the brand should be thought of as star players. These star players should quickly ascend the levels and get the recognition and rewards they deserve.

But what exactly are levels? Think of a level as a measure of the strength of the bond between the advocate and your brand. Higher levels indicate higher relationship strength. With each higher level, the advocate enjoys greater access and rewards. The highest levels are especially exclusive. Think of higher-level members as your most trusted advisors. In addition to working closely with you on complex brand advocacy projects, they can bring you important feedback from their audiences, and valuable advice on how to position your brand and design your products.

You can use any number of levels, and you can make the rewards and access available at each level whatever you want them to be. What’s important is that you make fans and influencers aware of the levels. Clearly describe the benefits of each level and what it takes to get there. How you describe the level system is also important. Don’t let it feel like a chore to attain higher levels. In fact, ideally it will feel like a game. Gamification is here to stay – see for example Gartner Research’s recent post on this emerging trend.

In Part 3 of this piece, I’ll talk more about how to work with and reward your highest-level advocates.

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Should You Pay Brand Advocates? (Part 1)

By Bryan Sise · Comments (0)
Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

Recent months have seen a surge of interest in the marketing world on the subject of collaborating with brand advocates. Whether they are influencers who are key tastemakers in their category, or fans of the brand who want to get more involved, the idea is to impel them to take action, to encourage them to recommend the brand to their own audiences. This sounds easy enough, right?

But wait – what’s in it for them? Why would a person want to be a brand advocate? Does it make sense for a marketer to offer incentives for brand advocacy? If so, what should those incentives be? Are we talking cold hard cash, or something else? These are all key questions that need to be addressed by any brand marketer who hopes to work with brand advocates.

We at Dynamic Signal have some strong opinions on the subject of incentivizing brand advocates. I’ll discuss these viewpoints in turn.

Brand advocates deserve our respect, our consideration, and our recognition that they are busy people who must contend with a variety of often-competing needs. I know this might sound a little sappy – too much like “brand advocates are people too”. But it’s tempting to view brand advocacy purely through the lens of campaign performance and ROI maximization, and to start seeing these advocates solely as a means to a marketing end. If we as marketers succumb to that temptation, we can’t expect to be able to hide our intentions. Brand advocates will immediately sense how we see them, and we’ll lose the privilege of working with them.

Brand advocates are looking for relationships, not transactions. This is a controversial statement in our industry. In fact, it flies in the face of entire business models used by companies who help brands work with advocates. These companies provide “marketplaces” where advocates and brands connect in order to engage in “transactions”. Anyone can sign up to be an advocate in one of these marketplaces, regardless of one’s brand affinities, and regardless of one’s level of influence.

The marketplaces work like this: a brand determines a “task” that they’d like advocates to perform, such as sending a tweet that says something positive about the brand. The task is released out to all advocates in the marketplace, and there is a cash price attached to it. (The more sophisticated marketplaces vary the cash price according to how influential the advocate is.) If the price for a particular task looks good to an advocate, the advocate agrees to perform that task. The mentality that these marketplaces create among advocates is “I’ll auction my favor off to the highest bidder. I’ll say nice things about whatever brand pays me the most, regardless of whether I genuinely like the brand.”

We think that this mentality ultimately destroys value for the brand, the advocate, and the advocate’s audience. It results in advocates spamming their friends and followers with a barrage of messages from a slew of different brands. Each of these messages lacks authenticity, and can diminish audiences’ trust in a brand, rather than building it.

Our many conversations with advocates suggest that advocates don’t want this transactional marketplace approach anyway! The smartest, most influential advocates are looking to build deep, lasting, mutually-beneficial relationships with brands they genuinely like, and are proud to be affiliated with. Advocates don’t want one-off, impersonal transactions with brands any more than brands want advocates to be motivated purely by money.

 
In Part 2 of this piece, I’ll continue to lay out the Dynamic Signal stance on advocate incentives and rewards. Expect to see more opinions that directly contradict what you may have heard some social media experts say, including the often-repeated dogma “You shouldn’t pay brand advocates.”

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Video – Building Your Brand Community

By Bryan Sise · Comments (0)
Friday, June 10th, 2011

Building Your Brand Community with Dynamic Signal

To reach distracted consumers in a powerful and authentic way, leading brands are forming communities of category influencers and loyal fans, and developing these community members into brand ambassadors.

Dynamic Signal provides a white-label platform for brands to form thriving communities of brand advocates. Our technology and services enable brands to run brand advocacy campaigns and distribute branded content in a scalable, measurable, brand-safe way.

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What is an Influencer?

By Bryan Sise · Comments (0)
Monday, May 16th, 2011

The term “influencer” is being thrown around a lot in social media and digital marketing circles these days, and that’s a good thing: it’s imperative for brands to build strong relationships with influencers. But what exactly is an influencer?

The Wiktionary tells us that an influencer is “A person who or a thing which influences.” Well, that’s not very helpful. The guy on the street would probably answer something like: “An influencer is a person who has the power to influence other people to think or do something.” That’s more helpful, but it leaves some questions unanswered. How does an influencer influence? What is the “something” that the influencer is influencing people to think or do? How many people does a person need to be able to influence, in order to be a bona fide influencer? And perhaps most important: how does one identify an influencer? Let’s address each in turn, while looking through the lens of word of mouth marketing.

How does an influencer influence?

The answer is “any which way they can”. A person who is passionate and knowledgeable about a given topic, and whose passion impels them to communicate their opinion to others, will use any means to reach their audience. The emergence of social media gives influencers an amazing new arsenal. But the majority of word of mouth recommendations occur offline, and the best influencers use both online and offline channels.

What is the “something” that the influencer is influencing people to think or do?

It’s accurate but simplistic to say that brands want to work with influencers because they can influence other consumers to buy the brand’s products. For a true brand (not a direct-response “As Seen on TV” marketer), the process of influencing purchase behavior is much more subtle and multi-faceted. Sophisticated brands look to engage a consumer across the entire spectrum ranging from mere awareness to full intent.

Consumers usually don’t buy things based on a “cold” econometrical calculation of costs and benefits — they buy things with emotional attention to the “warmth” a brand has cultivated with them over a long period of time. By collaborating with influencers for the long term, a brand can more effectively cultivate consumer warmth and affinity.

How many people does a person need to be able to influence, in order to be a bona fide influencer?

This is one place where there is a lot of confusion. Influencers are sometimes assumed to be celebrities with widespread fame. This might be true in some cases, but more often than not, influencers are not celebrities. Think of celebrities as a subset of influencers. All celebrities are influencers, but most influencers are not celebrities.

An influencer is simply a person who has an audience who trusts their opinions and recommendations. There’s no hard-and-fast number for how big that audience needs to be. (If you want to get into precise definition and segmentation of influencers, try exploring the excellent Peer Influence Pyramid research of Forrester analyst Augie Ray.) Some brands prefer to be highly exclusive, selecting only a small number influencers with whom they want to collaborate, each of whom has a large audience. Other brands feel that any of their loyal customers have the potential to be influential in their advocacy efforts, so they build large consumer communities consisting of many enthusiastic customers. Both strategies can be very fruitful. At Dynamic Signal, we help each brand client identify where on the spectrum of inclusiveness they best belong.

How does one identify an influencer?

That’s the million-dollar question these days! There are two methods for a brand to systematically identify influencers:

1.) Use listening and analysis tools to survey the vast expenses of the Web to find people who already hold sway with the brand’s target audience. (Then work to win these influencers over, inviting them into a mutually beneficial alliance of brand ambassadorship.)

2.) Invite large numbers of customers who have somehow indicated that they are enthusiastic supporters of the brand (e.g. Facebook fans, Twitter followers, etc.) to become members of a thriving community of like-minded individuals who are passionate about the same topics. (Then work to identify which of these supporters are most outspoken and influential, and develop these supporters into effective brand advocates.)

The key point here is that these two methods are not mutually exclusive. A brand can and should employ both methods, and Dynamic Signal provides a technology platform and support services to facilitate both methods.

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The Trust Factor

By Bryan Sise · Comments (0)
Saturday, April 2nd, 2011

What is the holy grail for a brand marketer? Let’s take a marketing manager for a sports beverage – how about SoBe. Would SoBe’s marketing manager regard a Super Bowl ad as the ultimate marketing achievement? Even better, how about a hilarious, memorable Super Bowl ad, the 30-second spot for which was negotiated at a highly discounted rate? That sounds pretty darn desirable for a brand marketer, don’t you agree?

On the other hand, maybe something entirely different would be the brand marketer’s holy grail. Maybe the best possible marketing scenario would simply be this: the star quarterback on the Lafayette High School football team in St. Joseph, Missouri tells a bunch of his friends and acquaintances that he loves drinking SoBe.

Huh? How could that possibly be as impactful and effective as a Super Bowl ad?

SoBe’s marketers think it is.

PepsiCo, the parent brand of SoBe, recently shifted a third of its massive marketing budget away from “big brand” media such as the Super Bowl, and toward social media and word of mouth marketing. Frank Cooper III, chief consumer engagement officer for PepsiCo’s US beverage arm, explains why his company spurned the Super Bowl:

We found that our consumers’ social relationships serve as the foundation for our most effective marketing. One of the most valuable – yet underrated – assets any company has is the wisdom and passion of its most loyal consumers.

What exactly is it that is making the Super Bowl less desirable for leading marketers, and word of mouth referrals more desirable?

It’s the trust factor. Though a TV ad with a silly joke might make you laugh, and a magazine ad with a supermodel might catch your attention, neither of these is as likely to make you want to buy a brand’s product as when someone whose opinion you trust tells you the product is good. That notion is borne out by plenty of research.

But let’s not drink too much of the word of mouth marketing Kool-Aid. The problem with the star quarterback example I gave earlier is that, while I’m sure Lafayette High School is a fine institution, it’s too small. While high brand engagement is definitely desirable, leading brands like SoBe also need scale. The real holy grail is trust-based SoBe referrals happening thousands of times, in thousands of places, over a sustained period of time.

To date, that grail has been elusive, because trust-based referrals are like lightning in a bottle. Brand marketers have thought of word of mouth marketing as being outside their sphere of control. They haven’t been able to directly create trust-based referrals among consumers, and they certainly haven’t been able to create thousands of referrals and measure the brand affinity and product purchases they are driving.

But that’s beginning to change. Social media has drastically reduced the friction that had previously prevented trust-based referrals in high volumes. The rapid consumer adoption of social media, however, is not enough to meet brand marketers’ needs. The problems now have to do with too much noise and confusion, a lack of brand safety, and a lack of consistent measurement.

Dynamic Signal was founded to tackle these problems head-on. We think marketers will greatly value a platform that enables them to collaborate with influential, outspoken consumers who love their brand, in order to generate trust-based referrals at high volume and with precise measurement. The grail will soon be within grasp.

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