What would happen if you gave your customers the keys to your corporate social media channels? This article reviews the rewards and the risks marketers face as they decide how much brand control they’re willing to give up.

Marketers are just coming to terms with how to deal with customers having free rein to either praise or bash their companies, but I think there may be a new trend on the horizon—the customer brand ambassador.

You have customers who love your brand and rave about it. But their reach only extends so far. Why not give them a platform to amplify their reach and spread the word? Think about it… It really could be a beautiful partnership.

We’ve seen examples of this with empowering customers to lead innovation in the company with product recommendations from Starbucks, GE and Intuit and their great examples of utilizing customer feedback in a controlled environment.

What's your Starbucks idea? Revolutionary or simple—they want to hear it.

But this post is about something different. It’s about a new approach, a new idea and a new way to look at involving your customers in social media. It’s about how to put your customers in the driver’s seat and actually allow them to run your corporate social media channels. Crazy? Maybe not.

Rewards of Giving Your Customers Access to Corporate Social Media Channels

#1: The power of a testimonial will outperform anything a marketer can develop.

The power of a customer’s story has been proven to increase web traffic and conversions. But in this case, you would have customers who are building genuine relationships and showing that they’re so passionate about your brand that it actually is part of their identity.

You could have customers who run an entire blog on your site, or one or more customers could be in charge of finding relevant articles they think your following would be interested in and sending out the tweets and status updates. Or from another angle, they could be charged with engaging with influential bloggers in your space and commenting on their blog posts on the company’s behalf. There are so many possibilities for these loyal fans to become immersed in your brand and share their genuine unfiltered perspective.

Read what real Voices.com customers have to say about their experience. Check out the success stories, testimonials and reviews from the press and media at large.

If you’re open to the possibilities, it isn’t difficult to find activities that the company is comfortable with and customers are excited to be a part of. Shofer’s Furniture implemented a brand ambassador program and had phenomenal results that increased their site traffic 4000%. And this doesn’t mean that the company doesn’t have access or also utilize these channels; it’s a partnership of voices to leverage influence and networks from customers too.

As a result of this increase in site traffic, Shofer's has experienced a significant increase in both web leads and overall store sales, both of which are tracked by SocialToaster's reporting feature.

#2: Customers can open doors faster than you can.

Let’s face it, when bloggers are getting pitched by a brand, they immediately put up their sales radar. They want to protect their audience from your spammy marketing messages.

But when one of your customers approaches a blogger about the difference you made in their life, it’s different. It doesn’t feel like a pitch, it feels like a case study that must be shared.

If you set this up well, you’ll allow the customer to leverage benefits he or she can offer to a blogger—a pseudo-toolbox of resources such as cross-posting on each other’s blogs, joint media interviews and/or joint sponsorships. You’ll have to do some training with your customers on how and when it’s appropriate to use their toolbox, but it can be done.

A customer who knows when it’s appropriate to say, “Hey, I also have some contacts over at the company and if you’re interested in posting in their community I can make an introduction.” An approach like that doesn’t sound salesy or pushy but natural, and builds on the power of social media to connect like-minded individuals.

#3: It’s genuine, it’s real, and it isn’t marketing.

It’s such a crowded marketplace for advertisers that it has become really tough to break through the clutter. And we’re seeing this extend into the social space. By having a group of customers who are your brand ambassadors, you can easily break through with an authentic voice because it will sound different—ultimately it’s humanization of your brand at its best.

As much as you try to develop pretty marketing messages that deliver, this will sound different than anything you put together. The reality is that even if the customer said EXACTLY what you would’ve said, it will have a tone of genuine passion behind it that marketers struggle to convey without sounding pushy.

The key is to get beyond the solicited customer testimonial and actually let them generate their own content in their own words. Facebook does a fantastic job with their Facebook Stories section. If it’s appropriate for you to be involved in their content creation process, only edit for grammar. Leave subjective edits in the trashcan. Give customers best practices, rather than rules. That’s where the power of authenticity takes hold.

Fill out the short form at the bottom and select a theme and you're able to share your story in the application and with your friends through their news feeds.

The Risks of Relinquishing Brand Control

#1: Fear of the rogue customer.

Giving up brand control is a difficult proposition because companies are terrified that their customer may turn on them at some point and have a large following they’ve established with the company’s support. I want to say it’s a valid fear, but it really isn’t.

Tennis fans may remember when Martina Hingis filed a $40 million lawsuit against Sergio Tacchini, an Italian shoemaker, for giving her “shoes that injured her feet,” as ABC News reported. This came as a result of a “five-year endorsement deal that was to pay her (Hingis) $5.6 million.”

Examples like this seem to always make the headlines and it gets worse when you look at celebrity endorsements that are cancelled due to embarrassing activities in the celebrities’ personal lives. While these are the examples most people associate with a rogue customer, there’s a really important distinction.

According to Tacchini, Hingis damaged their image and their products.

These are paid celebrities, not customers. They’re being paid to support your brand and likely have very little actual relationship with it.

Real customers who truly believe in your products are far less likely to turn against your brand, in my opinion. This is evidenced by the fact that I couldn’t find a single example of a real customer going rogue for this article.

It’s different because you’ll have a deep relationship with this customer as part of your work together and you’ll constantly praise them on how amazing they are (because no doubt you’ll bear witness to some awe-inspiring stuff). If there’s a problem, the customer is going to pick up the phone and call you, not the newspapers.

If you’re seriously concerned about not being able to satisfy a customer, then this approach is definitely not for you. But you’re far more likely to fall victim to a rogue customer who isn’t a brand ambassador than with a loyal audience member.

#2: Concern over losing a brand ambassador because they move on.

This is a reasonable concern. As you work with customers and they develop their own following, it can be tough to manage a transition if they decide they don’t have time for it anymore. I would recommend that you structure your brand ambassador channels in a way that allows for multiple customers to participate in a single channel so you aren’t too strongly aligned with an individual personality.

#3 Fear of not “controlling” the brand message.

The best we can do as marketers is to influence our brand’s message and perception, but the reality is that it’s largely controlled by our audience. The sooner we embrace the massive word-of-mouth network that has been magnified through social networks, the more chance we have of being a positive influence on it.

As the social media world evolves, our customers will have a voice, whether we empower them or not. The question is, are you willing to provide the platform to magnify your customers’ reach or are you going to wait for your competition to do it first?

Check here if you want to know if your brand passes the mirror test and check out this interview on how Cisco uses social media to connect with customers.

What do you think? Is your brand ready for this kind of change? Are you already using this strategy? Please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below.

The good news is social media has finally made it to the grand stage of “accountability.” A place where there are lots of people who want to measure it. The bad news is there isn’t a single clear-cut answer.

However, with a few simple steps, you can build a measurement strategy that accomplishes your goals.

Defining Terms

To start, let’s agree that brand awareness is a measure of how recognizable your brand is to your target audience. For those looking to get ahead of the curve on social media measurement, the first step is to align your social media metrics with metrics your company is already comfortable with.

Also, let’s agree that the measurements for social media aren’t all that different from how you’ve been measuring traditional media. To put brand awareness measurement into the context of the sales funnel, the key areas to evaluate fall into three categories:  social media exposure, influence and engagement.

With that understanding, let’s look at how you can level the playing field between your traditional media metrics and your social media metrics.

#1:  Measuring Social Media Exposure

How many people could you have reached with your message?

In social media, this measurement is about as reliable as a print magazine’s circulation, but knowing your potential audience does have value because it represents your potential sales lead pool.

Unfortunately, as of the writing of this post, some of these metrics have to be accounted for manually, so you’ll have to balance the level of effort to track the metrics versus the value you’ll receive from them to determine their importance to your overall strategy.

A good example of where there can be unreliability in social measurement is when isolating unique users for each of your metrics. You want to avoid counting the same person twice in the list below, but realistically it’s difficult to do.

These measurements highlight the number of people you’ve attracted to your brand through social media. To mitigate the potential for duplication of users, track growth rate as a percentage of the aggregate totals. This is where you will find the real diamonds.

• Twitter: Look at your number of followers and the number of followers for those who retweeted your message to determine the monthly potential reach. You should track these separately and then compare the month-over-month growth rate of each of these metrics so you can determine where you’re seeing the most growth. A great free tool to use for Twitter measurement is TweetReach.
• Facebook: Track the total number of fans for your brand page. In addition, review the number of friends from those who became fans during a specified period of time or during a promotion and those who commented on or liked your posts to identify the potential monthly Facebook reach.  Facebook Insights provides value here.
• YouTube: Measure the number of views for videos tied to a promotion or specific period of time, such as monthly, and the total number of subscribers.
• Blog: Measure the number of visitors who viewed the posts tied to the promotion or a specific period of time.
• Email: Take a look at how many people are on the distribution list and how many actually received the email.

Exposure is the top of the brand awareness funnel and represents your potential sales lead pool.

#2:  Measuring Engagement

How many people actually did something with your message?

This is one of the most important measurements because it shows how many people actually cared enough about what you had to say to result in some kind of action.

Fortunately engagement is fairly easy to measure with simple tools such as Radian 6, Biz360 and TweetEffect. These metrics highlight who you want to target to retain on social media channels.

For a starting list of key performance indicators for engagement, this post by Chris Lake is a great start.

• Twitter: Quantify the number of times your links were clicked, your message was retweeted, and your hashtag was used and then look at how many people were responsible for the activity. You can also track @replies and direct messages if you can link them to campaign activity.
• Facebook: Determine the number of times your links were clicked and your messages were liked or commented on. Then break this down by how many people created this activity. You can also track wall posts and private messages if you can link them to activity that is directly tied to a specific social media campaign.
• YouTube: Assess the number of comments on your video, the number of times it was rated, the number of times it was shared and the number of new subscribers.
• Blog: Evaluate the number of comments, the number of subscribers generated and finally the number of times the posts were shared and “where” they were shared (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.). Measure how many third-party blogs you commented on and the resulting referral traffic to your site.
• Email: Calculate how many people opened, clicked and shared your email. Include where the items were shared, similar to the point above. Also, keep track of the number of new subscriptions generated.

#3: Measuring Influence

This category gets into a bit of a soft space for measurement. Influence is a subjective metric that relies on your company’s perspective for definition. Basically, you want to look at whether the engagement metrics listed above are positive, neutral or negative in sentiment. In other words, did your campaign influence positive vibes toward the brand or did it create bad mojo?

You can also use automated tools like Twitalyzer, Social Mention, Radian 6 or ScoutLabs to make it a little easier, but ALWAYS do a manual check to validate any sentiment results. Influence is generally displayed as a percentage of positive, neutral and negative sentiment, which is then applied in relation to the engagement metrics and to the metrics for reach where applicable.

A great application for influence is to look at the influence by those who engaged with your brand in the above categories. Do you have a nice mix of big players with large audiences engaging with your brand, as well as the average Joe with a modest following?

If not, your influence pendulum may be about to tip over, because it’s important that you spend time engaging with both influential users and your average user. Note: many of the automated tools that track sentiment and influence are not free. And many times, you will need a combination of tools to measure all of the different social media channels.

#4:  The Lead Generation Funnel

After you’ve measured through the influence portion of the funnel, you’re now creeping into where too many companies are starting their measurement efforts: the lead generation funnel. This is where the brand awareness portion of the funnel ends and the traditional ROI-driven action begins.

Exposure, influence and engagement represent brand awareness in the measurement funnel.

Understanding your reach, engagement and influence through these primary social channels will allow you to define your presence and impact, which can then be applied as a model to other social networks.

Now that you’ve tracked all of this information, how do you make it meaningful? Excel is a great tool to help organize your data. Build yourself a standard dashboard in Excel that highlights the key metrics that matter to the organization. Create a tab for a high-level overview of multiple campaigns, and a tab for each campaign for the time period you’re reporting on. Ultimately, you should put the information into the same format that you’ve used to report on traditional brand awareness campaigns, with social media as just another vehicle in the overall marketing mix.

If you’re looking for tools to use for tracking, this post by Mani Karthik at Daily Bloggr gives a nice view of options.

To really understand the importance of measurement, here’s a great post on social media measurement from Social Media Examiner: Is Social Media Marketing Measurable? The Big Debate.

What about you? Are you measuring?  How are you measuring?  What metrics would you add? Leave a comment below and let’s talk.

#1: Social Media Engagement Big Challenge for Many Businesses (Deloitte)

Survey results from a recent Deloitte study (2009 Tribalization of Business Study), point to some key challenges that organizations are facing as they move toward integrating online communities into their social media strategy.

Here are the top three areas respondents identified as obstacles:

• Keeping visitors engaged:  30%
• Getting people to join:  24%
• Encouraging return visits to the online community:  21%

In addition, the majority of respondents agreed that the following are key business outcomes for their online communities:

• Increase word-of-mouth:  38%
• Increase customer loyalty:  34%
• Increase brand awareness:  30%

#2: Social Media Used as a Discovery Tool by 18% of Online Population (Nielson)

With the recent integration of Twitter and Facebook with Microsoft’s Bing, there is no doubt that social media has become a top player in the world of search.  A recent study by Nielson Company examined the relationship between social media and user search options.  The report compared social sites to search engines and portals like Yahoo! Of those surveyed, 18% reported social media sites as core to finding new information.

Jon Gibs, VP Media Analytics, reports, “While still a smaller percentage than those who use search engines or portals like Yahoo! or MSN, it is a significant figure. And as social media usage continues to increase I can only expect this figure to grow.”

It is speculated that the amount of information on the web, especially on social sites, contributes to the increase in content discovery on these sites.  The report goes into much more detail and is worth a read.

#3: Businesses Slow to Incorporate Social Media Into Practice

Although numerous recent reports show how businesses plan to incorporate social media into their 2010 marketing mix, a recent study by BIA/Kelsey reports that many small- to medium-sized businesses are slow to incorporate the strategies into their plans today.

When asked about their current social media experiences, results showed many businesses are slow to adopt social media:

• Have used Twitter to market in the last 12 months:  9%
• Have used social sites in the past 12 months:  23%
• Have incorporated video into their website: 16%

In addition, according to the survey results, adoption of social media by small- and medium-sized business is more prevalent among younger businesses:

• Businesses 3 years or younger: 16% report using Twitter
• Businesses 11+ years:  2% report using Twitter

What are your thoughts? What effect, if any, do the constant changes and shifts in social media have on your overall marketing strategy?

In this interview I talk with Scott Monty—head of social media for Ford Motor Company—and the man in charge of Ford’s social media presence and initiatives like TheFordStory.com.

When you think of Ford, you might think “old American car company.” However, under the direction of Scott Monty, Ford has become one of the leading big businesses in America using social media to connect directly with consumers. And it certainly seems that Ford is on the right track to success, recently reporting 1 billion dollars in profit!

In this video, you’ll learn how Ford uses TweetUps to help Ford executives connect with customers across America and how Ford is humanizing its brand. Scott also provides advice to other businesses that are looking to capitalize on social media. Scott also has a little fun, as you’ll see…

VIEW VIDEO HERE NOW:

What did you think about the video? How has your opinion of Ford changed in recent years?