Carri is better known for her role tweeting as Peggy Olson, a fictional character on  AMC’s Mad Men. She shares the story behind her fan fiction role and the lessons brands can learn from her story.

Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• Why brands need to monitor their personae online
• Why people thought the Peggy Olson Twitter stream was a marketing campaign
• How AMC  reacted to the Peggy Olson Twitter account
• How fans supported the fan fiction Twitter accounts
• What you need to know when evangelizing a brand
• What to do when you have an enthusiastic fan base
• How to help your brand evangelists

Connect with Carri on Twitter @carribugbee and check out her company Big Deal PR.

What do you think about fan fiction roles on social media? Please leave your comments below.

Bart shares how he created the Bulbstorm community for anyone to come with their own ideas and share them with others.  He also shows how brands can use this new game theory to acquire faithful followers.

Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• How Bart came up with the idea for Bulbstorm
• How to capture the passion people have for ideas and use this to create an engaging community where people have fun
  
• How brands benefit from the dynamics of sharing passion
• Fun and engaging ways brands become part of the conversation
• What brands can get out of combining their marketing with the sharing of ideas
• Why the new game theory rewards all types of participation
• Why people want to have fun even if they’re doing something serious at the time
• How behavior has changed and why this impacts marketing on Facebook

Connect with Bart on Twitter @bulbstorm, find out what the latest Bulbstorm challenges are on Facebook and check out the Bulbstorm community.

What do you think about this game theory for brands to build stronger communities? Please leave your thoughts below.

From Lady Gaga to Oreo, brands have been using freebies to build a social media following for years. The details may change, but the approach is still the same—build a following by giving something away.

In this article, I’ll cover five methods to grow your following using freebies.

#1: Work with Popular Apps

Work with existing applications on social networks (like Farmville) to make your own unique mark with a freebie. You get access to their network of users and they market the offer with you.

Look for apps that compliment your product and partner with them. Offer a great prize or exclusive access and promise only users of the app will get it. This exclusivity makes more people curious about the freebie and drives a following for your brand within the app. For example:

Gagaville takes over Farmville

Although it operates inside Facebook, Farmville is actually a social network within a social network. People connect with friends and build bonds by working together. So when Lady Gaga announced she would launch her own farm, Gagaville, it was a chance for her to connect with this large user base and use it to promote the launch of her new album, Born this Way.

For two weeks Lady Gaga practically owned Farmville.

Aside from being able to feel part of Lady Gaga’s universe, the Gagaville farm gave fans the chance to listen to new Lady Gaga songs before the launch of the album. No other channels had these songs, so for diehard fans this was a fantastic free bonus to be unlocked.

The masterstroke was that songs were given out in the days before the album launch. This gave the Lady Gaga PR team another means of promoting the album and getting fans fired up for launch.

It was also another story for the media to run before the launch, and because it was using Farmville, the story was even more appealing for the press. The album sales speak for themselves.

Billboard.biz reports that this is just the beginning. In an interview with Raquel DiSabatino, Zynga’s director of entertainment and media, they were told “Zynga’s phones have been ‘ringing off the hook’ from various music industry execs looking for ways to work with the company and its games, including labels, managers, and others.” So watch this space for more.

#2: Use Your Facebook Page

If you don’t have a Facebook page already, then make one now. It takes minutes and is a key place to drive people to learn more about your brand.

TOMS Shoes saving the world

TOMS Shoes built a following by giving stuff away, but they don’t actually give it to their customers. Instead they give away one pair of shoes for every pair purchased by a customer. This free pair is sent to the developing world.

TOMS reports on their progress toward this goal via a Facebook fan page—a page with over 900,000 fans. Although the number of fans has no effect on the number of shoes they give away, they’ve still been able to get people interested in their brand by giving stuff away.

The TOMS Shoes' philosophy.

TOMS’ Facebook page is branded with their “One for One” campaign, and they have a PDF available that shows all the good work that they’ve done. Although they would have worked for a good cause without social networks, it has nevertheless proved a very effective way of building a brand following on the network.

TOMS advertises a new shoe via their Facebook page nearly every day, allowing them to capitalize on this audience of fans, even those who only joined to learn about the donations made by the company.

It goes deeper than just Facebook, with FastCompany.com finding that “a standing army of social media activists and over 1200 TOMS university clubs use their online and personal networks to broadcast their love of TOMS Shoes.”

#3: Encourage User Content on YouTube

Create a YouTube account and hold a competition where people need to film themselves to enter. You’ll get viral content from other people doing the hard work, and if you include example videos of yourself and your employees, it gives people something to aim for. For example:

Be the Beatles

To promote the launch of his remastered albums, Paul McCartney (known by many for his involvement in the Beatles band) asked fans to create videos of themselves singing his song “Maybe I’m Amazed.” MSN Music reports that fans could then win advance copies of the album, but only if they got the most views.

Just some of the 135 video entries received.

McCartney then added the best videos to his YouTube account, which builds his own YouTube following by giving fans a central place to observe the competition. The landing page of his profile is branded to promote the new albums. It has a call to action for anyone arriving via the competition. It’s an account with 8,977,352 views.

The competition itself has 135 videos, all recorded by fans who want to win, and fans who want to have the most popular video. As they promote their own video, they are in fact pushing the new albums as well by singing a McCartney song—a very clever strategy.

#4: Promote Via Twitter and Set Up an Alert Using TweetDeck

Don’t just consider your own Twitter account. Give people a reason to talk about your brand on their accounts. Set up an alert on TweetDeck to tell you when people mention your brand on Twitter. Then monitor conversations and reward those spreading positive messages. In time you can encourage more positive brand discussions by offering freebies and rewarding loyal tweeters. For example:

Toyota gives away $1 million

Rather than giving someone a product you can also give money back. Toyota employed this strategy in December 2010 by every day giving 250 people the chance to earn $500 for tweeting that they had bought a new Toyota. This flooded Twitter with brand mentions of Toyota from satisfied customers.

Toyota encouraged happy customers to spread the word for cash.

People tweeting that they had purchased a car was a very effective form of promotion. To see people you follow actively promoting a purchase is certain to increase the likelihood you would consider that brand in the future. With the $1 million offer, Toyota dominated Twitter for a solid month, and gave out a good brand message all round. This helped Toyota achieve an 8% rise in sales year over year (source: The Guardian).

#5: Build a Competition Within Your Own Website

Build a competition within your own website and then encourage people to enter through any social network they wish. Although you don’t need to create any social media profile for this to work, it helps if you register accounts with YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. For example:

“Compare the Market” Offers a Dream Job

In a recent Social Media Examiner post, Ben Pickering highlighted how running a sweepstakes is an easy way to increase the number of Likes on your page. For Compare the Market, this sweepstakes focused on a dream job. People were invited to apply for the job of brand ambassador, which would earn them £40,000 ($65,000) for six months’ work. Not a bad payday, and certainly a good freebie.

The winner was revealed from 1,000 applicants.

More than 1,000 entrants then had to promote themselves across social media in order to get the most votes to win. With all of these people trying to get heard, it helped drive traffic to the site in large numbers. Once there, people could Like a candidate, which then drove more awareness of the brand and competition.

The winning candidate made his way to victory thanks to a tweet from Davina McCall, one of the biggest celebrities in Britain, who has over 650,000 followers. It generated amazing exposure for the brand, and that’s just one of the tweets for one candidate. When you factor in all of the other candidates’ efforts, the viral impact of the campaign is impressive.

What are your thoughts on using free stuff to build brands? Have you seen it work anywhere else, or do you feel brands’ marketing efforts are better spent elsewhere? Please share your comments in the box below.

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.

But many brand and marketing managers responsible for social media don’t quite understand what social media monitoring is and why it’s important. Here’s a quick primer:

Social Media Monitoring Is Listening

Listening to online conversations is technically done without ears. Using search engine technology, social media monitoring tools scan the Internet looking for documents that contain keywords you select. They return those results in some sort of order that allows you to see where people have mentioned your brand, company, product or whatever you specified.

Seeing these results reveal which websites or blogs you should visit to either see what people are saying about you or actually participate in those conversations. Without monitoring, the conversations are happening without your knowledge.

Social Media Monitoring Can Be Free

The easiest way to start monitoring social media is to sign up for some free tools and services. Google Alerts allows you to search for a word or phrase just as you would in a regular search, and then notifies you when something new pops up on the web with that search term. You can subscribe to email updates of the new search results or add them to your RSS subscriptions. (If you don’t know what RSS is, watch “RSS in Plain English,” a video from CommonCraft.)

You can also search for your company or product name on Twitter to see real-time conversations that include mentions or discussions of your brand. Add Technorati to the list and your monitoring will cover the majority of blogs as well.

Paid Social Media Monitoring Solutions Are Often Worth the Investment

The one drawback to the free monitoring solutions is that manual work will be required to quantify the results for your executives or report your findings. Paid social media monitoring services like Radian6, Scout Labs and Techrigy pull all those conversations together into an organized, web-based dashboard and allow you to pull charts and graphs that explain the information with very little work on your part.

One big benefit to many (but not all) of the paid solutions is their ability to analyze sentiment and tone of the conversations through fancy computer algorithms using natural language processing. What this means is that you can log in to your service, see that there were 250 conversations mentioning your brand this week, and of those, 83 percent were positive, 10 percent were negative and the other 7 percent were neutral.

Paid monitoring solutions offer dashboard experiences like this one from Radian6 which makes monitoring your brand easier

Monitoring Is Only the First Step

Finding and cataloging the online conversations about your company is just the tip of the iceberg in social media monitoring. Once you know where conversations are taking place and what is being said about your company, you can then participate in the conversation. This is critically important for companies because today’s web-savvy consumer requires direct access to the people behind the products and services they buy or shop for.

Let’s say you find a customer upset about the service she received at your place of business earlier today. Letting the individual mouth off to her friends who have a natural predisposition to either agree or jump on the bandwagon of hate only guarantees your company will be thought of negatively by those involved in the conversation. However, social media case studies show time and time again that entering into similar conversations with a simple, “I’m sorry you had a bad experience. What can I do to help?” shows the disgruntled fan—and her bandwagon-jumping friends—that you’re truly interested in improving the situation. The customer response is almost always something like, “Wow. I didn’t know you were listening. Thanks for offering.”

Smart Monitoring Can Build Your Business

Please don’t think that social media monitoring is limited to mitigating online detractors. By analyzing the conversations around not just your company, but also your industry or even competitors, you can gain a significant market advantage and actually drive business.

Let’s say you’re monitoring mentions of your nearest competitor and uncover a trend that people are complaining that their product (say, a coffeepot) is great but not durable. You then change your advertising campaign to trumpet the fact your coffeepot lasts three times longer than the competitor’s.

For another example, suppose you have a national product that has inconsistent sales patterns from region to region. Your social media monitoring shows you what people in the Pacific Northwest say are the best and worst qualities of your product, but the answers are different in the South. This consumer intelligence helps you better market your product based on geographic and cultural specifics which can be the difference in customers choosing you or your competition.

Last but not least, sophisticated monitoring can even reveal individual customers who are at the point of making a purchase decision, enabling you to reach out and help them make a connection to your product at the absolute perfect time.

What Are You Waiting For?

Now that you have an idea of what social media monitoring is and what it can do for you, dive in. Start a Google Alert for your company or product. Add one for some general industry terms your customers might use when discussing your category. Add one for each of your competitors. As you feel comfortable, add Twitter and Technorati searches, then branch out and start exploring other social media monitoring tools. At the very least, you’ll have a better idea of what people are saying about you.

What social media monitoring tools are you using? What are your thoughts?  Please leave a comment below.