Brand champions, brand evangelists, or any other name to describe a person so passionate about your product, service, or cause that they will share your good news to the ends of the earth.
The reaction people have to the word ‘evangelist’ is very peculiar given the religious connotations, however its description is precise with regards to marketing or in this case social media marketing. As the Chief Evangelist of Alltop, I did just as I described above. I shared the good news of Alltop from Hawaii to Texas and across the globe to Spain, Japan, India, and just about anywhere I could connect with someone.
I did this through attending three major new media and business conferences: BlogWorld Expo, SobCon, and SXSW. I armed myself with a good attitude, the acceptance that some people may not like Alltop, and a lot of swag! So much swag that Co-Founder of SobCon, Liz Strauss correlates me with “sticker bombing.” Yes, I will make sure you and your entire family, even your cousin twice removed would have or at least offered free Alltop stickers. Soon after, she named me an SOB.
But, how did I become the Chief Evangelist for Alltop? In other words, how did Guy Kawasaki find me? One word, Twitter. There’s a great story behind this, but I’ll save it for another time. Fortunately, Sanjay Shetty founder of Communities R US has a list of 17 different sources to find your evangelists. Before you dive in and begin building an external community, be sure to identify your internal evangelists first.
- Loyalty program members. Customers give their information and present their member’s cards to receive discounted items or perhaps free gifts, but are you leveraging their loyalty?
- Social Media. Umm, I just shared that I connected with Guy via Twitter. You never know the geniuses that are among your followers, fans, or in your circles until you engage them in sincere conversation.
- Followers of A-Listers. No, I didn’t say follow A-Listers, but harvest their followers. Too often, an A-Lister might be busy doing A-Lister things to notice the geniuses in their own followers or fans.
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