This article will change your life as a business person. It’s a radical departure from the “conventional wisdom” of advertising and promotion, but like many great movements, its strength lies its simplicity and focus on core values. Customer Evangelism is the pure essence of marketing again. Remember, the definition of marketing that that we read in the first week of marketing 101? Something to the effect that marketing is defined as discovering and meeting the needs of your customers? It seems to have been promptly forgotten or defiled by many executives, product managers, and advertising firms upon graduation from business school. Customer Evangelism is a popular uprising that has the potential to bring marketing back to reality.

“The Customer Evangelism Manifesto” by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba takes us to the core essence of marketing and beyond. It’s about providing the highest quality solution and then providing even more to a special class of customer: the encouragement and empowerment to become an active advocate, or evangelist, and a de facto member of your organization. It’s a charter to breed a special kind of super customer who not only purchases from you regularly, but feels compelled to tell others.

There is so much gold in this article, you’ve just got to read it, print it, share it, and forward it. If 50% of the businesses in the U.S. today were focused on creating customer evangelists our society would be radically changed for the better. (See how persuasive a customer evangelist appeal can be? How motivated would you be to read their article if you saw “Customer Evangelism Manifesto” advertised in a magazine?)

Here’s just a teaser to get you started: some clues to how a customer evangelist behaves:

• They passionately recommend your company to friends, neighbors and colleagues.
• They believe in the company and its people.
• They purchase your product as gifts.
• They provide unsolicited praise and suggestions.
• They forgive occasional dips in performance or quality.
• They do not want to be bought; they extol your virtues freely.
• They feel part of something bigger than themselves.

Read or download the Customer Evangelism Manifesto

The Premise

As businesses continue to discover the blogosphere and the benefits and repercussions that come along with it, too many marketing managers are simply applying the principals and practices learned in Advertising 101 and/or sales training seminars to construct their blogging strategies. In other words, I have noticed several blogs on corporate Web sites that have been written in a manner similar to what one would find on a product description page. This is in fact a significant blunder in blog creation because it dilutes the true purpose of a blog; which is to organically engage with people in meaningful and purpose driven dialog. The fact is, consumers don’t read blogs because they’re interested in hearing a sales pitch, but rather they desire to scratch beneath the surface so as to discover the degree of actual value a product, service, or brand may provide to them personally.

How to Write a Blog

In actuality, there is no set formula or templated prescription for writing a successful blog other than to keep the content real and relevant for the reader. The content should be structured so as to capture the emotions of the reader/consumer and in a manner to solicit feedback. In many cases, this strategy goes beyond product-centric content and taps into the lifestyle of the audience; creating a customer-centric forum that harnesses emotions and develops a level of interest with significant impact for the reader.

In summarizing the elements required to produce a successful blog, remember to:

• Develop content that is beyond the scope of your product
• Emotionally engage the target audience by talking about values, lifestyles, and subjects that keep people awake at night
• Ask for honest feedback
• Develop a mechanism to pass the blog along to other readers

How to Promote a Blog

Truth be told, successful blogs really don’t require a major media blitz to create a following if they are constructed around relevant content, as mentioned above, and if they incorporate a technological infrastructure to support a loyal following. For instance, RSS integration is a tool that is designed to build traffic to a blog site while encouraging repeat visits through a syndication method that is non-intrusive. In other words, RSS doesn’t clog up email and it helps the audience discriminate relevant information from spam through keywords and descriptions.

The Benefits of Blogging

Cutting through all the complex definitions of blogging, the most direct description is that of an online forum for authors to post comments and/or questions so as to solicit feedback. For businesses, blogging should not be viewed as an extension of an advertising campaign, but rather a medium to connect with customers and stakeholders. Companies that utilize blogs effectively will discover that their audience is more than willing to provide constructive feedback, in some cases eliminating the need for focus group style market research.

Additionally, blogs provide consumers with content they can search out for themselves, without having to rely solely on corporate-generated commentary. As a consumer, I appreciate the chance to view reader responses to corporate-generated content since it allows me the opportunity to experience the product/service from a peer’s perspective. For instance, if I’m preparing to make a purchasing decision, I as a consumer want to be well informed of the value that I would possibly receive from others that have bought before me. This is a great lead in for some common objections companies hold toward blogging.

The Objections

In my experience as a consultant, the two most common blogging objections that I run into include 1) the risk of negative feedback and 2) the lack of time. Starting with the negative feedback dilemma, companies must come to grips with the fact that not everyone can be overwhelmingly satisfied; and whether marketing managers like to hear it or not, the conversation about their company’s products and services is already taking place amongst consumers. Blogging simply provides an avenue for sellers to participate in the discussion.

To overcome this first objection, any company of worth will have loyal customer evangelists who are willing to extol the company’s virtues and provide testimonials via an online forum if provided the opportunity to do so. For companies wondering how to accomplish this feat, the key is in identifying those customer evangelists and inviting them to participate in the online discussion. Although almost any company will have its share of detractors, it also has a large network of customers who will willingly go to bat for the company so as to defend it from critics. If a company is unable to identify any customer evangelists, that organization is in serious need of evaluating their customer service program because they probably won’t be doing business 5 years from now.

To address the second objection, time is always a factor in business operations, one of the critical resources that is severely limited and often leads to the downfall of organizations that are unable to manage it wisely. However, blogging shouldn’t be viewed along the same lines as a company picnic or corporate birthday celebration, but as a critical component of customer relations. Without a doubt, blogging requires a significant commitment, however the burden of blog management can be mitigated through a smart and comprehensive strategy involving multi-blogger participation, strategic content parameters, and scheduled posting dates.

The Conclusion

In all, blogging is merely a tool that companies should leverage to envelop customers into brand loyalty and evangelism. If thought of as an extension of traditional advertising, the blog will ultimately fail because there will be a disconnect between the corporate message and the expectations of the reader. To succeed, keep the content real and customer-centric, and remember to implement technical mechanisms such as RSS or pass along links to broaden participation via social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

YOUR FEEDBACK is appreciated, please reply to this blog with any questions or comments.

Check our our new tricked out Facebook page . . . we can code about anything you can image for your company’s Facebook page. A Single complete custom branded and designed page with interactive features or a complete "mini site" within your Company’s Facebook page. We can code almost anything in your Facebook page including Flash (with fail safe alternative for iPads/iPhones), ajax, JavaScript, Forms, video . . . anything you can image.

• Visit our custom Facebook design here.

These do-it-yourself instructions are based on best-practice recommendations from Facebook and are current as of February 18, 2011. Additionally, Risingline provides full Facebook development services. If you would prefer to have us setup, optimize and integrate your Facebook and other social media assets with your Website, please feel free to contact us for a no-obligation estimate.

1. Setup a Personal Account

If one does not exist already, set up a personal account for the CEO, owner or a principal of your company. Do not set-up a personal Facebook account and populate it with business information. This is against Facebook’s terms of service and may result in Facebook deactivating your profile.

2. Setup a “fanpage” (In Facebook lingo, fanpage is synonymous with business page)

a. Login to the personal Facebook page you created in step 1. Click “Home” in the upper right.

b. In the far-left column, look for “Ads and Pages” and click. You may have to click the “More” link in that column to see Ads and Pages.

c. Click the “Create Page” button

d. Select the category that best describes the type of business page you’re creating. In most cases, you will need to decide between “Local Business or Place” and “Company, Organization or Institution.”

• If you market your products/service primarily in a single market then choose Local Business or Place.
• If you market your products/service nationally then choose Company, Organization, or Institution.

e. Fill in your basic business information and click “Get Started.”

f. Your business fan page is now setup in its initial draft state.  Proceed with uploading your logo or other company images for your profile. Save the other suggested actions like “Invite your friends” until after you add essential information to your page.

g. Click “Info” in the far-left column then click “Edit Info.”

h. Complete the Basic Information page. Insure you use (but don’t overuse) the keywords for which you have optimized your Website.

3. Add additional Administrators to your Fan Page (Business Page)

Click “Manage Admins” from the far-left column. Type in the email address of the other personal profile accounts of individuals that will also administer this page, then click the “Save Changes” button.

Your additional administrator should now show up on the “Manage Admins” page.

Important Information About your Facebook Business Page

Your business Fan Page needs to be treated as a business asset. It’s important that the owners/principals of a business have control of the business/Fan Page by being added as an administrator. It’s ok to have a trusted Web developer or employee as an administrator; the business principals just also need to be administrators. As Facebook states:

“Businesses do not typically put the titles to company vehicles in employee’s names, nor do they allow the employee to keep the company vehicle after termination of employment. Nor should they with FB business/fanpages.”

For more information on Facebook best practices for business fan pages please see this article from Facebook’s Website: Fan Page Help – Beginners Read First!

4. Start populating and promoting your page.

Click the “View Page” button in the upper right hand corner, then proceed with Invite your friends, Tell your fans and Post status updates.

Confusion Warning!

While logged into your business fan page as an administrator, be aware that clicking on the Home, Profile and Account links in the upper right hand corner will connect you to those section on your personal profile/page with no notification. Hopefully Facebook will correct this long-standing usability issue but until then, it’s best to use the lower column sections to insure that you’re remaining in your business page.

The View Page or Edit Page button that appears under them does pertain to your business fan page.

Continuing Your Fan Page Development

The above guide will allow you to optimally setup a functioning Facebook business page, but there are numerous other options you can explore for managing and promoting your Fan Page through your administrator account.

Facebook Optimization and Integration with Your Main Website

Risingline provides additional development services to integrate your Facebook page with your main Website, blog and other social media accounts like Twitter. A popular integration includes us setting up your Facebook and Twitter accounts to automatically post links to blog, news or article posts when you post them on your main Website. Feel free to contact us for more information.

Are you aware that how you send emails to your customers can dramatically affect the viability of your entire business? In the most extreme cases emailing to customers the wrong way can result in your entire domain being frozen or shut down.

While a successful email marketing strategy involves much more, there are a few basics that you must adhere too to protect the good name of your business and prevent potentially serious problems with your company’s ability to deliver emails of all types to vendors, clients and customers.

1. Never send to large groups using Outlook or Webmail!

Have you ever logged into your individual email account and sent an email to a group of customers by adding them all to the bcc field? Or have you ever taken a larger list of customer email address and broken them up into smaller sequential emails?

Because of the prevalence of spam, email service providers and ISP’s closely monitor emails sent to multiple addressees as well as the frequency in which they’re sent. ISP’s and service providers tend to be overly cautious and favor erring on the side of preventing potential spam. Therefore  they are likely to flag your email/domain as potential spam when they see this type of group sending activity. In some cases I’ve seen email service suspended as a warning for 24 hours if too many such emails are sent, and, in extreme cases, the Website and email for your domain can be shut down.  This threat exists when sending through an individual account no matter how legitimate the email is and how much your recipients want to receive it.

The best alternative is to utilize one of the large 3rd party email marketing companies, namely VerticalResponse or Constant Contact. They send millions of emails each month and have the ability, because of their size and volume, to safeguard that your domain name does not get associated with spam. Not only will your domain name be protected, for their nominal cost, there are many other advantages such as tracking and the ability to have have a custom HTML email design developed for your brand.

2. Never buy lists of email addresses from 3rd parties!

There is a good reason why Constant Contact and Vertical Response do not allow the use of third party email lists . . . they are often not poor quality in terms of relevancy, they tend to result in a much higher rate being marked for spam by recipients (thus potentially blacklisting your domain) and most importantly there is no way to verify that these lists were obtained legally. In short, they present a very high risk of damage to your domain name and the deliverablity of all your company’s email . . . just don’t do it!  For more information on this topic and insight about best practice email marketing visit Word to the Wise or Deliverability.com; both great sites about email, delivery and spam.

There are of course legitimate ways to collect addresses for your email  marketing—you can start with this these 29 Ways to Collect Email Addresses for Your Business provided by VerticalResponse.

3. Comply with the CAN-SPAM Act on all your marketing related emails (It’s not hard).

While admittedly The FTC is not overly aggressive in prosecuting, the fact remains that each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $16,000. This should serve as good motivation to adhere to the following guidelines:

1. Don’t use false or misleading header information.
2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines.
3. Tell recipients where you’re located.
4. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you.
5. Honor opt-out requests promptly.
6. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf.

For full details on these email guidelines, see the FTC’s CAN-SPAM Facts for Business.

Quick Guide to Writing Website Content

Writing content for your Website (or any marketing material for that matter) can be quite challenging. If I had to give one piece of advice it would be to keep your content as informal as possible so it’s not refined it into generic marketing drivel. What good is a Website that sounds like a million others?  I’ve found that it’s often the first pass at writing your content that can be the best at establishing that authentic tone that truly resonates with your visitors.

The Vital Elements for your Website

Effective communication on your Website can be compared to effective Interstate highway billboard communication — your visitors are going 70mph and if you’re not concise and clear they won’t bother slowing down to read your message. Research has established that visitors to your Website will make a judgment within a few seconds regarding the credibility and quality of your business (initially based on the graphic design) and then they will want these fundamental questions quickly answered:

• Who are you?
• What do you do?
• Where do you do it?
• How can they learn more or try your product?
• Why are you the best choice?

This last item is called your Unique Value Proposition and is extremely important . . . in fact it should permeate all elements of your marketing communication.

The Front Page

The front page of your site is that “billboard” that needs to provide answers to these questions or a clear one-click path for your users to get those answers. Don’t make your visitors guess about these answers or which link to click to get them, otherwise they’re apt to just leave and look elsewhere. Website visitors tend not to be very patient.

Provide Proof

For those visitors who are interested in your unique value proposition, a vital supporting section is the proof section . . . it’s one thing to say you’re the greatest at this or that, but offering your visitors credible proof is going to carry exponentially more weight than you just saying so. Examples of proof sections include testimonials, portfolios and/or photos of your staff and or customers engaged in providing your products or services to clients.

Photos as Proof

As the old saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” and this couldn’t be more true on your Website. Visitors are not going to invest the time to read 1,000 words about how great you are (even if they did, they wouldn’t believe it) but they can’t help but seeing a prominently displayed photo that, if done correctly, can instantly and powerfully communicate your values and help establish trust.

The Web is cold, impersonal and untrustworthy by nature.  Avoid at all costs stock photos with cheesy models posing. The only thing you’ll accomplish is to make people wonder if your business is legitimate. Rather, make this an opportunity to develop an instant personal bond with your visitors which you’ll find is extremely potent towards establishing credibility . . . offer photos of you in an authentic setting, whether it’s a photo that provides some personal insight on your bio or photos that show your business making real customers of yours happy.

Even if your budget is low, consider hiring a professional photographer to work in conjunction with your Web designer. While you may spend a bit more on the project, you’ll be establishing a significant competitive advantage.

I’m still amazed that with all the material we offer on our site, and the myriads of photos of our past projects, I often have prospects and clients commenting on my profile photo which shows me with my family. People want to trust the firm they’re hiring and my willingness to share this type of photo is very effective in helping to establish that bond (as you might of guessed, that’s the photo on this page).

For more explanations and examples, visit this demo site of ours and read through the pages (keep in mind, you don’t have to have every section on your site).

Lastly, here are some additional resources on this topic:

• Keys For a Successful Web Site — An older blog post of ours
• Make the Message — From Monelle Smith at Gemstone Media
• Web Credibility Report — Stanford University
• Advanced Common Sense — Steve Krug’s Usability Website

Edison Research just released an insightful report entitled "Twitter Usage in America: 2010".  This report is important because it cuts through the fanatical hype and provides a basis for establishing a rational decision about how much or how little your firm should incorporate such social media channels in your marketing efforts.

Many write ups I’ve read on this report have painted the findings in a negative light, emphasizing that "only" 7% of American’s actually use Twitter.  However, 7% of Americans is 17 million people and as it turns out these people appear to have many favorable characteristics for most businesses. Here are some selected findings from the report about Twitter users:

• 7% (~17 million) of Americans use Twitter; 41% (~126 million) Americans maintain a Facebook profile.
• 51% of active Twitter users follow companies, brands or products on social networks.
• Twitter users are 3 times more apt to follow brands using Twitter than other social networking services.
• Twitter users have higher than average incomes.
• 4 out of 10 Twitter users own three or more computers.
• About 1/2 of Twitter users post updates using Twitter; 70% of these same users post updates on other social networking sites like Facebook.

It’s easy to incorporate Twitter into your marketing plan

When considering if you should incorporate Twitter into your marketing efforts I think of the adage, "If it might help, it’s easy to do and won’t hurt then why not?" For those who are already publishing any sort of news or advertising communication on a regular basis it’s a no-brainer; we can put together a streamlined process so the same message is published to multiple mediums all at once. A typical scenario goes like this:

You provide your newsletter, advertisement to us. We take that message and immediately:

1. Post on your Website or Blog
2. Generate an optimized RSS feed that notifies Google and other major search services of your new article
3. Post on your business’ Facebook page
4. Tweet through your business’ Twitter account
5. Format, test and distribute in HTML email to your mailing list using an email marketing service like VerticalResponse or Constant Contact

Feel free to contact me for more information about electronic and social media marketing distribution.

I ran across a great article by Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger entitled, “What to Do When Your Search Rankings Drop.” In it he recounts a time when his site’s traffic dropped a dramatic 70% suddenly and for no apparent reason. He relied on Google to bring in most of his site visitors and some unknown change in their algorithms resulted in this costly (for him) change of fortune. While not the point of his article, this example underscores a principle that we’ve been emphasizing for years—it’s very risky to rely on awareness and demand generation being driven primarily by high search engine result page placement (please note my emphasis of the words rely and primarily).

I’m not suggesting at all that search engine optimization efforts are not important, but rather that your business plan needs to rely on demand generation from a source other than organic Internet search engines—a source over which you have more direct control. The risk of building your business with a single point of failure over which you have no direct control whatsoever is prohibitively risky in almost all business scenarios.

It’s for this reason that we typically advise our clients to build a business plan without consideration for demand generation via search engines (referral marketing is always the most desirable and secure foundation for demand generation) and then go ahead and implement a best practice SEO strategy. If your business plan is solid and your unique value proposition legitimate a by-the-book (Google’s book that is) SEO campaign will generate demand over time; all of which should be treated like “gravy” until significant enough to begin including in your sales forecast. This strategy then mitigates the high-risk of relying on search engines for your business while at the same time taking advantage of the great high ROI opportunity that organic search engine marketing offers.

I’m currently reading a book from 1938 entitled, “If You Want to Write” by Brenda Ueland. I was struck by how applicable her observation of business communication still is 70 years later; she writes:

Don’t write like an advertising writer…advertising companies hire the very brightest, wittiest young people to write for them. Not one single sentence of it is worth repeating. Why? Because it wasn’t meant. It was all written, not because the writer felt something and then said it (if you feel a thing the more simply you say it the better, the more effective), but because he tried to impress and inveigle people, convince them something is very fine about which he himself does not really care… (p 115)

I sense the anxiety many clients have when they put together the content for their Websites . . . they put themselves under some unrealistic expectation that their writing needs to sound “businesslike.” The problem with business sounding content is that it sounds way too much like a billion other Websites, brochures and magazine ads and is tuned out by the reader.

More than any other medium, the modern interactive Webpage is fertile ground for communication that is authentic. Most business owners and executives are typically much better qualified to provide this type of writing than anyone else . . . the most important to effective content writing is authenticity and passion.

Do you want to grow your business without relying on expensive advertising? Would you like to utilize an easy strategy to turn your best customers into your best salespeople? Are you tired of attracting poorly qualified prospects that waste your valuable time?

OK, enough of these silly rhetorical questions….any business manager who just read these questions has just gone through a brief period of euphoric fantasy followed by a sick feeling in their gut…knowing that it’s just too good to be true. I’m here to tell you though that they can be true and furthermore they can build businesses of much higher value.

Here’s some reality therapy about Advertising:

• People don’t believe advertising.
• Advertising is exceptionally expensive (you knew this already)
• The customers your advertising brings are often not high-value life time clients. Do you really want your business built on customers who were attracted by a gimmick or low price? Unless you can build loyalty fast they will leave the first time they see a better gimmick or lower price.

We’re all bombarded by thousands of advertising messages each day. How many do you remember from yesterday? A more important question: Of those you remember for how many will you become a customer? For example take Geico insurance, sure their hackneyed ads are embedded in our brains, but how many of us actually buy from them? Not many. About 7 out of every 100 auto insurance buyers. Don’t get me wrong, Geico has a solid business model but is it plausible for your business?  Can you afford to spend $500+ million a year to generate demand through advertising?

In my 15+ year sales career I’ve learned that one principle is by far the powerful: people buy from those they know and trust. Like many of the most profound concepts in life, this truth is simple and intuitive yet ignored by a vast majority of sales and marketing “experts”.

I was told once at a sales training seminar, “If you can’t be a good actor then you can’t be a good salesperson.” No wonder sales people have such a bad reputation! Do I really want to be sold something from someone who is acting (i.e. lying)…why should I expect that my customers want to get an acting job when they read my marketing collateral or meet my salespeople?

Traditional advertising and sales are almost always based on acting. It’s so established that advertiser embellish the truth on a regular basis that we’ve invented the special legal word—“puffing”. It doesn’t sound as bad as “lying” but means the same thing. Take a look around at the advertising or packages closest to you this moment and notice how we’ve become desensitized to the “puffing” of advertising…do you really believe that spaghetti on the shelf is “America’s Favorite Pasta“? No you don’t. That’s why you will typically buy it on price or otherwise only when you have credible insight into it having superior quality.

So it’s really no wonder that most people instinctively don’t believe either salespeople or advertising. Valuable life-time clients buy from the exact opposite of the angle presented in most advertising and sales…they buy from sources that they know and trust.