The Conversation Manager

I came across an interesting article on identifying your brand ambassadors written by the Digital Royalty herself, Amy Martin. Amy has over 1.3 million followers on Twitter, so follow her if you are not doing so yet.

In the article Amy talks about the way they supported the launch of Tony his book Delivering Happiness. They used a blogger program that identified bloggers (not only business bloggers) and gave them an advanced copy of the book. 800 bloggers from around the world were involved. They were screened online (Facebook, Twitter, …) to see if they expressed the desire to spread the movement. According to Amy ‘identifying and empowering passionate customers/fans to promote your product or service can arguably be the most effective from of marketing!’ We cannot agree more!

After the launch these brand ambassadors were involved in the planning of the Delivering Happiness Bus Tour and will be consulted in the development of an online community.

One of the big Telco players in Belgium, Belgacom, has scored a new advertising hit! The previous one was the ‘Who took my badjas’ campaign. 180 000 views on youtube.com, 150 000 fans on Facebook and a lot of attention in the press and in the streets. Everyone used the famous quotes from the ad.

And they did it again … the new TV ad with the two children educating their parents is a big hit again. Now already 63 000 fans on Facebook 60 000 views (over different videos) on youtube.com.

Very nice, but what about it … Well in the first campaign everyone knewabout the ad and talked about it with friends. Most of us used the ‘Who took my badjas’ sentence regularly at that time. But no one was talking about the brand Belgacom. I even think the fanpage on Facebook was not initiated by them. Now Belgacom has evolved and has worked on the activation part. Due to the success of the new movie they got a lot of requests of parents who would like to have their children in the next Belgacom ad. They immediately acted upon this and started a new campaign triggering the activation. Parents can go to www.belgacomcasting.be and send in their children’s’ version of the quotes in the ad. Of course parents can post the movie on social media to spread the word.

I’m sure in this case, more people will know that Belgacom is behind the TV ad. By owning the Facebook page they can interact more with their fans, which they do, but they can go further in my opinion. They facilitate the conversation but do not join it actively. (Except for the postings of bloopers or pictures.) Some of the reactions can lead to interesting ideas, conversations and I’m sure sales. Some examples (in Dutch):

And due to the this hit, I’m sure more people will remember that the previous one … was also Belgacom! 

I just wanted to write a quick blog post on a video I ran into of Gary Vaynerchuk at the SXSW conference of 2010. I saw Gary for the first time on LeWeb in Paris and he is a great speaker but most of all, a man with a vision. Gary has 850.000+ twitter followers(@garyvee), wrote a book Crush It (inspiring and empowering readers to pursue their passion for a living) and the only thing he wants to buy with his money is ‘The Jets’.

This video only takes 7 minutes of your time and is giving you a down to earth wake-up call on the changes going on. He kicks off, in his own style (which I love), by explaining that we all say what we are not going to do, why he believes the opportunity lies in what we ARE going to do. Gary is pointing out that no matter what industry you are in, one day you will be in the customer service business, we need to start caring about our consumers.

Gary confirms what you can read in the book ‘The Conversation Manager’: The world is changing and everyone has an audience and a voice. He uses an example of his brother going to a restaurant … nice one! Gary very often gets the question after he was on stage … how do you scale the efforts? ‘Scale is important, of course, but I can try’ is his answer. Caring is massively underestimated.

By the way, I also love my parents a lot :-) For those who get fascinated by Gary and want to see another nice video, check this one. Gary talks about his person, his family, his road to winelibrary.com, honesty, numbers of followers and the emotion of the audience, consistency, relationships, mobile allowing us to be lazy, Google and Facebook on search, …