How-To: Creating Advocate Communities
5 Tips from Brains on Fire's Geno Church
Certain initiatives just don't lend themselves to being ad campaigns, says Geno Church, Word of Mouth Inspirational Officer for Brains on Fire. For example, when the company launched an anti-smoking campaign in South Carolina, an ad campaign just wouldn't cut it. It needed to be movement, and it had to be run by the youth, he says.
Here, Geno shares his five tips on creating advocate communities:
Tip #1. Look for the obsessed and passionate
The campaign would be "driven" by kids, so Geno wanted to find teenagers that were passionate about something; they did not necessarily have to be "influencers." He traveled through communities looking for teens who were actively involved: raising awareness about teen pregnancy, cleaning up neighborhoods, etc.
Tip #2. Train thoroughly
After locating his advocates, he gathered them for a two-and-a-half day training summit on spreading the word about Rage Against the Haze (the name of the anti-smoking campaign).
Tip #3. Give them ownership
The teens were invited to name the group of advocates for the movement. Because they learned that not only emails and jokes can be viral, but that people can be viral, too, they called themselves the Viral-mentalists. The original group of 92 Viral-mentalists grew to over 1600, and when the state took away funding, enough buzz had been generated that private groups came forward to fund it.
Tip #4. Not every program is alike
Now working on a campaign for Fiskars (the orange scissors people), Geno is looking for advocates of scrapbooking to build a blogging community. While the end-result will be different, similar tactics are being used: he is traveling about, looking for passionate people who create scrapbooks. In this case, however, they will be paid advocates.
Tip #5. Don't over-control it, and don't hide affiliations
The bloggers who are ultimately chosen will be encouraged to blog about whatever makes the most sense to them. They don't have to stick to scrapbooking and scissors as topics.
That's because the scrapbooking world's bloggers tend to focus only about 30 percent of what they write on scrapbooking. The rest is just life.
"We're telling these ladies that we want this to be an authentic connection," says Geno. "They're not sales reps." However, they will be clear that they are paid employees of the Fiskars company.
More about Geno:
Read Geno's 2005 WOMMA Summit 1 presentation (PDF download)
