Keeping The Spirit Up!: Energizing Groundswell
Chapter 7 of Groundswell is all about energizing the base and your social technographic profiles. No, I’m not talking about simply keeping everyone motivated to keep your business going I’m talking about energizing. According to Groundswell, this essentially means word of mouth marketing through the excitement of your customers and creators (Bernoff & Li, 2011, p.130-131).
Envoking this energy is, as Groundswell says best, “a marketers dream” (Bernoff & Li, 2011, p.130). To have two people talk about your business then two more then four more then another eight and so on is this dream. It means you have such an outstanding service/product that it practically markets itself. Question is, why does energizing succeed? There are three ways actually.
It’s believable, it’s self-reinforcing and it’s self-spreading. Normally, I’d break down each of these explaining exactly why they are a reason energizing succeeds, but, I can honestly say they overlap in a good way. Because the information is being learned from a person, and not a corporate review site or account, it’s more trusted and as you hear it from more people you know it must be true. Then you like it and you tell someone else and then the process repeats.
Look at Netflix for example. Whether it be House of Cards, Arrested Development, Making a Murderer or whatever popular content, people talked about it and lead to massive audiences for these series. I can tell you right now I wouldn’t have touched two of these series if my teacher, my friends and Twitter didn’t rave about. House of Cards and Arrested Development are amazing!
The value of vocal customers is, simply, very very high. Especially in today’s society with technology and social media being the root of so many things. We see it everywhere. Twitter, Vine, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr. Name a social network; they’re there. Influencers talk about a product they like and share it with the world. Then those people try it and follows suit. This is why they’re important and cannot be disregarded.
So what’s left? That’s right! Maintaining this momentum. Even the idea of maintaining it is simple on paper. Communicating and being involved with these groups falls back to what we’ve talked about over the last few blog posts. Create a community, participate in the community and let the experts speak. It envokes trust and allows for your Groundswell system to work for itself.
A Dash of Web Development
You can ask any freelancer; word of mouth is important. If you’re a freelancer, and a good one at that, treat your clients with respect and it can help you in turn.
I know it’s not professional or even how I was taught in college to talk to clients but having a personal approach to communicating can mean everything. I’m not saying start an entire community destined to feed you clients because that is very iffy on the forefront in this career. I’m saying don’t be too serious and be yourself. Don’t be afraid to say “Hey Bill” or put a 🙂 in an email. Don’t afraid to treat them like a friend.
At least for myself, this works. Clients tell other people about my work and those people contact me back. I’ve even had people, who passed on me to work with them, come back. Treating people with respect and genuine personality can lead to that word of mouth and is something I will always do and encourage.
SOURCES
Bernoff, J., Li, C. (2011). Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social technologies (expanded and revised edition). Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing
Netflix. (2017). Netflix Logo [Graphic]. Retrieved from https://media.netflix.com/en/company-assets