called opinion leaders as a part of social media marketing. Those marketing professionals who belong to this
category were asked to check methods they used to identify their potential brand advocates. Figure 13
illustrates tactics and methods the surveyed companies use to identify brand advocates. Two-thirds of the
respondents make their conclusions based on the level of participation, e.g. number of comment/reviews at
the social networking websites. Number of friends was the second most popular answer among respondents,
forming 40% of the sample. And one third of the professionals believe that loyalty to the organization and
geographic location may ensure the potential motivation of fans to spread the word about the company. The
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high level of connectivity with their friends (affinity) is considered a valuable indication of the brand
advocates only for the 20% of the respondents.
Despite the fact that marketing professionals of the open concert venues make an effort to identify the
potential brand, the vast majority (15) do not utilize any tactics to stimulate the word-of-mouth referrals.
Only two marketing professionals identified the practices they use to stimulate brand advocates to share
information about a company with other users. One respondent identified his company’s practice, a “retweet
message for the chance to win ticket.” This tactic usually is designed by the companies to ensure fast
diffusion of messages using their customers who would like to share information through their own Twitter
network. When followers of a company receive a message (Tweet) they are asked to resend (retweet) the
message to their own followers on Twitter. The respondent in this case used an incentive “to win a ticket” to
stimulate potential brand advocates to share information with the network, increasing the outreach of the
marketing message. “Providing information to music blogger” was a method exemplified by another
respondent. Bloggers can be potential brand advocates since they already show their interest in the
industry/topic/theme writing blogs and reviews about it. So, providing information to the music bloggers
may be an effective way to share information with the larger audience.
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