by Mongezi Mtati (@Mongezi) “Can you make us go viral?” That’s what some clients still ask whenever we talk about social media and interacting with brand evangelists. It’s a popular buzzword and every brand wants a piece of it. However, going viral, though great for the ego, is often short-lived and may not cause a long-term impact and organise your customers into a community.
I recently looked at what made Wren Studio’s campaign viral and all the other platforms that helped to spread it. Melissa Coker, a consultant to brands and the founder and creative director of Wren, explained to Business Insider that it released video content for three years with each new collection. With the First Kiss video, it intended to create something to which people would respond emotionally.
The brand understood that the short film — which is what it set out to create — had to appeal to its target audience without screaming at them to buy something. It was part science and part understanding its customers, which led to massive coverage on various news sites such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN and Fast Company.
While it’s exciting when your content goes viral, it’s often only a hit when Buzzfeed releases the likes of The 100 Most Important Cat Pictures of All Time (which has received more than six million views to date, according to the website).
In the case of Wren Studio, it linked it back to itself and that led to a reported increase of 14 000% visitors to its website, 96% of whom were new to the site, and increased its sales figures by 13 600%. The locations of the new customers and whether they returned to the site are yet to be shared.
Most viral content, aside from raising local and global awareness, starts a conversation and allows a brand to connect with new customers.
Stanford computer scientist Jure Leskovec and his team studied some of the variables that make viral worth sharing between various networks. Some of their findings point to the time at which content is shared, grammar used and captions. Leskovec used a machine-learning algorithm to predict the spread of content over time and found that it could be repeated.
Don’t just make a noise; change behaviour
Brand advocates, the passionate people who spread every new product of their favourite brands and speak of it as though it were the gospel, organise themselves and rally the masses far from the web. The message that brands share takes on the nature and language of the community.
The upside is that, as a community, your brand evangelists have a better chance of growing and buying more products. They are more likely to defend a brand they love and feel passionate about, or to challenge a product release that does not meet their expectations.
Most brands reach out to their evangelist communities as an afterthought, as part of a campaign that they intend to reach the masses with. But customer-led communities are as valuable in the process of co-creating both a product offering and the buzz that follows.
Aside from being passionate about the brands they gravitate towards, people are part of multiple niches and knowing which ones they fall into could spread your message across a wider captive audience.
Organising a community
The balance between buzz and sales is often difficult to measure and, as such, most brands end up leveraging the exposure as a way to raise awareness. At its foundation, buzz has the ability to organise people behind a message or a brand and convert them.
Brands such as Weight Watchers have realised that the value they assign to brand evangelists, and to the communities that they build, is worth more in the long term.
When the weight-loss brand launched its pop-up Feel Good Café in London, it turned to social brand evangelists. It realised that engaging customers through a social in-store model would be more effective than raising awareness and possibly drowning in the sea of content that we consume.
Instead of following the model of launching a store through messaging that reaches a large audience who then trickle into its store, it let new and existing customers try its products. The brand started with an existing community that was either willing to try its offering, or had tried it before and wanted to improve results.
The solution was to let customers sample food from the café, which they then photographed and shared via social media — they created content that was spread by people in their networks.
In Nielsen’s ‘Global Trust in Advertising and Brand Messages’ 2013 report, it shows that consumer opinions are 84% more likely to be both trusted and acted upon by their peers — as compared to the 62% level of trust that people place on brand messaging on television.
Engaging a community
Stokvels are a common denominator in most South African townships, where people meet either monthly or quarterly and invest as a group, representing a common interest for the collective. Recent research by African Response, as detailed in this Business Day article, shows that South Africa’s stokvels represent approximately 8.6 million individual members and are estimated to be worth R25 billion.
While not all stokvel members know each other, they have come together with a common goal, saving their hard-earned money and making bulk-purchasing decisions, investments and, upon occasion, loans to their members. This informal-sector community is full of potential evangelists, who have influence across a vast segment of the population, and are ready for engagement.
The African Response survey estimates that, on average, stokvel members belong to 1.3 stokvels with an average of 31 members, where some go up to 100 members. These groups represent an unengaged — by brands, at least — 23% of SA’s adult population.
The survey also found that there are about 421 000 stokvels nationally, which can be a sustainable and growing channel for brands which approach groups on a personal basis with a customisable offering.
Influencers vs brand evangelists
Influencers are generally approached by a number of different brands because of their large following on various platforms and they may help raise awareness, whereas brand evangelists are already passionate and talking about their favourite products. As a marketer, you should convert more influencers and organise the masses into brand evangelists.
It is a customer-led community, not going viral, that converts more strangers into passionate evangelists over time and that generates trusted conversation about your brand.
Mongezi Mtati (@Mongezi) is the founding MD of WordStart (www.wordstart.co.za). Apart from being a kiteboarding and sandboarding adventurer, Mongezi connects companies and brands with measurable word-of-mouth. He contributes the monthly “The Word” column on word-of-mouth marketing and social media strategy to MarkLives.
— MarkLives’ round-up of top ad and media industry news and opinion in your mailbox every three work days. Sign up here!
RR Studio, a pattern lab focused on the new South African aesthetic
World Wide Worx found that more than half of SA adult cellphone users living in cities and towns (10.6 million SA adults) are using the more established WhatsApp messaging platform on their phones. WeChat, meanwhile, had already hit 5% of the market by February, and this is expected to rise to 13% in the next 12-18 months.
Feature-rich social sharing, focused on user privacy
e will be two brand binaries: those who come open, curious and excited to grow with Africa, and those who are chained by legacy perceptions, projections and prejudices.”
