In the analyst/consulting world it’s a constant search for new ideas and trends. I find Jeremiah Owyang, formerly of Forrester and now a partner at Altimeter Group, to offer more substance than most. His daily blast today caught my eye. The title:  Checklist:  Develop a Successful Advocacy Program.

Once again it appears, we, in the customer reference management community, are in the right place at the right time. Not that we were ever in doubt This time we’ve been relabeled as Advocacy Programs and social media has been added to our job descriptions. There will be some familiar ground here for many of us. Take a look at some of the recommendations on the checklist:

Get Internal Teams Prepared First

- We know that customer reference programs (CRP) need to do a lot of evangelical work in our organizations. This means involving executives, sales and our brethren in marketing to maximize the voice of the customer in every possible channel, including social media, and to be comfortable with customers speaking on our behalf.

Find Credible Advocates

- We call it recruiting most of the time, and it’s a search for not only credible references, but those who fit the current needs and future/strategic needs of the organization.

Ensure The Advocacy Program Is Above Board

- It’s particularly important to make it clear that these customers are part of your program when they’re posting to blogs and using social media networks. The FTC recently released some very stringent guidelines and penalties for a failure to comply.

Ensure It Matches Up With Their Agenda

- This is consistent with the basic premise of customer engagement, the focus of the Summit event in Boston in October. Know your audience and their motivations for participation, then trust them to represent your relationship (and brand) positively—wherever that may be.

Incentivize Them With Special Access –But Don’t Pay Them

- This debate is as old as customer reference management:  to incent or not to incent? Most of our clients promise nothing up front. Some are employing the full principles of customer engagement and facilitating executive-to-executive dialog on an ongoing basis. Most C-level execs still don’t use social media, so these are in-person or via phone. The objective is the same:  make these executives an extension of your own leadership team, learn from them, and reap the benefits of their advocacy.

Hand Over The Microphone –Give Them The Platform

- Savvy customer reference programs have known it’s best to stay behind the scenes versus act as a chaperone. This is just a reminder that manufactured/sculpted customer content isn’t nearly as compelling as the unvarnished truth with authentic insights from credible customers.

Intake Negative Feedback –But Be Actionable

- Managing a customer community, formally or informally, includes being responsive to the things that aren’t going well. The rest of the organization should rally to correct the problems of these V.I.P. customers, which will in turn solve the problems of many other customers. This is one of the many reasons that strong executive support is essential to an effective program. The CRP needs authority to get things fixed.

Provide Them With Communication Tools

- Potential customers will often talk to existing customers without a CRP’s intervention/knowledge. This was the case before social media. Now there are more possibilities for these conversations to occur. The current thinking is that it’s better to provide an online community for these conversations and know what’s on the minds of customers and potential customers, then try to monitor 100 different conversations. Makes sense.

Define Success Based On Influence And Reduced Cost

- The recommendations here regarding influence are a little touchy feely. In our opinion revenue is the ultimate measure of the efforts of a well-tuned customer reference/advocacy program. The benefits to product marketing, development, service, etc., are all real and no doubt add value. But gaining support for resources to build online communities or in-person advocacy events (advisory boards, executive councils what have you) will be easier to fund with a top-line contribution measurement. Otherwise you’re dependent on a visionary executive to put weight behind the effort. There aren’t enough of those people unfortunately.