By Theresa J. Trevor, Marketing Creative Director, Amplifinity

Engaging your brand advocates can be tricky – like all of us, they can be a finicky bunch.  Some are motivated by incentives, others are not.  Some want to write recommendations, others talk about you at parties, and still others promote you on blogs.  A referral program is one tried-and-true method of engaging and, more importantly, nurturing and growing your brand advocates.  Amplifinity has defined the following 9 Critical Success factors for creating, growing and sustaining your referral program:

1. Promote the referral program often and through different channels

• Integrate your referral program promotion into all other marketing/customer service efforts.
• Send dedicated marketing messages to inform and promote the referral program.
  • We see a dramatic increase in effectiveness when potential advocates receive emails and other marketing collateral focused solely on the referral opportunity.
• Include face- to-face program promotion
  • Referral success grows significantly when organizations motivate and train employees to ask for referrals and provide them with the tools to engage with the program.

2. Offer relevant, achievable and compelling incentives to your advocates

There are a wide variety of incentives out there; find out which ones work best by asking your existing advocates, or trying a tiered reward structure that utilizes several different rewards sure to suit many different preferences.

3. Create an incentive structure that encourages people to refer as many times as possible

Tiered reward and points programs also have the benefit of keeping your advocates referring again and again.

4. Give advocates tools to make referring easy on and offline

Empower your advocates to make referrals wherever they communicate with the people in their network, ensuring your clients never miss an opportunity to earn a referral.

5. Allow prospects to accept the referred offer easily and through multiple channels, on and offline

Make it as easy as possible for your prospects to accept a referral and become a new customer, both online and offline. Multiple channels are a must!

6. Expand the referral program in different phases to include customer, employees, and partners.

Customers aren’t the only ones who can make referrals. Employees and partners can make enthusiastic and effective advocates.  And employees and partners are happy to be included in the fun.  The added bonus? It builds community within your organization on top of generating new customers.

7. Keep advocates engaged and attract new advocates by refreshing the program, and changing the incentive offer.

Launch new and different campaigns so your program never goes stale. Changing it up keeps people coming back again and again.

8. Provide visibility into the referral process.

Create a program that allows advocates to easily check referral and reward statuses, and find information about the program.

9. Implement fast, transparent and efficient reward fulfillment process

Engage a company that fulfills rewards quickly, answers advocate questions thoroughly and promptly and provides an Advocate Dashboard where advocates can check reward statuses.

Contact Theresa at ttrevor@amplifinity.com

By Ben Pickering, CEO, Strutta

Originally published on Social Media Examiner

Are you planning to run a social media contest (like this one)?

Today it’s possible for anyone to achieve success engaging consumers online, thanks to the growing popularity and relative ease of execution of social media promotions.

The fact that anyone can run a promotion doesn’t mean that everyone should, and it certainly doesn’t mean that a promotion guarantees social media success. However, if executed as part of a comprehensive social media strategy, social media contests can produce tremendous results no matter how large or small your business.

So if you’re thinking of running a contest or sweepstakes, here are some key considerations.

Start With the End in Mind

Before jumping into a social media promotion, there are several important questions to ask:

• What are your marketing objectives? Be clear and realistic about what you hope to accomplish. Are you looking to generate leads or Likes, engage or activate your existing user base or reach a new audience?
• What is your budget? Yes, social media promotions can be executed at a relatively low cost. But budget considerations should guide your decision on the type of promotion you choose to run and will impact your ability to achieve certain outcomes.
• Where are you on the consumer engagement pyramid? Assess what type of promotion is right for you based on the level of engagement you expect from your users.

Consumer Engagement Model for Promotions

At the base of the pyramid is the traditional enter-to-win format. This is a tried-and-true contest model and can be a great place to get started online. Whether you have 100 or 100,000 fans on your Facebook page, running a sweepstakes is an easy way to increase the number of Likes on your page. This expands the audience for your Facebook communications and builds a fan base for future promotions.

As you move up the pyramid, you’ll see a decrease in the number of participants but a deeper level of engagement and richer content. It’s also important to remember that the number of entries is not a sole benchmark of your promotion’s success. If you run a promotion with public voting, you’re likely to see at least 10 times the number of voters as entrants.

Using terminology originally coined in Forrester’s Social Technographics report, there are three distinct audiences that will engage with your promotion: Spectators, Joiners and Creators. All three groups should be accounted for.

• Spectators may see a shared link from a friend and click through to your site but their interaction will likely stop there. For these people, you want to ensure you have a well-designed user interface and clear messaging, whether they ultimately choose to engage at the next level or simply leave with your brand top of mind.
• Joiners are likely to participate in a low-barrier format such as a sweepstakes and may engage further up the pyramid through voting, commenting and sharing.
• Creators are the people who are the target for any user-generated content contest. The percentage of online users who are content creators is significantly higher now than it was just a few years ago. Still, you must make it as easy as possible for people to participate.

Knowing your audience is essential when selecting the type of promotion you wish to run. Once you’ve determined the type that’s right for you, it’s important to communicate the what, why and how of your promotion: What is it all about? Why should I participate? And how do I enter / win?

Plan, Prepare and Prepare for the Unplanned

With social media promotions, you can reap the benefits of viral or word-of-mouth marketing, but it’s still essential to have a well-thought-out marketing plan to support your campaign. It may sound obvious, but when launching your promotion, you must drive traffic to your destination. I often remind our clients not to fall victim to the “Field of Dreams Fallacy”—the idea that “if I build it, they will come.”

Utilize the channels available to you, be that social media, paid media or promotional partners. Don’t overlook any opportunities to get the word out. Do you have a regular email newsletter or a point of sale display?

Participation at the outset will generate the ROI that comes from social sharing. And remember that your existing customers are most likely to engage. By targeting them first, you can build momentum that will spread through their social networks.

While we all hope our promotion will “go viral,” it’s not something you can bank on. Nevertheless, it’s important to plan for the scenario in which it does. If you’re running a photo contest and plan to moderate all of the submissions, are you prepared to handle the potential volume? If you’re running a contest on Facebook, are you prepared to manage the community dialogue?

One of the biggest topics people get concerned about when it comes to planning a contest is rules and regulations. This topic is worthy of a blog post of its own, but the short version is that with some foresight this should not pose a major obstacle to launching your promotion.

For those looking to run a promotion on Facebook, it’s important to be familiar with Facebook’s Promotional Guidelines and/or work with someone who is. This article by Mari Smith provides a good overview of what you need to know about Facebook promotions.

Execution Over Concept

Why do so many businesses still have a container at the register to drop a business card in for a raffle? Because it’s easy to participate and administer. Don’t get me wrong; I love cutting-edge promotional concepts. But I have seen time and again that too much of a big idea can take focus away from what’s really core to the promotion. Keeping it simple often yields better results.

When running a social media promotion, the first rule is ensure that it’s easy to enter and easy to share. While it’s possible to accomplish this on your own, there are companies that provide tools to ensure the mechanics of a successful promotion are in place. That frees you up to be creative. Avoid overcomplicating what you’re asking users to do when they visit your promotion. Make it fun, personal and accessible.

Listen, Engage and Learn

Running promotions must be part of your overall social media strategy and not approached as a one-off event. Because promotions today are inherently social, take advantage of that to engage and gather consumer insights. Add a survey question to your entry form, encourage conversation on your Facebook page, gather feedback and apply what you learn to future campaigns.

What are your experiences with online contests and social media promotions? If you have questions that you would like to see addressed in a future blog post, feel free to ask them below.

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Ben Pickering is the CEO of Strutta. The company offers tools for businesses to build and manage promotions and is a Facebook Preferred Developer. Twitter: @bpicks

Dave Kerpen, CEO, Likeable Media

By Dave Kerpen, CEO, Likeable Media

Originally posted on PROMO

In the last few years, brands have quickly gone from seeing social media as frivolous to including social media as a necessary part of any marketing and communications plan. Facebook, Twitter and other social networks hold great promise to quickly and widely spread the word for promotions, contests and sweepstakes. But while there is great promise, when it comes to promotions, many have struggled with how to go about it.

Here are 7 simple steps to launching a successful social media promotion:

1. Build a community first. Too often, companies think that if they create an exciting contest or sweepstakes, it’ll “go viral” and bring them lots of Facebook fans or Twitter followers. That may happen, but you’re much more likely to succeed with your social media promotion if you already have an established Facebook or Twitter and blog community.

2. Define your goal carefully. Are you looking for increased targeted likes? Website traffic? Leads? Buzz? Sales? Your goal will inform what kind of promotion you put together, the budget and length of the promotion, and success metrics.

3. Create a simple experience. Elaborate contests can be fun to envision, but too often are complex and ask too much of consumers to enter. It’s a lot to ask people to create videos, for instance, but easier to ask them to upload photos and even easier to ask them to answer a question.

4. Understand the laws of the land. When you run a contest or sweepstakes, you have to make sure the t’s are crossed and i’s dotted in your rules. In social media, it’s even more complicated, as Facebook has its own set of ever-changing Promotions Guidelines to plan around.

5. Choose a great tool to help you. Two of the best-known social media promotions tools are WildfireApp and Strutta, but there are lots of social media promo companies worth looking at. When setting up your promotion, keep in mind not only how easy it is to enter, but also how easy and compelling it is to share across social networks.

6. Include a social network media budget to support the promotion. You wouldn’t host an offline sweepstakes without a media budget to support it, so don’t expect to host an online promo without an advertising budget. Ideally, the media should be spent on the social platform where the promotion resides. So if it’s on Facebook, run Facebook ads. On Twitter, run Promoted Tweets.

7. Track results and iterate for the future. Unlike offline promotions, which may take a year to plan and execute, social media promotions can be planned and executed a lot faster, giving you more time to look at the results and make changes for the near future. Whatever success looks like to your brand, it can always be better, so the more you track, the more you can analyze and improve.

Above all else, take off your marketing cap, put on your consumer cap, and ask yourself, “Would I be excited to enter this contest and tell all of my friends about it? Is this easy enough to enter? Is the prize right?” If the answers to these questions are all “YES”, you’re well on your way to launching a successful social media promotion.

A hurdle that most run into, however, is ensuring that their audience is actually seeing their content and promotions. In addition to a 2010 study that revealed that posting early in the day is more engaging, one of the most important techniques a brand must learn is how to optimize posts to make them more “likeable,” or worthy of clicking “like.” There are many ways to do this, but the method that is by far the most mysterious to brands is the often misunderstood News Feed, how it works and how to optimize it.

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Dave Kerpen is CEO of Likeable Media. He is also the author of Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (and other social media.) He can be reached at Dave@likeable.com. Likeable Media is a Governing Member of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association.

By Patrick McCarthy, Social Media Coordinator & Blog Editor, WOMMA

Word of mouth is generated by many different sources and an effective WOM campaign should reflect that. Every facet of the endeavor needs to spark a conversation. Affect, a NY-based PR firm, produced an online contest earlier this year that did just that.

Like most PR firms, they needed a summer intern. Obtaining one is usually a banal repeat of career fairs, job postings, resume filtering and interviews. But Affect needed a really good intern and saw an opportunity to generate a flood of word of mouth in the process of finding one.

“Finding an intern was just one of the goals, but we really designed the program around other goals like raising awareness, building a use case for best practices that we could share with existing clients.” – Sandra Fathi, President, Affect

Every Step is a WOM Opportunity

Word of mouth starts with one really good product or idea and is successful through superb execution of the details. The contest broke the schema of how to find an intern, but that isn’t what made this campaign successful.

The contest was designed with three stages. The first stage required applicants to submit their pitch for hiring them. To make it to the next stage, applicants needed to get votes. This meant that they needed to persuade people to vote for them. Ample sharing ensued. The top six vote-getters made it to the next round.

Stage two brought in the big guns to pare down the six entries to three killer finalists. The judges were:

Guy Kawasaki, Partner, Garage Technology Ventures & Co-Founder, Alltop

“ I want to see that you understand what the company does, because you did your homework. If you don’t demonstrate that you prepared, don’t even bother applying to a contest that I’m judging.”

Erica Swallow, Associate Editor, Mashable

“The ideal candidate would be a creative thinker with influence in his or her interest areas, whether that’s through a blog, social channels or even a Meetup or club.”

Jessica Dickler, Staff Writer, CNN Money

“I’m looking for someone who is personable and smart. From my perspective, being easy to talk to and quick to deliver results goes a long way.”

These big name judges lent a lot of validity and prestige to the contest, which in turn generated even more WOM. By the time the contest reached the third stage, conversations were growing in college cafeterias as much as in media professional circles.

Sandra and Leslie Campisi, VP and Partner at Affect, finally whittled the three finalists down to one lucky fellow, Pat Gotham of Salisbury University. He’ll keep the fire alive by blogging his entire experience.

The New York Internship Project by the Numbers

In the end, the campaign worked. They had 96 potential interns who in total generated 165 comments and 14,360 votes. Pat Gotham alone received 45 comments and 795 votes.

Affect.com saw a 60% increase in traffic and a 56% increase in page views. Their blog, Tech Affect, drew 46% more traffic and 50% more page views. The contest website drew 63,492 visits and 109,371 total views.

The story was picked up by Forbes, Crain’s New York, Yahoo! Finance, The Wall Street Journal, and PR Breakfast Club.

Ben Pickering

Sandra Fathi

By Sandra Fathi, President, Affect Strategies and Ben Pickering, CEO, Strutta

Online contests look a lot easier than they are. We recently teamed up with Strutta to run a The New York Intern Project, an online contest for Affect Strategies‘ next summer intern. Strutta is an interactive promotions company offering an intuitive contest builder that enables businesses to manage fully branded online contests.

As we toiled to bring in the very best submissions, there were many online contest essentials that we needed to balance. For anyone planning an online contest, please consider these tips to success:

• Plan Ahead - One of the biggest reasons contests fail is due to lack of planning – especially when it comes to marketing and promotion. Don’t fall victim to the “if you build it they will come” fallacy. Before the contest launches, ensure you have a solid plan for contest logistics and promotion so that you adequately seed the entry pool. Consider both free and paid opportunities so you can guarantee promotional placements for the contest.
• Set Realistic Goals – As part of the planning process, set goals for your contest in terms of what you hope to accomplish - engagement, lead generation, etc. - and determine metrics to gauge your success. While everyone hopes their promotion will “go viral” it’s important to be realistic about how you define success.
• Make it Easy – Don’t make entering your contest too complex for entrants. Contests that have too many steps (e.g., upload a video to YouTube, then post that link on a different site, then get your friends to like the post) can cause a difficult user experience. Keep in mind that inherently video contests will receive fewer entries (but potentially higher engagement) than photo contests, and contests that require only text submission will generally receive the greatest participation as it represents the lowest barrier to entry.
• Prize Matters - The prize needn’t be of high monetary value (though that doesn’t hurt), so long as it is something coveted by users. A unique, experiential prize can often be a great hook.
• Leverage Social Media - The potential boost that social media can deliver to an online contest is enormous. Contests with a voting component naturally incentivize users to share their entry through their social network. Remember, when you run a promotion that is targeted at the right audience you have people who not only want to hear your message, but who want to spread your message.
• Target Online Media Channels – Think about where your target entrant pool gets their information, and announce the launch of the contest to those blogs and online news sites. Online media is the perfect promotion channel for online contests, as articles can easily include a link to the contest that readers can click.
• Partner Up – Consider partnering with an organization to co-sponsor the contest. This will expand the reach of your promotion activity, and give you access to a larger database to which to market. The partner can also help you increase the prize value of the contest to make it more attractive to entrants.

Sandra Fathi is founder and president of Affect Strategies a public relations, marketing and social media firm in New York. Sandra helps her company and clients engage in social media as a core component of their PR efforts. To learn more, visit the Affect blog, Tech Affect or follow her on Twitter @SandraFathi.

Ben Pickering is the CEO of Strutta and has been involved with online media for more than ten years. Prior to Strutta Ben worked at Yahoo!, where he played a key role in the first large-scale consumer promotion utilizing user generated content (Doritos “Crash the Super Bowl”). Now he’s thrilled to be able to offer marketers of any size the ability to create similar experiences using the Strutta contest platform. You can start building your own promotion today at www.strutta.com.