Webinars are a cost-effective, credibility-boosting tool to grow your email and prospect list. Not only do they give you a vehicle to showcase your knowledge and share your best content, but most importantly hosting regular webinars for prospects and clients establishes you as an authority in your field

 They key to a great webinar is promotion to attract the right target audience. Through research and trial and error this is what I have found gets the most traction and attendance to your webinar.

Step 1: Post your webinar on your website

Add a registration link to your webinar on your website at least two weeks prior to the presentation. On your website, share pictures of the speakers, a brief description of the webinar and a call to action to entice readers to register.

Step 2:  Send out an email blast

Send out an email to your entire prospect and client list two weeks before the event. Once people register have a confirmation email sent to them. Three days prior to the webinar send out another e-blast to the prospects and clients who have not registered yet. For those who register, send them a reminder the day before the webinar as well as an hour before it starts.

Step 3: Promote on your social networks

Post your webinar onto all social networks your company uses with different tracking links (for example, we use bit.ly) so you can track where prospects are signing up for the webinar.  The social networks I have found most effective for promotion are Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, and Reddit.

Step 4: Share on LinkedIn

Share the webinar on relevant LinkedIn groups and an update so that LinkedIn group members and followers can easily find out and register for your webinar.

Step 5: Get your team to help

Craft and send pre-written tweets and status updates with appropriate hashtags, mentions, and pictures to team members. You want as much free publicity as you can get for your webinar and leveraging your employee’s social network connections is a fast and easy way to do so.  By creating pre-written tweets and updates, your team can quickly copy and paste them without taking away from their duties, while helping you to promote to many more business professionals.

Step 6: Have the speakers promote it

Use your speakers to generate buzz about the webinar. Speakers, like your team members, are free avenues of social and LinkedIn webinar promotion. Use the same pre-written tweets and updates and encourage your speakers to share with their networks.

Step 7:  Blog about the webinar

Write a blog article to promote your webinar. Post the article on your blog and share a link to your blog on social sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Join us for a webinar May 23rd at 10am Pacific

Join us for a complimentary webinar entitled, “Using Digital Marketing to be a Customer-Driven Brand,” on Thursday, May 23rd at 10 am Pacific (1 pm Eastern). Ready Pulse CEO Dennis O’Malley and Mike Dover, Managing Partner of Socialstruct Advisory Group will share their best tips and strategies on how to re-invent your brand in a customer driven marketplace. Go here to register here now: http://bit.ly/10yVRzU

More and more brands and retailers are sponsoring athletes with the goal of leveraging their large following and influence to generate brand awareness. Some brands have organized product sharing campaigns, while others leave the athletes to organically post at will. Top athletes, in all industries from rock climbing to surfers are gaining significant sponsorships and brands are more than willing to make the investment. Currently there is $20 billion a year spent in athlete Sponsorships.

Athletes are so influential on social media that a mere mention of a product can significantly increase product sales almost immediately. A study by Catalyst Public Relations revealed that sports fans that follow their favorite athletes on social media are 55% more likely to purchase a brand if an athlete mentions it on Facebook or Twitter.

it’s not just the mega-athletes like Ryan Sheckler or Shaun White that have social pull, According to David Carter, head of the USC Sports Business Institute, and author of “Money Games”…“As celebrity endorsements move beyond the superstars, the mid-level player with personality and social media savvy can reach endorsement and name-recognition levels that were once only the domain of the best of the best.”

As with other areas of marketing the more advanced we become, the easier it is to track the return on investment but, are brand focused on the right returns?

The general rule of thumb for athlete/brand endorsements has been that the larger the athlete’s social reach, the greater the return for the brand, generally determined by outdated survey systems that judge popularity from the general public. But, what if athletes were rewarded for quality of the content, not quantity; for effectiveness, not reach? What if brands were able to sponsor the most effective athlete for their brand and demographic, not just the most popular? What if social content could be directly tied to online revenue increases?

Brand managers who work with athletes would love to see a lot of content coming from their sponsored athletes but equally, if not more important is the creation of organic, authentic content directed to the most relevant target audience for the brand. Even if an athlete’s following is large, it doesn’t necessarily mean that their following is the right target audience for the brand.

As a brand manager, imagine being able to tag, collect, search and archive all the social content from your sponsor athletes. Imagine seeing what athlete content had the best reach and was most engaging to specific audiences. Now imagine being able to dynamically display that social content on your web page in your digital marketing. At ReadyPulse, we built our web-based platform to do exactly that. For example, let’s say you are marketing shoes to a new category to a new audience. When you release the new shoes on your website you would be able to showcase the best social content, usually photos, from your sponsored athletes and use that content in an inspirational and aspiration way on your product page – driving web traffic and conversions.

Imagine being able to effectively measure the sales of a product related to one specific piece of social content from your sponsored athlete? Or, if you work with more than one athlete, being able to determine which athlete had best traction or most sales. How about finding the up and coming stars earlier, before your competitors? How much more effective could you be with your paid sponsorships?

If you are a CMO or CEO ask your brand managers how they are using sponsored athlete social content in digital marketing. If you are a brand or athlete manager – create your social content repository today. If you are an athlete – find out how you stack rank in your sponsor’s social audience – and encourage the reuse of your content.

Most importantly, for every brand and retailer executive – leverage the engaging social content from your most influential advocates, your sponsored athlete – it’s your best social marketing asset.

Delivering best customer experience is a critical objective of every customer-centric business. Customer support and service departments play a phenomenal role in delivering such great customer experience after the initial transaction. However, seldom these departments are used to identify brand advocates that can root for the brand after they received great customer service and support.

In this article, we describe how you can go about using your customer service and support departments to collaborate with your marketing department to identify and nurture your brand advocates.  We use Zendesk as a representative customer support system and its integration with ReadyPulse to illustrate the concept.

Step 1 – Integrate Zendesk with Facebook and Twitter

Connect your Zendesk implementation to listen to Facebook and Twitter conversations for customer support purposes. Zendesk provides native connectors to social media networks.

Step 2 – Implement a tagging system to identify sentiment, conversation nature and request type

As your customer support team is using Zendesk to listen to Facebook/Twitter conversations and providing help to your customers. they can tag each conversation as positive or negative and also tag the conversation for its nature (such as feedback, complaint, applause) and request type (e.g., promotion, shipping, returns).  Tagging scheme will depend on your business and there is a need for appropriate training of your customer support staff to ensure consistent tagging. Tagging will remove noise from your Facebook conversations and bubble up important conversations that are worth tracking.

Step 3 – Add Zendesk to ReadyPulse

ReadyPulse provides a connector to Zendesk to enable you to bring social conversations along with their associated metadata (sentiment, conversation nature and request type or any other tags).  Once your conversations are in ReadyPulse, you can leverage the power of ReadyPulse to identify brand advocates as well as use the social content provided by those brand advocates.

To add your Zendesk account to ReadyPulse, go to the “Manage Brand” tab and locate the “Third Party Integrations” tab. Provide the Zendesk URL, user name and password. Once you hit on Save, ReadyPulse will start connecting to Zendesk and retrieve the Facebook content along with any tags you have created on ongoing basis. Once your Facebook content is retrieved from Zendesk, the content is available in the ReadyPulse User Content Tab for further use within ReadyPulse widgets. We will discuss these aspects in the later paragraphs.

Zendesk setup within ReadyPulse

Once the Zendesk setup is complete, you can browse content from Zendesk in the ReadyPulse User Content Tab. Each post/tweet is shown with tags created using Zendesk interface and those tags are available as keywords to search for later use in ReadyPulse widgets.

Social Testimonial on Customer Service tagged within Zendesk and available in ReadyPulse

Step 4 – Identify brand advocates within ReadyPulse

Using the Audience section of ReadyPulse, search for the audience that are marked positive and you want to accord the status of brand advocates. Once identified, you can add them to your brand advocates list maintained within ReadyPulse.  You may consider maintaining multiple lists as necessary. There could be lists based on customer tier, such as Platinum, Gold and Silver.  ReadyPulse already provides segmentation of audience based on the gender and engagement. In addition, keywords can be used to identify audience based on their location.

Identifying brand advocates is a good first step for the following activities:

1. Continue to deliver best possible customer experience – think of your VIP customers
2. Listen to your best customers and fans at the executive level. Within ReadyPulse, check the Daily Pulse flag for your brand advocates list to receive a daily digest of posts and tweets made by your advocates.
3. Display content shared by your brand advocates.  We will discuss this aspect more in detail in the paragraph below.

Step 5 – Showcase social content from brand advocates

With added quality check on your brand advocates you are assured of the content they produce, which means you have a great marketing asset available to promote your business. As a next step in leveraging social content from your advocates, you can create a ReadyPulse widget to display the best content from your social marketing assets.

Below is an example of a ReadyPulse widget that displays social content from Jewelmint fans. You may choose to use existing social content or ask your advocates to create content relevant to your campaign.

Amy Bade Lewis

Feb 28, at 09:12 PM

Thanks so much for your help Sarah! I really appreciate it!

View Facebook thread

• 1 Comment

Sandra Alfaro

Mar 25, at 10:56 PM

Great customer service from Rick B. on live chat! Thank You so much for taking care of my issue.

View Facebook thread

• 1 Like
• ·
• 1 Comment

Julie Ho

Mar 19, at 02:30 AM

Received amazing customer service from Rick B. today! He also helped me many times before. Im a satisfied jewelminter :)

View Facebook thread

• 3 Likes

Vardanyan Marianna

Mar 05, at 01:15 AM

Alexandra helped me today on LiveChat and she was amazing!

View Facebook thread

• 1 Like
• ·
• 1 Comment

Cathy Gao

Apr 08, at 03:51 PM

Alexandra N. was so helpful when I contacted Jewelmint. Thanks again!

View Facebook thread

• 1 Like
• ·
• 1 Comment

Nina Almeida

Apr 08, at 09:58 PM

I did an order some time ago , and I did not know about "skiping" at every begin of the month. So, the attendent was super nice with me solving my problem. I appreciate it!. The jewelmint is a very place to buy. Thank you!

View Facebook thread

• 1 Comment

Kimberly Shoaf

Apr 24, at 05:14 PM

Just wanted to say I appreciate the help I received via chat from Ashley and Rick B. They were both very courteous and assisted me quickly and thoroughly. :)

View Facebook thread

• 1 Comment

Cindy Yin

Feb 23, at 12:10 AM

I just want to thank Alexandra N. for her huge help! :)

View Facebook thread

• 1 Like

Nina Almeida

Apr 08, at 09:59 PM

Just a complement: her name is Alexandra N. Thanks Alexandra!, I am very happy with your attention!

View Facebook thread

• 2 Likes

Sharmin Hakim

Apr 12, at 07:14 PM

Great customer service experience. All the time! Thank you. :)

View Facebook thread

• 2 Likes

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Using Social User Generated Content (UGC) on your web sites is not a new idea anymore with Twitter and Facebook widgets being used in many web sites. However, what’s new is identifying quality and relevant social content and repurpose the social content to drive more online conversions.  Read our related blog on the topic – “Beating Amazon in Review Game – Top 3 Ways to Boost Sales using Social Testimonials.”

Learn more on using social content to drive online conversions by downloading our white paper “Passion Doesn’t Fit into 5 Stars”.

Most major brands are now allocating larger parts of their overall marketing budget to custom content. With content marketing on the rise – a record $43.9 billion spent in 2012 according to The Custom Content Council – companies are looking for new and creative ways to maximize content to drive revenues.

One of the most innovative ways is using customer- generated content, especially the use of customer testimonials and stories to drive consumer behavior and increase revenue. Testimonials are powerful marketing tools. While Amazon.com has long been the gold standard of driving consumer behavior through testimonials and user recommendations, the authenticity of such online recommendations have come into question.

Online consumers don’t want to be sold to and have become increasingly cynical about the authenticity of the type of user-generated testimonial that we see being demonstrated on Amazon.com and other e-commerce sites. Consumers don’t know if a good review is truly a reflection of a good product or simply a falsified comment meant to boost sales. For this reason, the traditional testimonial or recommendation is harder to trust.

Social media testimonials, i.e. someone posting a positive review about a brand or product as a random tweet or status update, on the other hand, are harder to fake because they are backed-up by a real person’s social profile and history. The social media testimonial is much more credible and may actually help search results for a brand and promote a company’s biggest brand ambassadors.

Here are two examples, of social media testimonials from Ann Taylor and Zappos:

Collecting, curating and promoting positive social testimonials like these can significantly boost a company’s reputation and increase revenues. Social media testimonials are more credible, authentic and allow companies to cultivate better relationships by promoting their best brand ambassadors. The challenge for companies will be determining the best ways to sort and leverage these positive social reviews.

Top 3 Ways to Boost Sales With Social Media Testimonials

Here are the top 3 ways your company can boost credibility and sales by leveraging online customer testimonials: 

1. Use the social testimonials you already have.  Source and collect positive reviews and testimonials posted by your clients or customers on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linked, Pinterest, etc. For example, you can use Twitter’s “favorite button” to star and instantly save any tweet that mentions your brand in a positive review.  Then re-tweet the testimonials to your followers. It’s instant social proof that boosts credibility and ultimately, can boost your sales.
2. Get more social testimonials. Gather more social testimonials by Linked In’s recommendation tool or just post an update or tweet asking your fans or customers for instant feedback on one of your products or services. Filter out the not-so-desirable reviews and re-post the great ones!
3. Display most effective testimonials. Take the best social testimonials and display them on your website, blog, sales page or simply re-tweet or share them with your fans and followers.

Watch on-demand video

Looking for an easy way to collect, automate and promote your social media testimonials so you can benefit with greater credibility and sales? Check out the on-demand video entitled “Social Testimonials: The New Strategy in Word of Mouth Marketing” To view, visit: http://www.readypulse.com/events/social-testimonials-best-opportunity-word-of-mouth-marketing.

As marketers we all know how difficult it is to delight our customers. Harder still is getting  the customer to say something good about our brand. However, when the customer gives positive feedback in a public setting like social media, what are we doing as marketers to take advantage of it?

So far very little. Here is an idea:

Don’t let your social testimonials vanish in the vast flood of social media.

The story of a short-lived testimonial

Tim Cooke, Partner/GM, Cadence Preferred

Meet Tim Cooke, General Manager and Partner of Cadence Preferred, a marketing and design firm based in Redmond, WA. On a Friday afternoon, Tim is frantically trying to finish setting up his Microsoft Dynamics CRM account after his firm switched over to the service. As a new user, Tim ran into a few issues that are very common for any new user. What is uncommon is the way Microsoft Dynamics CRM team went beyond their call of duty to help Tim.  Especially considering that Microsoft is the largest software maker in the world.

Tim reached out to the Dynamics CRM support team via the Office 365 portal expecting to be lost in a pile of help desk tickets. To his surprise, he heard back right away from a representative introducing herself that she will be working on his support ticket and wished him a great weekend.

Tim forgot about the support ticket and went home for that night and on Saturday he had another email from the Dynamics CRM support team to setup a time on Monday.  Being the weekend, he felt he could reply to the email once he gets back to his office on Monday. To his surprise, he had a phone call and another followup email by the time he got to the office on Monday. He was pleased at the promptness and got on phone with the support person. She resolved the issues Tim was facing and asked if she can help him in any other way.

Tim had a few questions about some functionality of Dynamics CRM but was hesitant to ask as these were not simple tier 1 support questions but were the type of questions he’d usually hire a consultant to solve. To his surprise he got the answers he needed from the support agent. Tim was delighted to have saved hundreds of dollars in consulting fees.

Clearly pleased, Tim tweeted about the stellar service of Microsoft Dynamics CRM support team. His public testimonial in the world of Twitter had its moments of existence and disappeared in the vast flood of short-lived tweets that flow in every minute.

One might say, that is a happy ending for Tim and great testimonial for Microsoft Dynamics CRM support team. But, what was the lifespan of Tim’s tweet? A few minutes? What if the marketing team of Microsoft Dynamics CRM uses this testimonial to drive home the point to other prospective clients that they can take care of their customers better?

It is not uncommon that Tim and other hundreds of thousands of customers give their shoutout to the products, sevices and brands they use and love. Brands promptly thank them if they are active on Social networks. Often, that’s where the story ends.

Extending the life of a social testimonial

Is it possible to extend the life of a testimonial that is shared on Twitter? Absolutely. What if the Microsoft Dynamics CRM support team took Tim’s testimonial and put it on its web site? What if the same testimonial were included in a welcome email from the Dynamics CRM team once a trial user signs-up?

If you are visiting the Microsoft’s support web site and/or trial user, you will probably feel one or more of the following:

1. There is anecdotal evidence that Microsoft Dynamics CRM support is good enough that Tim took the pain to share his appreciation on Twitter
2. If you see more testimonials similar to Tim’s, you will feel confident that their support is pretty good and you may want to continue your relationship or sign-up for trial
3. If you have any questions on Microsoft Dynamics CRM support, you may connect with Tim, as Twitter enables such direct interactions between its users

Tim’s testimonial has the potential to help the Microsoft Dynamics CRM product more than the positive impact it already did being part of millions of tweets a day.

Using satisfied customers to get new business is nothing new. What’s new is the abundance of satisfied customers and accessibility of their public testimonials in social networks like Twitter. For a digital marketer – it is a key opportunity for a digital marketer to take full advantage of those testimonials.

Don’t let your social testimonials vanish in the vast flood of social media. Start breathing new life into the testimonials you already have, today!

The age old saying, ‘if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?’ provides a great visual (for us nature-lovers) for the frequent misses of some of the best marketing material available – your fans. The idea is this – fans of your brand and products are already sharing and engaging with you in ways that feel completely natural to them, and are already an integral part of their daily lives: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram – there are others, of course, but we’re focusing on the largest and most influential. These fans are flooding your brands’ social channels, whether it be when they’re at home, the mall, at work (shh! we won’t tell your boss), out running errands, at concerts, etc.. They’re not only leaving enthusiastic testimonials (defined here as positive expressions about your brand), uploading and sharing pictures of your products, and complementing you on your outstanding customer service, but they’re actually comparing you to your competitors and sharing why you’re better – a marketers’ ultimate dream.

Content Goldmine from Social Networks

Social Media Marketers have a content goldmine at their fingertips – but more often than not, all of that authentic, free, engaging social fan content gets lost in the forest, never to be leveraged or showcased. Placing these fans in context of your site or in an email campaign provides the social proof and consumer confidence that soon-to-be fans need in converting a visitor to a fan, activating old fans, and keeping current fans loyal.

Story Telling 101

Don’t let your best, most valuable story-telling tools get lost in the forest – it’s the fans, the passion, and the stories that people really listen to. Put those fans and their loyal, tweeting thumbs where they’re going to help you most – on your site, product pages, checkout pages, or in a targeted email campaign. You’ll grow your existing fan base while being able to leverage your current one.

…And while we may have solved this mystery, we’re still testing out theories on falling trees.

At ReadyPulse, we extensively use ActiveMQ for our messaging backbone. Everyday, millions of messages flow through the ActiveMQ brokers across multiple topics and queues. Hence it is super important to monitor them for two main reasons -

1. Brokers in unhealthy state can have a disastrous impact across all services and processes since messages will stop flowing.

2. Backed up queues or topics are a strong indicator of unhealthy consumers and subscribers.

Both the above reasons illustrate how effective an ActiveMQ based monitoring solution would be for keeping track of overall platform health. So we went about researching on how to implement this. The Apache ActiveMQ monitoring pagehas various ways of going about this. But none of them help in achieving our objectives which were -

1. Write a JMX based client app that would periodically monitor various queues, topics, consumers and subscribers and send an alert (e.g. email) when certain thresholds are breached.

2. JMX based monitoring should work on AWS EC2.

As a next step, I will illustrate how to set up JMX based monitoring that would work in general but not on AWS EC2. And then I will explain how to make it work on EC2.

How to setup JMX based ActiveMQ monitoring?

Here are the steps -

1. Open conf/activemq.xml file for editing

2. Go to the “broker” node in the xml and append ‘useJmx=”true”’ attribute to it, like shown below.

 1: <broker xmlns="http://activemq.apache.org/schema/core" brokerName="localhost" dataDirectory="${activemq.base}/data" destroyApplicationContextOnStop="true" useJmx="true">

3. Look for a node “managementContext ” and append/update ‘createConnector=”false”‘ attribute to it.

 1: <managementContext>

 2: <managementContext createConnector="false"/>

 3: </managementContext>

4. Open activemq/bin/activemq file for editing

5. Look for the first occurrence of ACTIVEMQ_SUNJMX_START.

6. Add the following line just before that –

 1: ACTIVEMQ_SUNJMX_START="-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=1099

7. Restart the activemq server.

8. Now using jconsole from a client, you can connect it using “service:jmx:rmi:///jndi/rmi://<hostname>:<portnumber>/jmxrmi”

These steps work in general but don’t work on AWS EC2 hosts!! It is not possible to connect to it remotely due to firewall security. That’s because the JMX RMI connector opens two ports: one is for the RMI registry which we just added above (-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=<port>). The other port is used to export JMX RMI connection objects. This second port is usually dynamically allocated at random and must be not opened to listen for the requests. When you do “netstat -an | grep 1099”, it shows that the connection is established on port 1099. But the client can’t establish the connection with the random port.

How to make JMX based monitoring work on AWS EC2?

We wrote our own custom java agent as default agent does not let us to specify the second port number.

 1: /************************************************************************************************/

 2: import java.io.IOException;

 3: import java.lang.instrument.Instrumentation;

 4: import java.lang.management.ManagementFactory;

 5: import java.net.InetAddress;

 6: import java.rmi.registry.LocateRegistry;

 7: import java.util.HashMap;

 8: import javax.management.MBeanServer;

 9: import javax.management.remote.JMXConnectorServer;

 10: import javax.management.remote.JMXConnectorServerFactory;

 11: import javax.management.remote.JMXServiceURL;

 12:

 13: public class CustomJavaAgent {

 14:

 15:     private CustomJavaAgent() {

 16:     }

 17:

 18:     public static void premain(String agentArgs, Instrumentation instrumentation) throws IOException {

 19:         System.setProperty("java.rmi.server.randomIDs", "true");

 20:         final int port= Integer.parseInt(System.getProperty("rmi.agent.port","1099"));

 21:         LocateRegistry.createRegistry(port);

 22:         MBeanServer mbs = ManagementFactory.getPlatformMBeanServer();

 23:         HashMap<String,Object> env = new HashMap<String,Object>();

 24:         final String hostname = InetAddress.getLocalHost().getHostName();

 25:         JMXServiceURL url = new JMXServiceURL("service:jmx:rmi://" + hostname + ":" + port + "/jndi/rmi://" + hostname + ":" + port + "/jmxrmi");

 26:         JMXConnectorServer cs = JMXConnectorServerFactory.newJMXConnectorServer(url, env, mbs);

 27:         cs.start();

 28:     }

 29: }

 30:

 31: /************************************************************************************************/

 32:

Compile this class and create a jar file with specifying a Premain-Class attribute in its manifest instead of Main-Class. Let’s call it CustomJavaAgent.jar. This java agent allows us to specify the second port as well. In the above CustomJavaAgent, port1 and port2 are same. You can customize it to open two different ports.

Now you just need to add this java agent to your ACTIVEMQ_SUNJMX_START param. Copy the jar file to the EC2 host and then just replace the step 6 and 8 with the following lines respectively –

Updated Step 6 –

 1: ACTIVEMQ_SUNJMX_START="-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false -Dexample.rmi.agent.port=1099 -javaagent:/<path to CustomJavaAgent.jar file>/CustomJavaAgent.jar -Djava.rmi.server.hostname=<dns name of EC2 host>"

Updated Step 8 – You also need to change the jmx-service-url, which is required by the client (jconsole/your application) to connect to jmx. Use

“service:jmx:rmi:// <hostname>:<portnumber>/jndi/rmi://<hostname>:<portnumber>/jmxrmi”

The next step is to write the JMX client in Java to connect to the broker and get all the required queues, topic, consumers, subscribers and their state. That part is easier to do. But if there is sufficient interest, I will share out those code snippets as well!

Happy Messaging on ActiveMQ!!

O’Neill Clothing Presented this Case Study at the eTail West Conference in Palm Springs in Feb 2013. The case study revolves around a common problem for brands and retailers – how to get reviews and buzz on a brand new product page. ReadyPulse worked with O’Neill to integrate with their product catalog to have products posted on social networks, instantly creating a “social coolness factor” leading to dozens of usable, authentic social consumer reactions that were displayed on product pages. Results we increases in all e-commerce categories.

Be a sponge, find the gems. That was some of the best advice I ever received from a mentor as I entered the start-up technology world. Many sponges and gems later, I truly believe I recently witnessed one of the most profound and effective tools: our rockstar customers selling for us. I was privileged enough last week to have a front row seat to brand advocacy in it’s truest and finest form…

ReadyPulse attended eTail West last week, and invited a number of our best customers to the event. I was absolutely floored when booth traffic started to pick up, and about 1 in every 3 people said they had been referred to our booth by one of our customers who had been perusing the show floor. This happened each day of the conference, with more and more referrals coming to our booth from our customers. By the end of the show, it became apparent that our customers truly had been our best advocates at the show. We hadn’t done any prep with our customers, told them what to say, provided any financial incentive, or told them to bring people to our booth. It was incredibly humbling and wonderful to know our customers believe enough in what we’re doing and have seen results and value significant enough to use their credibility to promote what we do. Our customers had tangible, relevant stories to tell, and were clearly eager to spread the word.

It’s incredibly humbling to be a part of a company and group of people where our customers are our best advocates and are passionate about what we do – enough so that they essentially sold for us at the event without even trying to. Our customers are our rockstars, and one of the best marketing gems I’ve come across thus far in my professional career. Not only was it humbling, but it was inspiring and motivating to see real people passionate about what we do every day here at ReadyPulse.

My sponge-like instincts tell me this is something I should strive for throughout my professional career. If you can make your customers your best marketing tool, you’ve got a good thing going.

In a recent blog post, the CEO of Spreadshirt, Phillip Rocke talks about how disappointing Facebook commerce has been for his 2,000 FB stores. One of ReadyPulse’s customers has documented their initial forays and failures in Facebook Commerce. All of which begs two questions – what is wrong and what should be done?

Let’s look at the differences of shopping experiences on Facebook and on a retailers website

Taking each difference one at a time.
1. Privacy – there is no expectation of privacy on Facebook. No one wants their friends to know they are buying a $300 purse, or that they are a size 38 in the waist, or what they bought their girlfriend for Valentine’s Day. Other than impulse purchases, movies, restaurants, basically anything sold on daily deals, people are not going to trust that their purchases are not going to be shared.

2. Why Consumers are on the site – You are on Facebook likely to view, read, be entertained and maybe post. You are their to share and discover, not to purchase. While you may see an ad or an offer, it is not going to be a pre-mediated purchase.

3. I have a question - if you are looking to get an answer, like live chat with a customer service rep, that is not going to happen on Facebook for most brands. While there is hope in a new industry solution like Moxie Software’s Engage+,, most brands and retailers have no way to direct engage or answer a question from a consumer.

Now to think about what can be done? Imagine a web store that has privacy expectations, trust seals, and great customer testimonials. One that has stories, pictures, and recommendations from Facebook users. One where you can sign in with Facebook if you want and you are presented with goods that you are most likely to be interested in based on your social profile, and displayed recommendations from people you are most likely to be influenced by. That is bringing Facebook to e-commerce, not e-Commerce to Facebook.

I think Phillip’s blog post is spot on for Facebook commerce’s issues – but I see the solution in developing killer content and advocates on Facebook, and leveraging that advocacy where it matters the most – where people research and buy online – on your website – where you own the traffic, you control the data, and you can directly answer your customers question.