Economy is not getting any better. If you have a marketing budget today, chances are that it'll be slimmer tomorrow and completely vanish in a week from today.
Got a few minutes? Read on to learn on how to improve your budget with a new kind of currency - currency that is completely immune to inflation or depreciation - meet EgoDollar.
What is EgoDollar?
In 1999 I had a meeting with a guy who was an Open Source evangelist for SGI. He told me about a very easy to understand concept of EgoDollars to explain why people work on OpenSource projects. They don't get paid in "real" money. They get paid in EgoDollars - the more prestigious projects or harder from technical perspective problems they solve, the better their EgoSalary is.
Super simple.
But I'm sure that you will not be surprised that you have people among your customers who want to be paid with EgoDollars as well, right? I mean a typical customer is looking for Dollars - like discounts, special offers or gifts. But there is a special type of user that would be even happier to get EgoDollars payout instead of a discount!
How can we tell which customers want to be paid in EgoDollars?
Identify Alfa Males/Females
First you have to identify which of your users have accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or any other social network. If you use Gmail you can use Rapportive.
If you use Discourse you know that we select and let you link your customer's profiles from external sources like LinkedIn or Facebook.Currently we are testing on more thing - we use LinkedIn integration to get hold of Twitter user name of your client or prospect. Then we scan Klout for influencer information and we give you a list of Alpha Clients sorted by Klout influential score (it's a private beta feature - want to join? Shoot me an email to smartupz@smartupz.com).
If you have a list - the rest is pretty simple:
1. Make those users happy
2. Ask for reference
3. Make it easy to share info about your product
Let's go thru the list and see how we can achieve those steps.
Make your Alpha Users happy!
Paying in EgoDollars takes some discipline and a little bit of investment. First of all you should figure out which items have highest EgoDollar value. For us this works pretty well:
- Access to private beta of upcoming release
- One-to-One skype calls to get feedback about new features
- Giving extra storage and/or user licenses for $0
You'll be surprised how well this works - especially the first point.
Ask for reference
Your Alpha users will be happy to share your product feedback with you and not only with you. Easiest way to ask them for reference is to ask three questions:
- Who is an ideal customer for our product?
- Do you know anyone who could benefit from using our product?
- What you tell them?
Answer to your last question would be your reference quote.
Make it easy to share info about your product
I know it's a cliche but let's face it - you need those "like", "share" and "follow" buttons and you need to drive attention of your users towards them.
In Discourse we store customer reference quotes with their profile information (again - private beta feature). We present those quotes to the users that are among "influenced_by" or in social graph with our Alpha Clients. Makes biggest impact.
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2 comments:
Figuring out who your most important users are and turning them into brand ambassadors (or whatever other term you want to call them) can be very rewarding. The problem is that everything has a calculated return on investment cost and if you're spending all of your time buddying up with a few important people you can also end up using too many of your resources ignoring your main group of supporters. One of the reasons that I've abandoned trying to go after traditional media is that a lot of important people are too busy and too fickle and breaking through their filter is too tough. I really hate to replicate that experience with social media as well. I think that there's nothing wrong with trying to influence some big users, but social media seems more designed to reach out to the masses and I think the entire advertising ecosystem around Facebook (see BuyFacebookFansReviews for instance) illustrates that this is the focus of the marketplace as well. I think Klout is a useful tool for figuring out who to go after, but there's more than one way to go far on a limited marketing budget and measuring what works best for each particular project through real statistics and metrics is probably the most important thing.
I agree that focusing only on big users can be a problem. I was just saying that it makes a lot of sense to focus on big users but continue to use common sense and not forget about other marketing activities :)
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