For Marketers and Entrepreneurs, its impossible to ignore the importance of conversations about the brand online. Many of us do keep our customers engaged with conversations and try to use social media marketing to its fullest. How many of us use such conversations with existing customers to get new ones? and how is it possible?

Advocacy Marketing is extended WoM

Today people are much more influenced by other people ‘just like themselves’ when thinking about new products or services than they are from advertising or marketing. Marketers are looking at ways of how they can get the advocacy of others in front of prospects and consumers on their owned media channels to help form positive impressions.

Advocacy Marketing is collecting anonymous testimonials

Analysts are pointing at 2011 as being the year when companies try to integrate their websites to social channels. With nearly 600 million people on Facebook, 125 million people on Twitter and nearing a 100 million on LinkedIn there is a massive amount of opinion and conversation about brands and companies happening on social networks. Showcasing the voices of advocates harvested from social media and displayed on websites will be the natural evolution of this.

The last two years have seen most companies spend money on engaging with customers, prospects and consumers on social channels but hardly any companies actually capitalize on those conversations by using the best bits to help drive conversions on their other online properties. For example if a happy customers tweets something great mentioning a company, within days it will just scroll off the companies Twitter page. Other people just don’t get exposed to the great advocacy that is out there. It is a waste and the smart marketers know it.

Imagine being able to monitor how people are interacting with your campaign, product or brand across Facebook, Twitter, youtube, flickr, blogs and LinkedIn and then have these streams filtered and curated so you can use the best bits of advocacy across your website showcasing your fans and followers. Social media is changing the way we market products and services. It should be as much about our communities view of what we do. Marketers need to combine the views of fans and followers with their core marketing blurb on all online properties.

Services like EngageSciences let you pull in social streams from across the social web and have them filtered in a number of ways so you can easily curate and then publish the voices of your advocates across your website or sites in just a few clicks. The most powerful form of advertising is after all happy customers. Marketers in 2011 will leverage the unique capabilities of social media to take this to the next level.

Here is an example. element14 is a name which all electronics/design engineers would know. Its an online retail store that sells over 5,00,000 products and also has a facebook like community where engineers discuss problems and interact. Both store and community can be integrated and let people comment on the products they buy. Checkout the two images and see for yourself whether it makes a difference and helps in marketing.

Pic 1: Without Advocacy Marketing

See how things change when we get to hear some of our friends saying good things about a product!

Pic 2: With Advocacy Marketing

Here is another picture to showcase a how a mobile selling website can use it. This is as simple as customers selling your products to each other!

Idea: EngageSciences