Word of mouth is great. It is marketing’s pot of gold. But one step beyond good customers talking about your business, are customers that become crazy, enthusiastic fans of your business. The ones that tell everyone about you and your product, the ones that sing your praises.

Call them champions. Call them evangelists. [...]]]>

Word of mouth is great. It is marketing’s pot of gold. But one step beyond good customers talking about your business, are customers that become crazy, enthusiastic fans of your business. The ones that tell everyone about you and your product, the ones that sing your praises.

Call them champions. Call them evangelists. With a little help from you, more of your best customers can rise to that next level. Shouting your good deeds from the rooftop (or Facebook even).

Having a quality product is of course step one (let’s hope you have that one covered). Being remarkable in some way can create plenty of word of mouth on it’s own. And many of the steps below can be summed up as “building real relationships with your customers”. Still, I am thinking 44 concrete examples might help a little.

Please feel free to reblog this if you want, just please link back 44 Ways To Help Your Customers Fly.

Make Customers Feel Special

1. Create a reward program, allowing customers to accumulate points, earn discounts/prizes
2. Allow customers to influence your products/services (see Dell’s IdeaStorm)
3. Have contests that require very little action by the customer (“100th customer of the summer gets a free reward”)
4. Have customers give away swag for you (see @MommyBrain at Blogher)
5. Create official champions that believe in your company, that can help you hold events, educate other customers, and create content

Simple Steps

6. Start internally, look to employees, relatives, and friends for your biggest evangelism opportunities (see IBM’s employee blog network)
7. Teach Employees to spot potential evangelists
8. Create tags/hashtags/keywords that allow your customers to signal when they are discussing your company online
9. Take surveys of your customers, display the results (on and offline)
10. Encourage customers to check in on Facebook, Twitter, etc. (see Jet Blue at SXSW)

Connect and Educate

11. Hold classes, webinars, seminars to teach customers relevant skills (see Hubspot’s webinar series)
12. Provide content that helps customers that are parents teach or entertain their children
13. Find customers that are using your product or service in a unique way and feature them for others to learn from
14. Create a meetup group around a topic relevant to your business (discussion group,  monthly book club, health/fitness club)
15. Build communities online around existing social networks (see Graco’s Flickr group)

Content Creation

16. Interview happy customers on video (case studies, testimonials, reviews, unique use of products)
17. Quote customers as often as possible. Other consumers will trust them before they trust you
18. Customer submitted product photos (see Threadless, Carhartt)
19. Customer submitted video contests (see Late Night Jimmy Fallon Dance Challenge)
20. Feature customers on blog posts, give faces and personality to your community

Customer Service

21. Use unique feedback channels (Facebook, Twitter, Online chat)
22. After resolving customer complaints, ask them what else you can do to improve their experience
23. Suggestion box, online or offline, reward customers who make suggestions (see My Starbucks Idea)
24. Forums, allow customers to help one another, answer each others’ questions
25. Monitor blog searches (Google Blog Search, BackType) for comments and posts that complain about or suggest improvements to your business (and respond to them)

Be Creative

26. Photo opps, bold visuals for customers to share online (see Dominos)
27. Interview current evangelists about what they love about your company
28. Give your customers business cards to give out (discounts would help of course)
29. Ask customers to help hold an open house, or anniversary event
30. Give away swag (customers wearing t-shirts, hats, bags, etc. are strong reminders), especially to return customers (see free Gmail stickers)

Blogging

31. Exchange discounts for part time bloggers
32. Let customers decide between two coupons that you will offer each week or month
33. Feature vendors/partners and how they help you offer a better product
34. Make it easy for your readers to share your content (Sharethis, Addthis, Tweetmeme)
35. Create a podcast where your customers are the stars

Facebook

36. Feature photos of your customers with your products and at your events (see Zappos photos on Facebook)
37. Wish your customers happy birthday – simple and easy – we all like birthday wishes
38. Help promote community events and events hosted by your customers
39. Hold contests for your Facebook fans, give them riddles, ask them to write haikus, celebrate the winners, give them prizes (see Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice)
40. Become a fan of and participate on community related pages, for your city, your neighborhood, local philanthropies

Twitter

41. Link to your customers – again, feature them as the stars (see Trader Joes)
42. Use Twitter Search to look for links to interesting stories relevant to your niche. Share them and give credit to the source (see Whole Foods)
43. Ask questions of your followers and write a blog post that quotes the best responses
44. Study and respond to your critics, or better yet, study and respond to the critics of your competitors

Be creative, have fun, invest in your customers – and they will invest in you.

Feel free to add your own ideas in the comments. The more the merrier.

Photo Credit: Anirudh Koul

Kluster is a cool crowdsourcing community that launched at TED 2 years ago and fosters community collaboration on a unique level. Members submitted problems, suggested solutions, and voted to guide the creation of all kinds of products.

It was wide open, with little direction, creating everything from copywriting to website design to [...]]]>

Kluster is a cool crowdsourcing community that launched at TED 2 years ago and fosters community collaboration on a unique level. Members submitted problems, suggested solutions, and voted to guide the creation of all kinds of products.

It was wide open, with little direction, creating everything from copywriting to website design to industrial design and more. Since then kluster has tried to focus on more niche collaboration communities and today their newest effort, quirky, went live.

Quirky is focused on industrial and product design, and takes design collaboration to a new level. Creating new products, designing that next cool gadget, is how kluster started. Quirky builds on that idea, the thought that a group of creative people can combine unique ideas to solve simple problems, and profit from them together.

Got some undervalued  design skills? Constantly writing down ideas for inventions or new products? Give quirky a go and share your ideas with the world.

Their first product, the slingback, is already for sale. They describe it as the first universal cord retractor. I personally could use a half dozen of these. If industrial designers and idea folk embrace the concept of this community, the possibibillities seem very cool for quirky.

Kluster also brought us the copywriter’s playground that is NameThis.com, another favorite collaboration community.

I dig quirky because it brings an idea platform to the masses, a true outlet. Anyone can take an idea that may better the world, or maybe just improve the modern mousetrap, and share it with the world. Our collective intelligence gets a little more collective with sites like this.

And just imagine what they can do if they team up with charities, helping to design that next great mwater purifyer or mosquito deterent.