Blogging and Customer Evangelism

Good morning! Welcome to the 5th stop of the Business Blog Book Tour (BBBT). I had the opportunity to chat with Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell of Church of the Customer to talk about their book, Creating Customer Evangelists. After reading the book, I was struck with the parallels of blogging with each of their 6 Tenets of creating customer evangelists. So in the upcoming posts today, I’ll address each tenet with both my own observations from reading the book, and Ben and Jackie’s comments from our phone conversation (paraphrased from my fiercely scribbled notes; unfortunately I didn’t have a recorder). They’ll be visiting Brand Mantra to address any questions or comments you may have, so (as always) fire away. This group isn’t known to be shy!

Comments

[Marc Orchant]

Jennifer - I've had a bit of conversation with Ben and Jackie (well, mostly Ben) about this. Blogging is perhaps the most authentic, transparent, and interactive medium yet for engaging customers and especially customer evangelists. Shortly after the first Customer Evangelists University event last fall in Chicago (which I was delighted to have attended), Ben and Jackie launched a discussion forum. It did not sustain itself, even though it was intended to provide a discussion space for evangelically oriented folks (who, as you know, are not shy!).

Their blog, OTOH, has proven to be a great dynamic for stimulating conversation and creating Creating Customer Evangelists evangelists (how's that for some nice parallelism?). This blog tour they're on allows them to extend their reach and offer both Bite-Sized Chunks of their wisdom and Napsterize Their Knowledge to a wider audience.

These two definitely practice what they preach!