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Shashi Tharoor 225

If you are looking for an example of the governmental and agency use of social media, take a look ■ EXTEND ENGAGEMENT
at the works of Shashi Tharoor. You can follow Shashi Tharoor on Twitter (@shashitharoor) and
learn more about him here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shashi_Tharoor

Advocacy

Collaborative activities, in a business context, are designed to move current and poten-
tial customers up and through the engagement process toward true brand advocacy.
Brand advocates are, of course, an essential factor in a brand’s overall success: Not
only do they promote the brand and any associated products or services, they will
defend the brand when it is being attacked. The earlier example of India’s Café Coffee
Day and the bloggers who were rightly offended by an overly enterprising store man-
ager made clear the beneficial impact of brand advocates.

There is a larger play to be made, however, using social technologies. Similar
to the diffusion that is observed in PR—where easily identified journalists or industry
experts active in traditional media give way to a foam of enthusiasts present on the
Social Web, the development of brand advocates requires a deeper dive into the conver-
sations that surround a brand, product, or service so that the advocates—and the top-
ics around which advocates may form—can be identified and nurtured.

The degree to which a brand participates via social technologies is a good
indicator of the contribution that such participation has. In the Altimeter report
“Engagement db 2009,” the case is made that an active social presence is associated
with successful brands. To be clear, the report does not claim that an active social
presence causes or directly drives enhanced business success. Recall the difference
between causation and correlation. The report does, however, note that there is a very
strong correlation between successful brands and an active social presence.

Most useful is the following realization: Whether social activity drives business
success or business success provides a context for an active social presence is not the
issue. Instead, the connection—the correlation—between the social activity associated
with successful brands and the success of those brands arises out of the combination of
business acumen and significant time spent in defined, measurable activities that engage
customers. The result is a higher-than-average generation of brand advocates, further
driving this (positive) cycle! In other words, it’s not the social activity that matters per
se: It is what happens in and around a business or organization and its marketplace as a
result of this social activity. More engagement + better experiences = more advocates.