How Companies Succeed in Social Business: Case Studies and Lessons from Adobe, Cisco, Unisys, and 18 More Brands

14. Arming your Advocates: Formalizing the Social Media Advocacy Program to Activate Your Biggest Fans

Michelle Kostya, Customer Success Executive, Hootsuite Media Inc.

Think about how you make a purchase decision on your next book. Certainly, we judge a book by its cover, the description, and the reviews and claims regarding “bestseller” lists. Perhaps even more often we pick books through word of mouth, reviews, and thumbs up. We look to our friends, and “people like us” for recommendations. With the Internet and in particular with social media, this broadens our access to recommendations from people we view as similar to us, and in this example, who influence our book-buying decisions. Working in the early 2000s at a Canadian book publisher ...