Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users has some thoughts on how to turn users into evangelists. (Hint: The bottom line is to have a product or service or cause that helps users learn and grow and kick ass at something.)
As always, she just gets it right:
1) You have a product or service or cause that helps users learn and grow and kick ass at something. 2) You give users tools to help them evangelize. 3) You do not ever, ever, ever pay users for doing this.
The main point isn’t that Kathy knows how to give good advice. On her weblog, she puts all of her advice in the right context, explains how to apply those rules of thumb in your day-to-day life (or job, be it consulting or anything else), and she sure follows her own advice: You can just feel that she believes in what she says. Effect: It’s all very convincing. It truly amazes me how entertaining consulting advice can be.
So if you’re looking for general advice to apply to your own service or product, or to pass on to your clients, or if you’re simply looking for some cool tool ideas for building your own evangelist community: Don’t miss out on this article. Sure enough, I bookmarked it.
(Two links from said article I’d like to share here with you: The How To Get Involved pages of Oxfam and Greenpeace. ’cause obviously, if your users are supposed to get involved in whatever it is you’re doing, the first thing to do is showing them how to get involved. So there you go.)
