Mark Organ, bad Kardashians, and the benevolence of Facebook – VB Engage

Episode 20. XX. Veinte. (Or Venti, if you’re in Starbucks). A score. Twenty. Yep — we’ve made it this far, and we’ve got a great episode for you today!

This week, Stewart and Travis talk about influencer marketing do’s and don’ts with Mark Organ, CEO of Influitive. Our news is also about influencer marketing (those naughty Kardashians), mobile payments, and advertising, so let’s begin.

Before we jump into episode TWO-OH, let’s recap episode 19, with Alain Falys, the CEO of YoYo Wallet. We discussed mobile payments, and it was a fascinating interview.

Speaking of mobile payments, Facebook announced this week that it will be accepting payments via Facebook Messenger, and — get this — it will not be taking any percentage of the fee. For free. No cost. Facebook is going to accept payments, and it won’t cost merchants anything, aside from whatever the payment partner company will be taking.

This is most likely a play to open up the floodgates, get a bunch of merchants on the platform, and then start charging down the road. It seems like the same strategy that the social behemoth put in place to get businesses over to Facebook in the first place.

We shall see.

In other Facebook news, everyone’s favorite filtered photo app, Instagram, launched some new cha-cha-changes to its advertising platform. In short, we will get the pleasure of seeing more ads! Yay!

The change has made Instagram ads more visible — with a highly visible call to action if you’ve been sitting on the image for 4 seconds. Also, video ads will open up to a landing page experience.

It’s very simple to create ads for Instagram, as Facebook owns it. You can access and create ads within the Facebook Power Editor. If you set up the ad within FB, with the right dimensions, it can automatically be activated in Instagram. The call to action you use on your Facebook ads will be the one used in Instagram — that is, unless you set up Instagram-only campaigns.

In influencer marketing news, the FTC recently developed new regulations around influencer disclosure. And the Kardashians are allegedly being illegally paid to promote brands on social media without disclosing advertising or sponsored posts. Is there a chance they will all get arrested and go away forever? Tough one to call.

We also tease a future competition in this week’s episode. Huawei recently flew Travis to China to meet the company, and Travis being Travis, he bagged some impressive devices to give out to our audience. Look for more details in upcoming weeks. If you’ve listened to a few of our episodes, you’ll have a much greater chance of winning.

Speaking of influencers and customer advocacy, today’s guest is Mark Organ, CEO of Influitive.

People are increasingly distrustful of anything that comes from a company, brand, or even the CEO. However, they do trust employees of the enterprise, and they want to hear from people in a similar situation to their own.

Mark explains that net promoter questions and surveys are good at surfacing customer advocates. Who is generating a lot of value for them? Clients who are happy with you are great people to add to your VIP customer advocate programs.

Influitive uses an internal VIP portal that resembles a Pinterest board and provides various opportunities for customers to engage with other clients. Maybe they can speak on stage with them, or they can help write a blog post or meet other customer advocates.

If you just ask people to do something, that doesn’t usually work all that well. You need to supply additional features to increase loyalty. Randomness and fun works, but you must actually engage and gamify your VIP customer advocacy experience, Mark says.

Having a great customer advocacy platform can help your advocates tell their story better. They get better over time. And you can help them and train them to tell better stories. It is a very engaging process and builds your company.

Thank you for tuning into episode 20 of VB Engage. Tune in next week for episode 21 with the CEO of Hipmunk, Adam Goldstein, who just sold the travel app company to Concur. It’s a great interview, and a timely one.

As always, if you’ve enjoyed this content, give it a subscribe, rating, or review on your favorite podcast platform. Come on, Stewart needs a virtual hug.

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