What Starbucks Can Teach You About Recruiting And Empowering Your Evangelists

Showing us they’re good for more than a vanilla latte Starbucks has provided a pretty savvy guerrilla marketing case study that activated their evangelists. Even tastier is that it’s a social media approach you can duplicate for your real estate business.

Starbucks is doing a few savvy things in their marketing here that recruits evangelsist front and center. Snagged from Flickr’s pages…

1. They’ve idententified a niche community that are passionate about their interest (photo enthusiasts).
2. Reaching out to these folks is also easy thanks to social networks (they hang out on Flickr).
3. Starbucks then set about identifying who their evangelists were inside this niche community (created a Starbucks group) – again, social network sites make this easy to do.
4. The evangelists are then encouraged to promote Starbucks to their own personal networks (publish photos of themselves in Starbucks).

It has all the makings of a good guerrilla marketing campaign. It reminds me of Pampers’s Potty Dance campaign that also took off like wildfire. These two campaigns share two very important elements…

1. Make it monkey-stoopid simple for your fans to speak up and show that they’re fans.
2. The manner in which the fans speak up causes a viral ripple where the fans tell their personal networks how much they like you.

In the real estate space Ines Hegedus-Garcia does this very well with her Miamism Flickr group. So does Nick Bastian with his Phoenix Light Rail group.

How can you be doing this in your market?