Huba books
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Huba and McConnell books
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Their articles
Six Reasons Why Small Businesses Should Blog Now
How a blog can fan the flames of customer evangelism for small businesses.
Market Like a Rock Star
Grassroots tours of business "rock stars" are a hot ticket. Here's what a business can learn from taking its act on the road.
Are You Making a Sale or Selling a Dream?
Selling is rooted in what's good for me. Evangelism is rooted in what's good for you. A look at the differences and how a customer evangelism mindset inside the company is key.
Fight the Fear: The 10 Golden Rules of Customer Feedback
Overcoming fear of customer feedback requires courage. But that leap of trust can lead to exceptional word of mouth, showing that you value your customer's opinion.
How
to Ignore Your Best Customers, the TiVo Way, Part 2
As a follow-up to our August 2003 critique of TiVo's marketing practices, here's how TiVo could embrace its "out there" customer evangelists.
How to ignore your best customers, the TiVo way
We are TiVo evangelists. They've joined tens of thousands of TiVo customers who evangelize that black box of circuits and how it's changed our television-viewing lives. But for such a brilliant cause, we are continually amazed to find that TiVo gives its most passionate customers the the cold shoulder.
Creating Employee Evangelists
For Executive Circle magazine, we describe the idea of creating employee evangelists and the questions senior executives should ask while trying to rally evangelists inside the company. (Registration required)
Worst To First: How Mark Cuban Engineered a Team's Monumental Comeback
How Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban revived a dying franchise by focusing on improved fan relationships.
A Just Cause: Creating Emotional Connections With Customers
Inc.com, the website of Inc. magazine, features our article on how to create a cause and rally customers around it.
A Just Cause: Creating Emotional Connections with Customers
"What does your company stand for?" Companies with a cause -- how they're making the world a better place -- often create emotional connections with customers. Those customers in turn tend to become its advocates and biggest supporters: its evangelists.
Bite-Size Chunks: Getting Customers To Try Before They Buy
How a well-defined and generous sample program creates evangelists quickly and efficiently, even out of samplers who don't purchase.
Creating Customer Communities: A Surgical Approach
Canada's Shouldice Hospital does something unheard of for most businesses, much less a hospital: Each year, it throws a reunion party for its patients who undergo hernia operations.
8 Steps to Creating an Infectious Business
When customers evangelize you to colleagues and friends, what they say is as important as the passion behind it. To make it easy for customers to describe what you do, they must easily understand the idea of your company. If people quickly grasp the idea and benefits of your business, it can become infectious.
Napsterize your knowledge: Give to receive
Companies that share their intellectual property and business processes with customers and partners are more likely to have their knowledge (or products) passed along to prospective customers. People tend to evangelize products and services they love, admire or find valuable, so Napsterizing one's knowledge allows for the grassroots effect of distributed marketing. The network is the channel.
Top 6 Tips to Understand Customer Evangelism
How to recognize customer evangelists in the wild and what to do after you find them.
The Customer Evangelism Manifesto
What is customer evangelism and how do companies create it? The "manifesto" sets the stage.
5 tips to save yourself from cold calling
Cold calling is almost universally despised on both sides of the phone. So why do we continue to remain locked in such destructive habits? Here are some ideas to get out of the cold.
Their evangelist profiles
Who are the worldwide leaders in creating customer evangelists for their companies' products and services? Our profiles salute organizational leaders who are making a difference by intensely focusing on customer satisfaction.
Lynette Chiang, Bike Friday
Can a bicycle change your life? It did for Lynette Chiang. While working as a copywriter for advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, Chiang purchased a bike in 1996 and decided it was time to see the world. She loved it and started telling the world. It didn't take long for the Bike Friday founders to notice.
Chris Pirillo, Lockergnome
This guy, the Lockergnome, is literally screaming in to the phone. "If you like something so much that you will steal it and send it to all your friends, what the hell is wrong with that?!," he exclaims, describing what often happens to digital content. You see, the Lockergnome thinks that overzealous protectors of copyrights have it all wrong, and now his pitch is louder than what most people would consider a safe volume for most eardrums.
Suzanne Beecher, Chapter-A-Day
The way Suzanne Beecher figures it, she has a mission. An avid reader, Beecher felt strongly enough about books and reading them that she wanted to impart their importance upon her friends and colleagues. That mission led her to launch Chapter-a-Day.com, a Web site that emails a five-minute excerpt from a featured book each day for a week to a network of 100,000 readers.
Meg Whitman, eBay
In seven years, eBay has gone from zero customers to nearly 50 million. Seven years! That's about seven million new customers per year. In seven years, eBay has gone from zilch to more than $700 million in revenue per year. Seven years!
Brian Erwin
Brian Erwin is a grassroots marketing pioneer. He was the marketing brains behind Ed Krol's "The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog," a million-plus best seller from O'Reilly & Associates. Arguably considered the first and best book about the Internet, "The Whole Internet" was a best seller because of a grassroots approach and evangelism marketing.
Maxine Clark, Build-A-Bear Workshop
In 1997, Maxine Clark founded Build-A-Bear Workshop, a St. Louis-based retailer of stuffed animals. Thanks to a memorable store experience that fuels a nearly 50 percent word-of-mouth referral rate, Build-A-Bear Workshop is exceeding all traditional retail store growth benchmarks thanks to its legion of mostly young customer evangelists.
Guy Kawasaki
Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist of Apple Computer, is considered by many to be the father of evangelism marketing. His 1991 book, "Selling the Dream: How to Promote Your Product, Company, or Ideas - and Make a Difference - Using Everyday Evangelism," is the seminal work for understanding how to build support for a cause that changes the world. If there was a marketing Hall of Fame, Guy would be in it.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM evangelist. Wait a second. IBM? Evangelism?
Steve Jobs, Apple Computer
Steve Jobs can work a room like a seasoned rock star. The Jan. 7, 2002, twice-yearly love fest known as Macworld was no different for the jeans-and-turtleneck-clad chief executive of Apple Computer. He commands presence.
Melissa Giovagnoli, Networlding
Spontaneously, speakers step to a microphone during a fundraising event to tell stories of Networlding - some choked with emotion - of how new best friends have been created, how support groups for the in-between-jobs set randomly formed and how the importance of relationships in the post-September 11 haze has been central to healing.
Robert Habeeb, First Hospitality Group
Robert Habeeb is a hotel executive responsible for 1,500 employees in an industry where employee turnover can average 100 percent. That's the equivalent of having to replace everyone in your entire organization every year. But Habeeb does something different.
Simone Paddock, O'Reilly & Associates
Tucked away in an office in Sebastopol, Calif., Simone Paddock patrols the Internet's underground, lurking in the shadows. Well-cloaked so as to keep her identity a secret, she is out to discover what people are saying about her employer, O'Reilly & Associates, the fast-rising technology publishing company.
Herb Kelleher, Southwest Airlines
In an industry that's roundly reviled by customers, Southwest Airlines largely stands alone. Thanks to the extremely effective, maverick-cum-evangelistic leadership of Kelleher, Southwest has outlasted competitors big and small to become bigger than all of them combined.
Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks
Mark Cuban is a rebel with a cause. He's out to make life better for long-suffering Dallas Mavericks fans, overthrow the stuffiness that has consumed the NBA and introduce new levels of technological sophistication to his team and the game that will help make everyone more money.