It is true that Brand Advocates have value in part due to the reach of their relationships within and across their social networks. When they encourage their friends and colleagues to buy our products, our brand’s buying power increases exponentially, and it simply makes good business sense to leverage those opportunities.
The risk here is that we can become so focused on our Brand Advocates’ social reach that we see them only as a means to an end (sales) and stop seeing them as people. We might get greedy and start looking right past them to market directly to their networks, ignoring our Advocates themselves. While that marketing method can still be somewhat teffective, it costs more, it is more difficult to implement and maintain, and it is dangerous to our brand. We cannot de-value our Advocates and expect our brands to thrive!