It seems fitting to be writing a review to evangelize a book written on the topic of making evangelists out of your customers. I can’t help but think after reading Creating Customer Evangelists, “how can I let as many people as possible know how wonderful this book is!”

I’d venture a guess that many of you reading this review have delved into a lot of business books in your lifetime. I’m sure that the best of intentions were taken into each book, only to find out that ½ way through the majority of them, they had lost their relevance and hadn’t delivered on their promise. I mean, really, how many books about marketing can possibly have any really interesting and immediately helpful ideas?

While CCE is not a fiction thriller, it will keep you as engaged as any good novel would, because at it’s heart, it tells a lot of great short stories, and it tells them with insight and conviction. The book follows a “case study” approach and illustrates a world-class case example of a company doing CE right in each chapter. And, unlike those feel-good business books about how breakthrough something is that leave you hanging with no action items, CCE includes a full set of appendices on how you, yes you and your business, can get going on your CE efforts.

The book lays out the process of creating customer evangelists in the following order:
1. Customer Plus-Delta (you need to be continuously gathering customer feedback)
2. Napsterize Your Knowledge (share and share alike, and freely, and not cheap crap either – put some good material out there!)
3. Build the Buzz (find the WOM networks in your industry and tap into them, not blatantly, but intelligently. Oh, and give to get. See principle #2)
4. Create Community (encourage your customers to mingle, either physically or virtually – build a coalition of customers around your cause)
5. Make Bite-Size Chunks (devise specialized, smaller offerings to get your customers to bite) The software industry uses this tactic with abandon. When’s the last time you bought software w/ out a trial download?
6. Create a Cause (focus on making your world, industry, community, and company a better place because you were involved)

These are easy enough principles to understand, but NOT_EASY_TO_EMBRACE. How many of you are prepared to “Napsterize” what you know to everyone in and around your industry? Really, how many? Do your marketing managers actually “participate” in the industry and community, or are you all a bunch of bystanders.

Creating Customer Evangelists is about more than “implementing a few best-practices”, this is not six-sigma, but there are ways to measure, and Ben & Jackie have an entire appendix devoted to those to!

Are you ready to embrace your best customers as customer evangelists? Get the book – get the culture!

**This book was read and reviewed in conjunction with the Business Blog Book Tour