In this keynote, Bryan Kramer explains how to build a powerful network of brand advocates by using the "wave" as a metaphor for coordinated, viral action. He begins with a live demonstration of a stadium wave to illustrate how simple, repeated actions can scale into a movement, recounting the real‑world origin of the wave at the Oakland A's in 1984 and its three‑year incubation before spreading globally. Kramer then introduces his core belief that advocacy is fundamentally human‑to‑human (H2H), citing his own presentation that generated 80 million impressions in 48 hours and was translated into 15 languages. He shares a TED‑talk experiment where audience members used their phones to tweet a shared screen, producing a geographic network map of advocates that demonstrated how pinpointing key sharers can replicate viral spread. Kramer outlines six distinct advocate personas—Altruist, Careerist, Early‑Adopter (Hipster), Boomerang/Troll, Connector, and Selective/Observer—derived from a New York Times Customer Insight Group report, and provides a URL (bryankremer.com/advocate) for participants to identify their own type. He then presents a five‑step framework for cultivating an influencer army: (1) locate advocates where they congregate, (2) treat them like VIPs, (3) give before you ask, (4) make interactions fun, and (5) sustain the conversation long after the initial experience. Each step is illustrated with practical advice, such as handling travel logistics, offering value first, and incorporating social moments like a gin‑and‑tonic networking break. The talk concludes with five actionable takeaways for community‑driven marketing: listen before you ask, give VIP treatment, give more than you receive, inject fun, and view influencer relationships as ongoing. Kramer invites the audience to approach him after the session for further questions, reinforcing the H2H ethos throughout.
Chapters
Hey, everybody. Hey, how are you doing? Good. So excited to be here and talk to you about advocacy. So who here is an advocate? Almost everybody. Let's prove it. You guys ready to prove it? All right, let's prove it through a model I like to call the wave. Are you ready? I need a volunteer over here. Who here can volunteer? Just one person. All right. You are in charge of getting this entire room to do the wave. Are you ready? On your marks, get set, go. Are we going to go back? Let's try. Go back the other way. This is awesome. After lunch, you guys did the wave. How cool is that? Give yourselves a hand. So thank you, first of all. See me afterwards and I will get you a free copy of Shareology. I appreciate that. Second, I didn't just make you do the wave to wake you up after lunch. I also wanted to share with you the model for creating advocates, creating a network of people that are very interested in doing something together. And if you think about the wave, it really is kind of simple, right? But at the end of the day, it also can be complex. When you think about what goes on inside of a stadium when individual people stand up and sit down in order to make a wave happen, right? But here's the interesting thing. The wave was actually started in 1984 by Crazy George. At the Oakland A's Coliseum. Here's the more— here's a much more interesting piece. He actually started it 3 years before that. It didn't take off for 3 years until people got this weird concept of sitting down and standing up at the right time together in unison to make the wave happen. Sometimes once, sometimes 5 times, sometimes on a great day it would happen 20 times. at the height of the wave. And then 2 weeks later after it worked, it spread like wildfire and other— That's good. Okay, and other people would do it at other stadiums and every 2 weeks it would go to a new stadium and the wave became a wave. But here's the key, it didn't just happen overnight. It took 3 years before Crazy George could convince everybody to sit down and stand up at the right time. Now let's see if I can get this. So I wanted to talk to you about the 5 steps of building an army of influencers to create your own wave. Now that we all know that each and every one of you is an advocate or an influencer, you will understand exactly what I'm talking about. One thing I wanted to start with is something that I have really worked hard on. I presented this about 3 years ago. It's called There's No B2B or B2C, It's H2H, Human to Human. I actually leaned over across this screen as I was giving this presentation at another keynote, and it took off like wildfire. It got over 80 million impressions in 48 hours, was translated into well over 15 languages, and was blogged about by 2,000 people. Now I don't share that with you to pump this up as much as I do to emphasize the fact that human to human is what builds your advocacy. Being a community driver and helping people to understand the value behind actually taking part in a community is what it's all about. And to do that, you have to help and usher your community along. There has to be a human to human advocate network in order for for that to succeed. Now, years and years ago, many years ago, Paul Revere was one of the first advocates. I mean, think about it. If today he wanted to spread the news saying that they're coming, help, we gotta get out of town, everybody run, he probably would have tweeted it. And it would have been way easier, and I would have liked that way more myself, than getting on a horse and telling the whole village, we gotta go. Now, I was really excited, I think it was about a year ago, a little over a year ago, and the reason I look over here is because my dear friend Kari Andersen and I got the chance to actually speak at a TED event. Kari's gonna be up speaking next, so you'll hear more from her. But it was so exciting because we got a chance to actually do some interesting things during these TED Talks. I wanted to prove the model of sharing. I wanted to share with everybody this concept. It was a screen that was up behind me that I asked everybody in the audience to take a screenshot of and share up on Twitter. Now, it was the first time that TED allowed anyone to use phones or mobile phones inside of the auditorium. Normally you're not. Now, thank God, they ended up not only letting me use the mobile phones and having people take part, but at the end of the day, it actually worked. And I had a big sigh of relief that I just had convinced TED to do something that could have gone severely wrong. Not only that, but then I discovered this interesting piece where, as people were sharing that screen of how they could change the world by sharing, we started to see trends. The trends were shaped into this graph right here. So what you're looking at are different clusters. Those clusters are each geographies, different countries. And those countries are headed up by those individual little nodes, and those nodes are advocates. Those are individual people that helped to spread this message of sharing inspires to the rest of the country. What that means is, is that by actually locking in on those individual people that were sharing the message, we could recreate the same thing. It trended on Twitter globally, and knowing that, we could take this same message and go back to those same people and make the same thing happen again. Community works. Advocates work. How does it work? So first of all, I want everybody here to understand this concept, that everybody is an influencer on something. Everyone is passionate about at least one thing, if not more. Everyone thinks about something all the time, whether it's even biking or hiking or or their kids or their family or something in their job. Everybody is passionate about something, and I would rather go to you to find out what that is and help me understand that topic more than I would a brand, because I trust you more, because advocates understand passion around a certain topic because they put so much time and effort into it. Now, there are 6 different personas, 6 different advocate types that was done around research. There was a research report that came out by the New York Times. It was the Customer Insight Group, and it helped us to understand those different types of advocates, 'cause at the very end of the day, we needed to understand where people fit. Not everybody fits into the same bucket. Humans are all different. We share in different ways. We say different things. Some of us are introverts. Some of us are extroverts. We are all different, so let's categorize things so that we give them exactly what they need and how they need to share. So the 6, and I'll go over these really quickly, and I have something for you online so you can capture these later. You don't have to write these down. First one is the altruist. They share something specific. Second one is the careerist. They like to help other people in their career as well as themselves through thought leadership. The third one is a hipster. I like to call it an early adopter. They like to take things on and be the first one there in order to share it out or teach other people. Number 4 is a boomerang. Very interesting, a boomerang likes to ask questions, wait for a response, and then ask another question or respond. Or they can also be a troll. Boomerangs are also trolls. Number 5 is a connector. A connector is somebody that likes to connect 2 or more people together. I like to think of myself as a connector. And number 6 is a selective. A selective likes to share privately. They like to capture information and they wanna give it to you through private messages, or they want to DM you with the information, or they want to email you a piece of information. They're observers. Some people like to call them lurkers. I prefer observers because I think we're all observers. Now, I wanted to help you out, and I'll have this up again at the end, but in order to discover which kind of brand advocate, which kind of persona each and every single one of you are, you can actually go to bryankremer.com/advocate. Forward slash Advocamp, and that will give you the brand advocate— your type, your brand type. Now, there are 5 quick steps. I'm going to go through them. What makes you a brand advocate? How do you make brand advocate armies out of people? How do you build your network? So first and foremost, where are they? Sorry, I went one screen ahead. Where are they? Listening is key to making sure you understand where they are. Understanding what they talk about, where they like to play, what they like to read. Now this goes back to the observer level, but actually locking in on what they talk about really helps you to define how you're going to approach them because the last thing you want to do is be creepy. I think most of us. The next one is to treat them like a VIP. And this is really important. I know it seems simple, but the more that you actually onboard your influencers and treat them so well, the better they're going to treat you back. Can you imagine if every single one of your influencers was treated like a VIP? The next one is to give before you ask anything of them. I see so many times people reaching out to their influencers and saying, can you do this for me? Can you do this for me? Can you do this for me? Can you do this for me? Before they had a chance to actually do something for them. So my motto, and this comes out of my, straight out of my book in Shareology, called give, give, give, give, give, give, give, and then maybe get. And if you don't, start over again and start giving. But at the end of the day, don't ask them to get married on the first date. Number 4 is one of my favorite ones because I love to work. I love to work. I like serious fun. I like the combination of serious and fun. What human doesn't like to play? We all like to play. We all like to have fun, and that's how we network. We all look forward to drinks at 5 PM together at the end of a conference day more than anything else that day, right? Gin and tonic? Sometimes fun is where the magic happens, and yet we put influencers or advocates through so many rigorous activities, they never have a chance to have fun. Fun, but the fun is actually where they come up with the ideas that helps to make your platform, your message, and your product get shared more passionately. And then number 5 is the conversation grows long after the experience. You may have an event that you invite them to, you may have a platform you invite them to, you may have an experience, one thing that you do, but that's just the beginning. The community is what gets started there and then ends up growing over time. Now we have many communities at my marketing company where we help our clients grow those communities, just like on this platform here, where we start the conversation and help them have conversations between each other. See, it's not just about our product, it's not just about our service, it's about them connecting with each other. That's what keeps them coming back. So 5 key takeaways. First one, listen and learn. It's so vital up front before you ask them to take part. Number 2 is everyone gets the VIP treatment. Every single person wants to be treated really well, and that means if they're gonna travel, take care of all their details. Make sure that they're okay and make sure that they're smiling through the entire experience. And that means everyone, even the boomerangs. Number 3 is give way more than you get. I guarantee you, you're going to get more out of it if you give more than you get. Number 4, have fun. Make sure you have a gin and tonic every once in a while. And number 5 is an influencer relationship is forever. The experience that you create, the one thing that you invite them to do is just the beginning. You can keep them going as long as you follow these 5 things. Now I'll put this up one more time, make sure that you have access to this, and I really appreciate you listening to How to Create an Army Influencer Network, and I'll be out here afterwards for any questions. Thank you so much. Thank you.
