I’m a big fan of Jerry Dankin, who strikes me as a non-ideological, data and evidence driven marketer, especially when it comes to digital marketing. But I think he’s missing a step when it comes to customer advocates, in his post, “The Missing First Step In Social ‘Brand Advocate’ Programs #DigitalSense.”

His point is that the elusive hunt for passionate brand advocates—who’ll promote you, represent you, gladly share your content for free, and all around take the case for your products and services to the greater public—is futile. Because such customers don’t actually exist in any significant numbers.

Further, loyal customers don’t really confer a competitive advantage. Research (especially by Byron Sharp) shows that loyalty is actually driven by market share, not superior customer experience. Even famously passionate customers like those of Apple and Harley Davidson are historically no more loyal than those of their large competitors.

I’ve read Sharp’s research, and it’s compelling, but not definitive—his research on loyalty among Apple customers is more than a decade old, for example. But in any case, here’s what Jerry is missing. While it’s often true that marshalling referrals and advocacy by organizing customers around “our brand” is misguided–it’s the rare brand that is that compelling in the first place, dismissing the concept of organizing customers into communities is a bridge too far.

Any company has a much better chance of organizing customers around the concept of affiliating, not with your brand, but with EACH OTHER. And organizing customers into communities in such ways can generate substantial business impact. Some of which includes getting them to, in effect, market and sell for you.

Examples abound. Last week, Salesforce brought some 170,000 or so customers, prospects, developers and others to Dreamforce in San Francisco—its annual customer conference, which is, in effect, a gigantic marketing and sales opportunity driven by conversations between customers and prospects. Salesforce’s own customer community now numbers around 1.6 million by the last count I saw, and its community members contribute in extraordinary ways to the firm’s success. For example:

• Salesforce’s product group is enlisting its community intensively in product development, with significant impact on the success of new product releases.
• Community participation itself leads to increased purchasing and retention.
• Pre-sale inclusion in communities helps establish relationships with buyers before they actually purchase.
• Post-sale participation significantly improves the customer experience.

Procter & Gamble’s legendary BeingGirl community has attracted hundreds of thousands of teenage girls to its website to discuss issues surrounding puberty and the changes of life they’re experiencing—and to subtly market their products and service to this audience, as well as generate a steady stream of content and videos that get picked up by the media—and by P&G’s larger market of teenage girls.

MIcrosoft’s customer community has proven critical in making its business model for expanding into markets in developing countries work. When the high costs of developing, servicing and marketing its software in regions where it doesn’t speak the language or understand the culture threatened to sink its business model, Microsoft nurtured local “MVP” (Most Valuable Professional) customers, who contributed amazing numbers: the MVPs saved the firm $100s of millions in services and support costs, and weeded out a high percentage of bugs in software releases before launch—both of which dramatically lowered the costs of product development and services. The MVPs were also exceptionally valuable conduits for marketing communications in new markets.

So while its true that customers may not be all that eager to organize around your brand in order to advocate for it, they are most certainly eager to affiliate with their peers–including your prospects–in order to help each other, as a community, become successful. And that fact is creating a lot of opportunities to create business changing impact on the business, not only in marketing and sales, but also in product development, services, support and more.