Celebrities get a lot of attention, so it is not surprising that engaging “influencers” is a popular way to stimulate brands. But influencers are a short-term marketing tactic, not a long-term technique.

Influencers are the social mavens of the Internet who command large followings, whether because they are a celebrity or CEO, or because they’ve successfully turned their personal brand into a large following of fans.

So long as many people listen to what they have to say, brands pay influencers or give them products to convey their message to their followers.

An influencer will almost always have a greater reach than a true believer of a brand, but these influencers are like kindling, while brand advocates who believe in a product and are loyal to a brand serve as the large logs that sustain the fire and burn long.

In the short term, it often makes sense to engage influencers to build awareness. But much good comes from organically developing brand advocates, and this starts with a good contact center that keeps customers happy.

A recommendation from a trusted friend is up to 50 times more likely to trigger a purchase than a low-impact recommendation from a celebrity, according McKinsey. McKinsey also found that marketing-induced consumer-to-consumer word of mouth generates more than 2 times the sales of paid advertising.

Further, your army of advocates is basically a free, volunteer marketing army. Leverage them.

The value of this army is illustrated by a recent blog post by Sam Fiorella, a partner at Sensei Marketing.

Fiorella writes that he dreads his annual trip to Florida because of his family’s peanut allergy.

“Unlike Canadian airlines, Delta and other American airlines continue to serve peanuts on their fights, which is problematic for the growing number of people who go into anaphylactic shock from exposure to these small but potent legumes,” he wrote.

“I don’t complain when the gate agents’ computers don’t show the ‘peanut allergy alert’ that was part of our reservation,” he added. “I don’t complain when the gate agent fails to alert the flight attendants of the risk. It’s a common occurrence and so I’ve learned it’s best to simply go with the flow and remind every Delta employee as I see them.”

So when Fiorella boarded a Delta plane recently and saw a flight attendant scrubbing down his seat to help ensure there were no peanut oils on the seat, he of course was impressed.

And in this social networking age, what he did next is exactly why brands need to engage advocates: He tweeted his excitement at seeing a flight attendant going above and beyond to accommodate the peanut allergy issue.

“Our hyper-connected society has made customer experience the defining factor in the consumer’s perception of a business brand,” he noted in the blog post. “Creating social proof across blogs, social networks and search engines is a critical factor in their decision-making process.”

But we’ve already seen this power with Apple (News - Alert), a company that has created brand advocates so loyal that they kept the company afloat until Steve Jobs returned in the late 1990s to resurrect the now dominant technology firm.

Does your business have fanatical brand advocates? Why not?