Here are some things I learned from reading Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz.
Participation in the conversation is now mandatory. With the advent of the internet and proliferation of instant communication, it’s imperative that companies join the conversations posted online by their customers. It’s easy for negative stories about your company to go viral (think of the story about United Airlines breaking that guy’s guitar), so companies need to stay on top of what their customers are saying and react quickly to any negative experience. On the other hand, offering thanks to people who say good things about your company can further the goodwill with that customer and lead to more word of mouth conversations.
Word of mouth marketing isn’t just one strategy in the marketing playbook, it encompasses all marketing strategies. WoMM can be created from advertisements, products, customer service experiences, promotions, sales, etc. It’s really similar to the concept of the “brand”. Both are difficult to quantify and both are products of many areas of the company (marketing, customer service, product management, etc). In a sense WoMM is the customer to customer interaction of how people feel about your company’s brand, so it’s important for companies to take a holistic view of all of their operations and determine how they might affect this conversation.
Tracking WoMM efforts is a huge and critical opportunity moving into the future. This was barely touched on in the book because this topic is a little too advanced for what this book was designed to do, but I believe this will be the area of greatest growth within WoMM. Gathering and analyzing data is becoming a big trend in business today and as techniques to gather WoMM data mature, more and more information will be available for companies to use to hone their marketing efforts. Being able to more accurately quantify WoMM programs will lead to better marketing campaigns overall and hopefully better products and services.
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