My Takeaways from Andy Sernovitz's book "Word of Mouth Marketing"

I consider myself an avid social networker. I have an account on almost all of the usual social networking sites, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, and even a dusty account on Myspace. Of them all, I use Linkedin for my professional network and Facebook primarily for my more casual social networking. After reading Andy Sernovitz’s “Word of Mouth Marketing”, I see that I already follow some of the rules he outlines for being a successful social networker, but I also found areas where I could improve that I had not necessarily thought about before.

Sernovitz’s first rule is to “Be Interesting”. On facebook, I find it particularly interesting to look at the pictures and status updates my friends post to see how many comments or “likes” they received. I often try to post insightful, funny, and even controversial content to see how many comments or “likes” I can get myself. Although I had not previously viewed being interesting from the framework of being a successful social networking requirement, I have thought about it in sense of being an effective marketing strategy similar to Seth Godin’s assertion that one should strive to make their business or product “The Purple Cow” that sticks out and has staying power amongst all the other “cows” in the market. I have practiced it in the past so Sernovitz’s book gave me confirmation that I am on the right track. From now on I will actively think about how I am “being interesting” and try to maximize the effect in each with each post.

In his second rule, Sernovitz touches on something I had not thought about before, which is to “make the message easy to be shared and (to) find the ways to make it easy to spread”. The key point here is to make it EASY. It seemed like common sense after reading it, but for some reason rule two really jumped out at me. I suspect the ease with which something spread could be correlated with the rate at which its spread and the level of penetration it achieves in society before it becomes disinteresting. I’m taking this rule to heart and I will definitely be crafting posts that are “easy” and observing the outcome.

In addition to his rules for successful word of mouth marketing, Sernovitz also outlines the five “T”, one of which is the “talkers”. When I read this, I instantly thought back to another concept from Godin’s “The Purple Cow”, the “sneezer”. The “talker” and the “sneezer” are one and the same in that they are both avid users or reviewers of your products, services, blogs, etc., that spread the word (sometimes good, and sometimes bad) for you. They are often the experts, the connoisseurs, or the “go-tos”. Both Sernovitz and Godin emphasize the importance of utilizing them to your advantage and capitalizing on their social capital and ability to market for you.