Jason here - I just finished reading Andy Sernovitz’s book, Word of Mouth Marketing. It’s a great read, and I would have enjoyed reading it even if it weren’t required for class! I scrawled down a bunch of notes, but here are the three biggest takeaways for me, as someone who works for a fairly large company that just hopped aboard the Social Media Train:
- Savings from Public Participation.
Sometimes it’s a challenge for me to quantify to others the savings and importance of social media and other forms of word of mouth marketing. The section on Putting Value on Your Word of Mouth gave me some great ideas to help better quantify those values in the future. Being able to articulate that solving customer service problems on a customer website saves customer service costs is a powerful idea I can take to management.
- Honeymooners/ new customers can be the most powerful word of mouth advocates for your company.
I’ve usually avoided recruiting Talkers who are new to my company with the logic that they’re still not familiar with the services and products of my company, and that they’re a bit of an unknown quantity. This bit reminds me how excited new customers are about discovering something great – I’ll keep this in mind when I’m doing more Word of Mouth brainstorming.
- It’s Less Risky Thank You Think
Word of Mouth Marketing means you give up a lot of control on your marketing message. It’s definitely still a bit scary for the business I work in, particularly with the amount of time and energy we put into shaping our company image. But Andy Sernovitz points out that your WoM bloggers could be doing something inappropriate, stupid, anyway, through any number of mediums. Delete it, apologize, and move on.
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