I am a huge believer in the marketing power of word of mouth. However, I have still not managed to wrap my head around the actual practice of World of Mouth Marketing. I think I must be missing something. I have been to a conference on the subject (Hell, I even spoke at it), I have signed up on both BzzAgent and The Influencers to try and figure it out from the ground up and still I am feeling a bit mystified by it all.

With BzzAgent I signed up for a program with Sonicaire, I soon got a package in the mail with a new electric toothbrush (which is great, my old Oral B electric toothbrush broke about a month ago), some discount coupons, and a Code of Conduct book from BzzAgent. I haven’t really spoken to anyone about it yet, but I must say that I actually like my new electric toothbrush better than my old one (so I guess that by blogging this I am now engaged in the act of WOM marketing).

I totally understand the product seeding aspect (get the product in the hands of people who talk), but there must be more to it than that.
Here is what I do understand:

• Word of mouth marketing works best around products that are best in class, unique, define a new category or otherwise remarkable.
• WOM companies attempt to profile people who are connected, influential and relevant to the desired audience.
• WOM companies (at least the ones I looked into) have a code of ethics that requires honesty, disclosure, opt-in, and no requirements to spread the meme.

Andy Sernovitz, the CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) at his presentation at Word Up said that Word of Mouth Marketing is:

1. Giving people a reason to talk about YOUR stuff.
2. Making it easier for that conversation to take place.

I guess the strategy is really as simple as that and the tactics underneath just simply fall out those two points. So Viral, Community engagement, grassroots, evangelism, referral programs, cause marketing, along with blogger and podcaster outreach, could all be considered the tactical elements of a WOM plan.

I think I have been looking at this in the wrong way. Perhaps WOM marketing really isn’t a new bag of tricks, but is simply a “new bag” for holding a bunch or our existing tricks.

Can anyone else add anything here?

Note: I am not paid for my participation in either BzzAgent or The Influencers, but both offer some kind of points based reward program, niether of which I have participated in.

This entry was posted on November 20, 2006 at 11:49 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Random Word of Mouth by dwalker 1 Comment