Book Preview: Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz

My buddy Andy Sernovitz, the CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, is coming out with a new book called, duh, Word of Mouth Marketing.

I highly recommend this book because it was so practical, tactical, and hysterical. Here are the ten ideas, stories, and recommendations from the book that I liked the most:

1. Companies could hire a customer service rep to cruise the Internet looking for kudos and complaints. When the rep finds kudos, he should thank the person. When the rep finds complaints, he should get it fixed. This is such a simple, effective idea—I doubt, therefore, that many companies will do it! :-)

2. Commerce Bank has a free change-counting machine in its branches that anyone can use. This beats the hell out of the machines in markets that take 7%.

3. A study by the Verde Group showed that people who heard about a bad shopping experience are less likely to go to the same store than the person who actually had the bad experience.

4. The most powerful word-of-mouth advocates might be the customers who have only done business with you once so far. They are the most excited; repeat customers are probably accustomed to the great product/service and therefore, ironically, less likely to talk about it.

5. The Prostate Net, a not-for-profit educational organization, contacted 50,000 barbers to talk to their clients about prostate cancer detection and prevention.

6. Incentives and rewards are likely to reduce word-of-mouth advertising because motivation becomes suspect. You can’t “buy” word-of-mouth advertising.

7. The Wynn Las Vegas resort gave free rooms to cabbies to generate word-of-mouth advertising via this very influential part of the transportation infrastructure.

8. Henkel Consumer Adhesives, the manufacturer of Duck Tape, sponsors a contest for college scholarships called “Stuck at Prom.” Is this funny or what?

9. A word-of-mouth campaign, brought back “Family Guy” from the dead (that is, cancellation). How many tv series have you heard of coming back from the dead?

10. Zappos has a one-year, no questions asked return policy for shoes. This boggles my mind although I’ve never heard of any woman return anything to Zappos.

Someday I hope to read about your kick-butt ideas in a book like this. Until then, your word-of-mouth marketing efforts will surely get a boost if you read this book.

---

Comments

[Mir]

Hey, I've actually returned things to Zappos (sometimes stuff doesn't fit, ya know). Not only does their policy cause us shoehounds to buzz amongst ourselves, their price-matching policies mean that I hardly ever order shoes from anywhere else; I'd much rather go where the great customer service is. I wish more online retailers did the Zappos model!

[JC]

We actually go a step further. We read our sites' server and error logs and contact people directly who had issues with things like registration, making listings and so forth.

Many lot of users will simply leave the website after a failure, rather than inform tech support.

So, we try to build the error reporting system with enough information tracking that we can (hopefully) identify the email address of the person whose registration effort failed for whatever reason (most common reason: couldn't handle the password length requirements).

We then email the person and offer to do whatever is necessary to remedy the problem.

It's something to consider doing if you have the access to the logs and code.

[Jack]

Example number 11: Get Guy to love your product and have him post a rave review on his website.

*************

This can also work!

Guy

[Harry Chong]

Word of mouth marketing works so well simply because it has credibility, like Toyota.

[Jason Sanzone]

Good stuff, I'm very excited about reading this one.

[John Dodds]

Interesting insights but I wonder if the act of praising any of the examples, (let's say, the Wynn resort/cabbie campaign) would undermine it because we the public now have an awareness of rewards being involved and according to point 6 will react against this? Perhaps this mean that the most successful word of mouth campaigns are not actually campaigns at all but just excellent performance which inspires word of mouth.

P.S. I can't help but smile at the irony of Word of Mouth Marketing having an association!

[//aSaM//]

Talking about word of mouth marketing, have you seen all the funky stuff at http://mydreamapp.com - it's great, so much energy and enthusiasm and young talant, it's like another breath of fresh air in the Mac community, it's how the original revolution started, but this is just exploding.

Groovy baby :)