Top 10 Word-of-Mouth Marketing Mistakes

As Word-of-Mouth Marketing is receiving more recognition, it is beginning to move beyond the Innovators into the Early Adopters portion of the bell-shaped Adoption Cycle. This is good news as it is a sign of less-innovative organizations recognizing the need to best understand and leverage the power of Word-of-Mouth.
However, based on our recent experience many of these Early Adopters lack the Innovation strategy, process and mindset of the Innovators and are approaching Word-of-Mouth from a purely marketing and tactical perspective. Essentially, they share a mindset of wanting to be told which marketing tactic will be the best at getting individuals to talk about them and running with it.
This is a dangerous approach for many reasons including: Word-of-Mouth is owned by your influencers and overt, half-baked attempts to manipulate it will result in Negative Word-of-Mouth. Word-of-Mouth is a process to be managed, ideally through an Innovation Framework to maximize it through 1. Investigating Needs, 2. Creating Ideas and 3. Evaluating Solutions before 4. Activating Plans.
As a result we are preparing a Management Brief entitled, "The Top 10 Word-of-Mouth Marketing Mistakes - and How to Avoid Them" to prevent organizations from messing up the method responsible for 20%-100% of their sales and customers. Please email us if you would like to be one of the first ones to receive it.

Word-of-Mouth FeedBlitz

Take part in our new Word-of-Mouth Feeding Frenzy by subscribing (at the very bottom - Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)) using FeedBlitz by entering your email address. You will receive my new blog posts via email so that you get all of my Word-of-Mouth tasty thoughts, announcements and updates right off the grill.

Inspiring vs. Motivating Word-of-Mouth

As Word-of-Mouth Marketing receives more attention as the most powerful hidden marketing medium, it is not to suprising to see the number of marketing consultants and agencies jumping on the bandwagon, ready to launch Word-of-Mouth Marketing Campaigns for their clients. What IS suprising is how organizations are falling for this, without thinking through the diference between Inspiring Word-of-Mouth and Motivating Word-of-Mouth.
What's the difference?
Well, organizations that Inpsire Word-of-Mouth place meeting and exceeding customer expecations first and foremost, while companies that Motivate Word-of-Mouth put the cart before the horse and expect Word-of-Mouth to simply take off if they throw enough Word-of-Mouth Marketing vehicles at the market (The Perfume on a Pig Syndrome).
Well, the timing could not be better for Customer Expectation Innovation (tm), a method measuring customer expectations so that they may be efficiently, effectively and consistently met - creating the greatest possible amount of organic Word-of-Mouth and Customer Activism. More on our newly developed breakthrough Customer Expectation Innovation (tm) coming soon...

Word-of-Mouth Linking Customer Feedback to Business Results

Wow. My head has finally stopped throbbing (I mean this as a compliment) from IIR's Linking Customer Feedback to Business Results Conference a little over a week ago, were I was priviledged to present my topic Word-of-Mouth Marketing Innovation: Elevating Customer Feedback for Exponential Growth. Kudos to IIR for planning and assembling some of the top corporate speakers on the subject and delivering a knowledge-packed 3 day program.

Some Big Takeaways were:
1. How serious these leading organizations were in strategically capturing, classifying, analyzing, linking and acting on customer feedback as they understood the strong correlations to customer loyalty and revenue.
2. The many different ways these organizations apply customer feedback to help drive their business, and from a new school "Sense & Respond" perspective rather than the old school "Command & Control" perspective.

Some Big Surprises were:
1. How these organizations weren't including or integrating customer Word-of-Mouth into their Voice-of-the-Customer or Customer Feedback initiatives, although when I asked they indicated that it was something were considering doing in the future.
2. The many voiced issues with Fred Reichheld's Net Promoter Score. We shared several of these concerns which led to us developing our Recommendation Intention System (tm) and Buzz Influence Power Score (tm) as a more comprehensive solution to measuring Word-of-Mouth.

I had a well-attended session with great feedback. Jennifer Hurley, Director, Commercial Analysis of GlazoSmithKline emailed me afterwards commenting, "I really enjoyed your presentation - very energetic and engaging." Thank you Jennifer, I appreciate your feedback and your spreading the word. For a limited time, I will email the slides of my presentation upon request when you click here and help spread the word about UNLEASH Buzz to your colleagues.

"Customer Constitutional Rights" on President's Day

I think that today being President's Day that we should also consider our "Customer Constitutional Rights" and the gaps that organizations and their Presidents have in addressing our Customer Rights as one of the simplest and most powerful ways of looking and what causes Word-of-Mouth and Buzz. What do you think?

The Biggest Event in Customer Feedback and Word-of-Mouth Marketing Innovation History Pre-Announcement

Yes, you read that right. On March 1st, I will Pre-Announce The Biggest Event in Customer Feedback and Word-of-Mouth Marketing Innovation History at Institute for International Research’s Linking Customer Feedback to Business Results Conference http://www.iirusa.com/customer where I will be speaking on the topic, Word-of-Mouth Marketing Innovation: Elevating Customer Feedback for Exponential Growth.
I can not go into any further of "The Biggest Event" details just yet except to say it will involve millions of people, a Website, hundreds of organizations and a Cause of Causes. The suspense is building...

Linking Customer Feedback to Business Results

I am thankful and honored to be requested to speak at IIR's Linking Customer Feedback to Business Results Conference. This is the industry's elite event focused on linking customer satisfaction and feedback to customer results and profitability, and will be attended by nearly 200 D/VP/C level executives from entrepreneurial to Fortune 500 organizations. It is the only event unveiling the blueprint for researchers, marketers and customer strategists to translate data into action.

In my session, Word-of-Mouth Marketing Innovation:
Elevating Customer Feedback for Exponential Growth, I present Word-of-Mouth as the most powerful form of customer feedback and Word-of-Mouth Marketing Innovation as the top method to optimize customer feedback. I will be presenting detailed information behind our The Word-of-Mouth Marketing Innovation Idea Generation Case Study to show how we created 2,227 Word-of-Mouth Ideas responsible for generating $52 million in revenue.

The Linking Customer Feedback to Business Results Conference Conference runs from Monday, February 27th through Wednesday, March 1st, 2006 when I speak. See http://www.iirusa.com/customer/ for details. I look forward to seeing you there.

For any unfamiliar, the Institute of International Research www.iirusa.com is the world’s leading provider of business information. I strongly urge you to visit their Website and attend a conference that addresses your top business issues for powerful knowledge and results.

Force-Feed Marketing

The new Word-of-Mouth Marketing "experts" seem to completely overlook the powerful discovery of real honest-to-goodness real ORGANIC Word-of-Mouth obtained through Qualitative Ethnographic Market Research. Instead, they pontificate that marketers first need to "give them a topic that they are willing to talk about." Excuse me, but you really need to first hear the actual words people are saying about you to others - otherwise you're still guilty of practicing traditional Force-Feed Marketing.
This force-feeding Word-of-Mouth approach is typical of traditional marketers who have stumbled onto Word-of-Mouth Marketing and approach it the same way they approach their traditional ego-based marketing efforts. Without the re-thinking and training that Word-of-Mouth Marketing Innovation provideds, these force-feeders could ruin Word-of-Mouth Marketing for us all - similar to what has happened with e-mail marketing.

What is Word-of-Mouth Marketing?

Wow, Word-of-Mouth Marketing is starting to receive it's long over-do recognition. Well, it's about time. Unfortunately, all of pundits writing about Word-of-Mouth Marketing remind me of The Describing the Elephant Story: ""It's like a wall!" "No, it's like a snake!" "No, it's like a spear!" "No, it's like a tree!" "No, it's like a rope!" "No, it's like a fan!" http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla65/papers/089-104e.htm
Everyone's talking about Word-of-Mouth Marketing like they're "experts", but they continually confuse "Word-of-Mouth" with "Word-of-Mouth Marketing" and it usually gets worse from there. One thing I learned from Quality training was that if you can't accurately define something, you sure aren't going to accurately manage it and grow it.

Here are the Word-of-Mouth and Word-of-Mouth Marketing definitions from my new 320,000 copy Best-selling book, Walking with the Wise Entrepreneur on sale here: http://www.unleashbuzz.com/walking_with_the_wise_entrepreneur.htm I'd be happy to personally sign your copy.

"As Word-of-Mouth Marketing is a new discipline, there is a significant amount of confusion on precise definitions. And you can’t manage and improve that which you can’t define. To help companies better define, investigate create, evaluate, and activate Word-of-Mouth Marketing, we have developed the following standard definitions:

• Word-of-Mouth: Any independent person-to-person communication about a product, service, experience or entity.
• Word-of-Mouth Marketing: Any face-to-face or oral marketing activity that stimulates person-to-person communication about a product, service, experience or entity.
• Word-of-Mouth Marketing Innovation™: The Word-of-Mouth Marketing strategy, methodology and process for continually investigating, creating, evaluating and activating new and valuable Word-of-Mouth ideas.
• Viral Marketing: Any online, pass-along or non-oral marketing activity that stimulates person-to-person communication about a product, service, experience or entity.
• Buzz: The sum of all person-to-person communication, the total positive Word-of-Mouth minus the total negative Word-of-Mouth, about a product, service, experience or entity at any given point in time.
• Buzz Marketing: Any offline or online person cluster or network-focused marketing activity that stimulates person-to-person communication about a product, service, experience or entity.

I have also included more definitions for you here: http://www.unleashbuzz.com/word-of-mouth_marketing_innovation.htm