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