In reading Andy Sernovitz’s book “Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking”, it struck me that word-of-mouth marketing is instrumental to building communities, both around brands and in a wider sense.
The elements of a word-of-mouth marketing effort include:
- Talkers – Who will their friends about you?
- Topics – What will they talk about?
- Tools – How can you help the message travel?
- Taking part – How can you join the conversation?
- Tracking – What are people saying about you?
Every element will help you build a community around your company and offering. All the rules Andy outlines for word-of-mouth marketing – be interesting, make people happy, earn trust and respect, and make it easy – correspond to some of the rules of creating a sense of community.
Talkers are your community’s leaders. Making your talkers feel special by receiving special privileges for their talkativeness – sneak peak of a new product, public recognition, invitations to talkers-only parties – will help create the core of your community, a special circle of insiders with a connection to unique stuff or information. Connect with your talkers on that deeper level, and through them you’ll make a connection to their own circles. Happy customers are probably the best talkers to get your word of mouth rolling.
Topics are what your talkers are talking about and what binds them together as a community. Participating in the discussion creates a sense of belonging to a group that’s talking; we all prefer to be members of an in-group over being left out. To identify or develop a simple, organic, portable, and unexpected topic, follow the rules in Heath brothers’ quick read “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die“. Customer service and partnering with a nonprofit are two major ways to give people something to talk about and to make your campaign triple-bottom line friendly.
Tools to help your word-of-mouth going is the infrastructure that binds your community together. Online tools (email, audio/video, forums, social networks, blogs) and tangibles (samples, swag, fun extras) people can pass along are excellent conversation starters as well as platforms for conversations to take place and reference points for your community to share a connection.
Taking part means you’re not just your community’s manager or director, you’re an active participant in conversations about you and in the community. You may be the one starting conversations, but by the time those conversations have spread (hopefully like wildfire) through the community, you must participate to keep the conversation going. Being available and making people happy, in other words fulfilling their needs, rather than selling, is the point here.
Tracking will give you a sense of who in your community is talking (talkers), what your community is talking about (topics), and how and where the conversations are taking place (tools). Asking people for feedback will loop your effort back to making them feel special enough to want to keep talking about you, reinforcing your community. Measure the results of your word-of-mouth marketing campaign to see how it affects its size and strength as well as your sales.
The word-of-mouth marketing framework offers fantastic opportunities for small businesses to build their brands and communities on a shoestring. The book offers many cost-effective tools and tactics you can implement today!
