Andy Sernovitz's Damn, I Wish I'd Thought of That!

The 3 kinds of negative comments and reviews

May 18, 2012

When someone writes a bad review about you, they have very different motivations.

1. Malicious people. These are people who are out to get you. They want to pick a fight to promote themselves. They have a political agenda. They work for a competitor. They’re just nasty, mean, and like to fight. They may have a personal/emotional issue unrelated to you or your business. Also known as trolls.

Action: Don’t feed the trolls. Don’t respond. If you encourage them, they’ll escalate it. Don’t give them a voice or a platform. I advocate quietly moderating/deleting these comments, but many don’t agree with that position.

2. Angry customers. These are real customer who feel they have a legitimate complaint.

Action: Make them happy. Listen to them. Apologize. Resolve the problem. Ignore this kind of feedback and you’re screwed.

3. Off-target customers. Example: the college kid who complains that the $30/entree restaurant is overpriced or the advanced student who signs up for an entry level class and complains that it’s entry level.

Action: These are tough. Their complaints are caused by the fact that your product isn’t right for them. They may have made a bad choice, and they want to blame you. Their opinion isn’t necessarily relevant to your target customer. Suggestion: Gently comment in a way that explains who is right for the product.

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Newsletter #885: The “Do Something Different” Issue

May 17, 2012

[Welcome back to the Damn, I Wish I'd Thought of That! newsletter. This is text of the great issue all of our email subscribers just received. Sign yourself up using the handy form on the right.]

When you make something funky, goofy, smelly, odd, or unexpected, you can create something worth talking about. Here are a few ways smart marketers are doing it:

1. With their gift cards
2. With their staff
3. With their spokespeople
4. Check it out: Websites Like

1. With their gift cards

Why do all gift cards look same? At Austin’s STAG clothing retailer, theirs are wooden coins with their value stamped on them, wrapped in a pouch, and presented in a wooden box. They’re so cool, you almost don’t want to spend them. By making them so remarkable, STAG has turned the lazy gift card into a truly special present to give a friend.

The lesson: When was the last time you told someone about a gift card? How can you make yours worth sharing?

2. With their staff

More than anything you do, the people you hire are your biggest opportunity to do remarkable things and be unique. At Nashville’s The Cookery, owner Brett Swayn is taking full advantage of this by hiring the homeless. Through his nonprofit restaurant, he’s hiring and training them in culinary skills — skills they can use to go on to get other jobs in the industry. And in doing so, he’s also creating a one-of-a-kind restaurant experience that lots of people are talking about.

The lesson: What’s unique about your culture and the people you hire? How can you help them get customers talking about you?

Learn more: WSMV.com

3. With their spokespeople

A lot of brands drop heaps of money on big-name spokespeople, but few are as memorable as the trees German nonprofit Oro Verde used. That’s right, trees (which turned out to the perfect spokespeople for their rainforest-saving project) were given signs that said things like, “Need money for my family in the rainforest.” The super-simple program gave the 10-employee Oro Verde an instant army of volunteers collecting donations around Germany — and doing it around the clock.

The lesson: Instead of telling the story for your fans, customers, or people in need, what could you do differently to help them say it themselves?

Learn more: CreativeCriminals.com

4. Check it out: Websites Like

Want to find more sites like the sites you like? Use this simple search engine to quickly discover new places on the web like the ones you already
love so much.

Check it out: Websites Like

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You put the Word of Mouth Marketing book on the bestseller list

May 16, 2012

My book, Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking, had a big week last week:

#6 New York Times Bestseller
#1 Amazon Business Bestseller
#1 USA TODAY Money Bestseller
#1 B&N.com Bestseller

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

It’s a nice compliment for the book, but it says something bigger about the word of mouth movement. This is more than marketing, it’s a philosophy that spans all businesses and all industries.

This is about earning the respect and recommendation of our customers. It’s about building a trust, loyalty, and love that will carry the good guys at the good businesses through good times and bad.

And hey, it’s also a lot more fun too.

So to all of you who pre-ordered, blogged about the book, and shared it online and off — thank you for helping to make this word of mouth movement possible.

P.S. The book is available at Amazon, B&N.com, and in bookstores everywhere. And we had such a strong response from our workbook giveaway, we’ve decided to extend it. Just send your receipt for the book to editor@wordofmouth.org and we’ll send you our 16-page Word of Mouth Workbook (PDF).

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A name with a bug, part 2

May 16, 2012

Last week we had an amazing conference called the Word of Mouth Crash Course. It was a fantastic day, the third in a series.

But it wasn’t as big as we expected, and we discovered a critical reason why:

We changed the name of the event — it used to be called Word of Mouth Supergenius — without any testing.

Here’s what happened — people thought that it was an online course instead of a live conference. The word course implied online training to many people. We also failed to use certain trigger words that indicate that something is a live event: Summit, Expo, Conference, Boot Camp, etc.

Many of our most loyal fans had no idea that there was a conference, even though they definitely saw the promotion. It just didn’t connect somehow. They were disappointed when they found out later, and we lost a huge opportunity to serve them.

Lesson: Test, test, test any new name. You’re not going to know how it works until you start using it.

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A name with a bug, part 1

May 15, 2012

We were going to launch a site called WordofMouthMarketing.org.

During the few months we were planning it, everyone kept saying WordofMouth.org — they kept dropping the word marketing. Even employees and contractors who were working on the project.

That was a problem. If our own team couldn’t get the name right, how would our customers find the site?

So we killed the project until we could get ownership of WordofMouth.org.

It was incredibly lucky that we caught the problem before we launched. We would have sent all of our confused customers to someone else’s site.

Lesson: Test, test, test any new name. You’re not going to know how it works until you start using it.

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Give them an experience they’ll never stop talking about — and a reminder to re-start the talk

May 14, 2012

The Cameron Park Zoo in Waco, TX invites school and scout groups to spend the night camping in the zoo. It’s an amazing behind-the-scenes experience. More that just the camping, which is remarkable, you also get to feed a giraffe, pet a rhino, and hold a giant cockroach. Just as important: Every kid gets a [...]

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What’s the simplest thing you can do to create a remarkable experience?

May 13, 2012

Subway gave us a kids meal in this nice reusable bag. We talked about it, we told people, we kept it, and we tell more people when our daughter carries it around. Probably cost them 30 cents — which is about 10 cents more than a throw-away box. But the conversations it starts are priceless [...]

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35 ways to improve sales

May 12, 2012

Classic advice from e-commerce master Sam Decker, now CEO of Mass Relevance, originally published in 2004 and still relevant: Can I find that item I’m looking for? Tune your internal search engine to match top search terms to product pages. Put top sellers on home page. People buy on impulse or recommendation. Match the landing [...]

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