Advertising is the cost of being boring.
If your customers won’t talk about your stuff, you have to pay newspapers and TV shows to do it for you.
But when people trust you, they are willing to put their words on the line for you. Please them, inspire them, and they’ll bring their friends to you.
What are your other options? Bore them — and be forced to spend millions in advertising to get them interested. Annoy them — and watch your customers walk away, taking their friends with them.
Word of mouth marketing is more than just marketing.
It’s a simple new philosophy: Earn the respect and recommendation of your customers and they will do the rest. Treat people well and they will do your marketing for you, for free.
Word of mouth marketing is more than just marketing.
It’s about making your stuff and your company worth talking about. What can you do today that will make someone want to tell a friend about you?
Put this on the wall.
I’ve been preaching this important message since 2006. And now the amazing Hugh MacLeod has created one of his fantastic original works so you can hang it on your wall and never forget.
Get a fancy, fine art print by visiting Hugh’s art gallery. Show off your WOM pride by getting a shirt, hat, or poster at our WOM store.
Meet Hugh.
Hugh’s remarkable custom creation is the rally flag for our Word of Mouth Supergenius conference. Meet Hugh (and 30 other amazing marketers) live on July 20 in New York.
Our promise: Inspiring advice you can actually use to get people talking about you. This is a practical, you-can-do-it, blow-your-mind-with-results kind of day. Find out how.
Would anybody tell a friend?
It’s an important question.
It’s a question that raises the bar, that makes you better, that changes your company forever.
You only have two choices: Be so special that people want to talk about you — or buy advertising.
Be interesting — or be invisible.
Because being good is different than being worth talking about. Making a good product isn’t good enough anymore. Everyone does that these days.
Change the game.
Push yourself to ask: Are we being remarkable? Is this a purple cow? Are we awesome yet?
Challenge yourself to be worth talking about. Would someone look at your stuff, drop what they are doing, and say, “You’ve got to see this?” Are they inspired to tweet, share, like, friend, forward, or run down the hall and stick it in the face of a co-worker or family member?
If not — I compel you to make it WONDERFUL, OUTRAGEOUS, PURPLE, DELICIOUS, SMELLY, GOOFY, LIFE-SAVING, AMAZING, OR DEEPLY MEANINGFUL.
Put this on the wall.
This question should be taped to your computer monitor, stuck in your wallet, and hung in your conference room. And thanks to the amazing Hugh MacLeod — one of our brilliant authors speaking at Word of Mouth Supergenius — you can make it look awesome when you post it.
Get a fancy, fine art print by visiting Hugh’s art gallery. Show off your WOM pride by getting a shirt, hat, or poster at our WOM store.
Meet Hugh.
Hugh’s remarkable custom creation is the rally flag for our Word of Mouth Supergenius conference. Meet Hugh (and 30 other amazing marketers) live at July 20 in New York.
Our promise: Inspiring advice you can actually use to get people talking about you. This is a practical, you-can-do-it, blow-your-mind-with-results kind of day. Find out how.
I love that sentence. I read it in the fantastic book It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For: Why Every Extraordinary Business Is Driven by Purpose by GSD&M’s Roy Spence.
You know that I like to talk about advertising as the loser cousin of word of mouth. But Roy is the rare ad man who gets that there is a higher purpose to business.
Get your customers and coworkers to understand and believe in a genuine purpose. If you don’t have a purpose, get one. Or get a new job.
The advertising part is easy when you have something meaningful to say.
Welcome back to the Damn, I Wish I 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.]
Sure, extra cash lying around might seem like a distant, nice-to-have problem. But in reality, you probably have more opportunities for creative uses of extra funds than you may realize. What to do:
1> Give it to charity
2> Save it for the next sale
3> Start a movement
4> Check it out: Third graders on why Pluto is a planet
1> Give it to charity
Everybody hates ATM fees. Few things are more frustrating than paying some anonymous entity a gouging fee for accessing your own money. But New York’s Choose Change ATM venture is changing the experience. They still charge a fee, but in doing so, they also let customers instantly donate a dollar of the fee to a charity of their choice. It’s a small tweak to the process that changes everything: Instead of an annoying fee, customers get to tell their friends how they helped a worthy cause. The lesson: Change the story about your buying experience by giving customers the chance to help a great nonprofit.
Learn more: PSFK
2> Save it for the next sale
If you help your customers save some cash, odds are they’ll have more to spend the next time they need what you offer. James Ready Beer’s recent billboard campaign is based on this idea. The billboards offer special coupons at local businesses — and with the money they save, James Ready lets them know how much they’ve got left for beer. There’s nothing fancy about the program, but it’s a simple way to get other businesses involved and talking about James Ready with their mutual customers.
The lesson: If you can help your customers save a little extra cash, there’s a good chance they’ll have more of it the next time they’re shopping with you.
Learn more: Adfreak
3> Start a movement
It might surprise you how little it can take to do something big. In 2001, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard along with friend Craig Matthews started the 1% For The Planet program — where companies pledge 1% of their sales to earth-friendly preservation and restoration projects. In less than a decade, more than 700 businesses around the world have signed up. And not only do they donate, they also collaborate, forge business relationships, and share ideas and resources amongst their fellow members.
The lesson: When you bring a bunch of smart, generous thinkers together, a little contribution from everyone can add up to significant results
Learn more: OnePercentForThePlanet.or
4> Check it out: Third graders on why Pluto is a planet
Pluto’s demotion from its planet status upset loyal third-grade fans. A bunch of them sent passionate (and often hilarious) letters arguing for the reinstatement of Pluto, and in a recent post Discover Magazine featured some of the best.
Check it out: Discover Magazine
Someone sends an envelope
With a book of poems
About marginalia
And other stuff on the side
Promoting Google Sidewiki
But really showing us that
Great marketing is simple
And feeds the imagination
Marginalia – Billy Collins
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Read the full poem…
There should be a museum for advertising this bad.
(click for a close-up)
“… not one of the marketers we surveyed listed the amount of content forwarded by users as their most important metric,” according to Forrester’s “Three Steps to Measuring Social Media Marketing” research.
But that’s the one that matters.
When someone forwards your content, you get your message in front of a new prospect.
We call this “advertising” in traditional marketing and we pay dearly for each impression. We call this “lead generation” is search advertising, and we pay dearly for that too.
But word of mouth content sharing is more powerful than both of these — because it includes the personal endorsement of the sender. Something no advertiser can buy.
Content forwards are the most measurable word of mouth statistic, and they correlate nicely to existing lead/impression valuation metrics. It’s not the only thing to measure, but it will give you real data that makes traditional advertising types happy.
Procter & Gamble: Swan dive… into Old Spice’s remarkable social media campaign
Alberto Culver: Managing promotions on Facebook
UnitedHealth Group: Success in social recruiting
BlogWell: How Big Brands Use Social Media
