1. Word of Mouth and Small Business

    Thursday, 18 Jun 2009 No Comments Posted by:

    Having successfully made it to Seattle, I’ve been caught up in the haze of work, two year old, and unpacking. What better time to point out a guest post I wrote a while back over at the GasPedal blog. Since it’s summer, it’s time to talk smoothies.

    —

    The medical community might tell you that blended fruit and ice don’t actually contain any addictive qualities, but I’m not convinced. I’m physically unable to pass a new smoothie shop without stopping to sample the wares. I can’t see “smoothie” on a menu without feeling a longing.

    Last week I downloaded the Yelp.com iPhone application and tested it by… you guessed it… looking for local smoothie shops. To my extreme pleasure, I discovered Icey (http://www.yelp.com/biz/icey-garland), a new shop that had just opened down the street. Within hours, I was inside ordering my first smoothie. (It was far and away the best I’d ever had)

    As I walked out of the store, tasty smoothie in hand, I found myself wanting to do whatever I could to ensure their ongoing existence. Horror stories abound about the failure rate of small businesses, and this simply can’t happen to Icey. Where would I get my fix if they close the doors??

    If they ask (I’ve already volunteered), here are 6 points I’d share with them about how they can build Word of Mouth for their incredible business.

    Tell a story

    Icey isn’t just a “smoothie shop”. They’ve created a menu that includes Bubble Teas, Sweet Ices, and a range of non-traditional items. Why this menu? What makes it unique? Give me something I can learn, then in turn share with others to show how smart I am. For instance: “Sure Icey doesn’t have the boost powders like Jamba Juice, but that’s because they offer such fresh ingredients, they don’t need to”. (I’m making that up, but you get the point.

    Help me decide

    When I see a new menu item that I don’t understand, I’m more inclined to revert to my old standby than I am to try something new. With pictures, descriptions, samples, and encouragement, help me branch out. When I have a teacher, the shop is my classroom. And a classroom inherently encourages frequency.

    Drive repeat visits through awards

    A friend of mine has been on a quest to achieve the coveted “Gold Plate” status at a local pub, the Flying Saucer (http://www.beerknurd.com/). You see, the pub has hundreds of beers available, and when you’ve tried all of them, you are immortalized by having your name put on a gold plate, hung on the wall. Not only has this program given my buddy a reason to come back regularly, it’s also given him an incredible knowledge of beer. The more Icey introduces their customers to the full menu, the more likely they are to come back. And the more knowledge these customers have, the more likely they are to bring a friend with them that they can show off their in-depth knowledge to.

    Do something to stand out

    When the Icey staff hands over your hand crafted drink, it comes in a plastic cup with a sealed sheet of plastic on top. So sealed, in fact, you can turn the cup upside down without the slightest risk of spilling. The way you actually consume this drink is to punch a hole in the top with an oversized straw. If the drink really is “unspillable”, why not hand over the drink upside down?

    Brand everything

    While I was walking around the shopping center, tasty drink in hand, I noticed that the cups didn’t have any sort of logo on them. How were people to know that this delicious looking concoction was created by Icey and not Starbucks?

    Have a web site

    This may be a bit obvious, but build a basic Web presence with your location info, a bit of your story, and an overview of what you serve. This doesn’t need to a complex, data heavy site, but it should look great. The primary goal is creating a destination that can be emailed, blogged, and generally shared. (You’ll notice I had to use the Yelp.com link to get you to them in the beginning of this post) The incredible cupcake bakery, Sprinkles (http://www.sprinklescupcakes.com/) launched with an incredibly lightweight site, which even helped them create an ambience of exclusivity.

    —

    UPDATE: One more point I’ll make that wasn’t part of the of the original post…

    Listen to experienced professionals

    Seriously, this seems basic but when you’re getting freebie consulting from high paid, highly experienced professionals you might want to considering following their advice. I’ve been talking to a number of small business owners locally since the original post went up about their marketing efforts. The one piece of advice I’ve consistently give each and every one of these small business owners is simple: Buy Word of Mouth Marketing , read it, and then we’ll sit down and talk about how to implement the principles of the book.

    You know how many have both bought and read the book? None.

    As a small business owner, I know how difficult it can be. I understand how many hours go into running the business. But if you’re not always, and I mean ALWAYS thinking about how to drive your business to the next level, you’re failing. There’s are plenty of reasons a vast majority of small businesses fail, and lack of forward planning is big one.

  2. Success by 1000 Paper Cuts

    Thursday, 2 Apr 2009 Comments Off Posted by:

    As many of you know, I do quite a bit of public speaking. Most of my engagements focus on social engagement and customer experience, specifically helping business people figure out how to better connect with their customers, fans, and clients.

    There are a few questions I can always count on getting during or after the session:

    “But what if nobody in the organization is empowered to make the changes you mention? Who’s job is this change you refer to?”

    Out of all the frequently asked questions in my sessions, this is that one that gets me the most amped up, ready to pounce. My reaction is normally summed up by a quote overheard in the hallways of SXSW 2009 a few weeks ago:

    “If you know something’s wrong…fucking fix it!”

    We’ve come to see that fear dictates many of our external facing business decisions, giving rise to massive Terms of Service agreements, NDAs, massive Legal team power, and other protectionist tactics. But it continues to surprise me how afraid we are of our bosses, colleagues, and management teams.

    Whose job is it to fix things we recognize as problematic? Ours! It is every employee’s obligation to stand up for their customers, to be on the look out for ways to improve the company.

    When I started at LEGO, I was a Senior Web Producer who saw instantly that the Adult Enthusiast community was being completely overlooked. I took on a few extra hours a week to help them. Those few hours turn into an official part of my job, and then my entire job. I didn’t ask for permission, I just started fixing it.

    Surprisingly, especially for me, nobody told me to mind my own business or focus on my “real job”. They started seeing results I was producing and asked me to take on more and more and more of those duties.

    The trick to making this process work is to use a tactic I call Success by 1000 Paper Cuts. The idea is simple: start with the biggest element of activity that you can do without having to get full blown approvals, budget sign offs, or legal approvals. A single paper cut barely gets notice, but enough of them and you can cut off a limb.

    Start small, create success, share results.

    The repeat over and over again until you have a collection of successes that represent a landmark. Bundle that landmark up and show it off. Use the landmark to get permission to bigger and radical and perhaps more expensive projects, but only by the new increment.

    Start just a bit bigger, create success, share results.

    So what are the small things you’re going to do today to impact change and improve your customer experience?

  3. Why is “Why?” still the most under appreciated question?

    Saturday, 8 Nov 2008 6 Comments Posted by:

    Questions, in life or in business, fall into the following buckets:

    • Who?
    • What?
    • When?
    • Where?
    • Why?
    • How?

    I’ve spent a great deal of time defining my own as well as evaluating and using other methodologies for strategic planning.  For the record, I’m a fan of scenario planning.  If interested, here’s a pretty good read:  Profiting from Uncertainty.  Having said that, strategic planning methodology can be a lot like ice cream…some people just like different flavors and at times a different flavor is just a better choice.  If you’d like to explore methods, there’s another pretty good reference book called Strategy Safari.

    Most of work I do today involves strategic planning around Customer Experience, Social Media, Communities, Influencer Programs and Voice of the Customer initiatives.  When it comes to social I often use the following planning framework to help structure a project:

    image

    And in case it’s not obvious, if you use this framework, start with Purpose.  I’m in the process of documenting a playbook based on this approach which hopefully I can share at a later date as the above really isn’t as detailed as it needs to be, but perhaps a reasonable starting point. 

    Methodology forces you to ask and answer a lot of questions, but throwing all thoughts of methodology to the side, it has struck me in my last 6 months of consulting projects the imbalance in basic questions. 

    Most of the focus on questions are the following:  What, When and How?

    • What are we going to do? 
    • What technologies are we going to use?
    • When are we going to launch?
    • When is it going to be done? 
    • How are we going to measure it? 

    And far too little time focused on these questions:  Why, Who and Where?  (Especially Why!!)

    • Why are we doing this? 
    • What problem are we trying to solve (ok, ok, that’s a "what" – but it is really a why!)
    • Who is our audience?
    • Who are the internal stakeholders?
    • Where are we going to focus our efforts?

    So, maybe the old questions we learned in grade school could be a pretty good v1 planning template.  The irony is that the biggest question I get asked is always around metrics and ROI.  They are critical points, but until you answer the question of why (and gain organizational agreement to that answer!!) you can’t answer the ROI question with any specifics.  I can give you a list of metrics to attach to a social site or community, but I can’t tell you if those metrics matter unless I know what the business objective is.

    So, maybe some primer questions to start the list, I’m sure you can think of more to add.

    • Why:  Define you purpose
    • What:  What are the business objectives
    • Who:  Define your audience and/or segmentation
    • How:  How do our users do it today (whatever you define it is in the why question)
    • Where:  Inventory where users are going today
    • What:  What are the interactions we need to enable to improve the experience
    • What:  What systems and processes do we need to integrate with
    • What:  What technology and tools are necessary to support this effort
    • How:  How will we know it’s succeeding
    • What:  What are the success measures
    • Who:  Who are the internal stakeholders
    • Who:  Who are the key people and organizations we need to get engaged / participating?
    • What:  What are our policies and/or guidelines to govern internal participation?
    • When:  Define the project timeline
    • How:  How much is it going to cost (to execute AND sustain)

    And maybe two last points.  You’ve got to re-validate that why question again and again and ensure you are continuously educating everyone involved on the answer – otherwise you’ll stray.  And lastly, friends don’t let friends plan without execution or execute without plans:) 

    Sean

  4. Why is "Why?" still the most under appreciated question?

    Saturday, 8 Nov 2008 6 Comments Posted by:

    Questions, in life or in business, fall into the following buckets:

    • Who?
    • What?
    • When?
    • Where?
    • Why?
    • How?

    I’ve spent a great deal of time defining my own as well as evaluating and using other methodologies for strategic planning.  For the record, I’m a fan of scenario planning.  If interested, here’s a pretty good read:  Profiting from Uncertainty.  Having said that, strategic planning methodology can be a lot like ice cream…some people just like different flavors and at times a different flavor is just a better choice.  If you’d like to explore methods, there’s another pretty good reference book called Strategy Safari.

    Most of work I do today involves strategic planning around Customer Experience, Social Media, Communities, Influencer Programs and Voice of the Customer initiatives.  When it comes to social I often use the following planning framework to help structure a project:

    image

    And in case it’s not obvious, if you use this framework, start with Purpose.  I’m in the process of documenting a playbook based on this approach which hopefully I can share at a later date as the above really isn’t as detailed as it needs to be, but perhaps a reasonable starting point. 

    Methodology forces you to ask and answer a lot of questions, but throwing all thoughts of methodology to the side, it has struck me in my last 6 months of consulting projects the imbalance in basic questions. 

    Most of the focus on questions are the following:  What, When and How?

    • What are we going to do? 
    • What technologies are we going to use?
    • When are we going to launch?
    • When is it going to be done? 
    • How are we going to measure it? 

    And far too little time focused on these questions:  Why, Who and Where?  (Especially Why!!)

    • Why are we doing this? 
    • What problem are we trying to solve (ok, ok, that’s a "what" – but it is really a why!)
    • Who is our audience?
    • Who are the internal stakeholders?
    • Where are we going to focus our efforts?

    So, maybe the old questions we learned in grade school could be a pretty good v1 planning template.  The irony is that the biggest question I get asked is always around metrics and ROI.  They are critical points, but until you answer the question of why (and gain organizational agreement to that answer!!) you can’t answer the ROI question with any specifics.  I can give you a list of metrics to attach to a social site or community, but I can’t tell you if those metrics matter unless I know what the business objective is.

    So, maybe some primer questions to start the list, I’m sure you can think of more to add.

    • Why:  Define you purpose
    • What:  What are the business objectives
    • Who:  Define your audience and/or segmentation
    • How:  How do our users do it today (whatever you define it is in the why question)
    • Where:  Inventory where users are going today
    • What:  What are the interactions we need to enable to improve the experience
    • What:  What systems and processes do we need to integrate with
    • What:  What technology and tools are necessary to support this effort
    • How:  How will we know it’s succeeding
    • What:  What are the success measures
    • Who:  Who are the internal stakeholders
    • Who:  Who are the key people and organizations we need to get engaged / participating?
    • What:  What are our policies and/or guidelines to govern internal participation?
    • When:  Define the project timeline
    • How:  How much is it going to cost (to execute AND sustain)

    And maybe two last points.  You’ve got to re-validate that why question again and again and ensure you are continuously educating everyone involved on the answer – otherwise you’ll stray.  And lastly, friends don’t let friends plan without execution or execute without plans:) 

    Sean

  5. Satisfaction, Loyalty and Affinity…

    Monday, 31 Dec 2007 4 Comments Posted by:

    I had the good fortune to eat Sushi, have some 1:1 discussion and participate in a short video for Jeremiah this past month while he was in Seattle attending the Web Community Forum.  The video gave me a chance to talk a bit more about finding, thanking and engaging influential’s as part of developing a more effective advocacy and user listening strategy.  Ultimately, I like to think of engagement in the following lifecycle:

    image

    • Satisfaction is really just "brushing your teeth" – basic hygiene.  You have users who believe what you provide meets their needs.  Nothing more or less.  The barrier to be replaced here is pretty low.  And realistically, few mature companies have large scale customer dissatisfaction issues – they more likely have large scale customer apathy issues.
    • Loyalty is obviously a higher achievement.  At this point, you’ve earned users who show up in your Net Promoter scores and exhibit behaviors of likelihood to recommend. 

    In my experience, this is where a lot of the measurement ends.  However, this is short of the destination that brands we envy elicit from their customers.  Does loyalty really capture the essence of the Harley Davidson or Four Seasons customers?  It doesn’t capture how I feel about Cookshack! The word "customer" is probably not even the right word in these cases!

    • Affinity is an even stronger measure of alignment with a brand, product or service.  What does it look like?  The behavior I look for is "likelihood to defend."  If someone "attacks" your product, service or brand, does someone show up to defend it?  We all know the credibility that the brand itself has in defending its products or services – pretty limited.  I’m not advocating the brand doesn’t participate here, I’m merely making the point that other users are generally more credible advocates. 

    Note:  Overly supportive/pushy/argumentative "fanboys" can be counterproductive in this, so take care with the extremes.

    A few questions for brand/product managers are:

    • What are the drivers that move users across this continuum?
    • What is the cost model for the drivers?
    • What is a healthy distribution in my relative industry and competitive market?  If I was Marriott, would the same distribution goal make sense as the Four Seasons?  Probably not. 
    • What is the my current vs desired state distribution?

    Thanks again Jeremiah for taking the time for the video and here’s a link to watch.

    Sean

  6. User Generated Help and How-to Content Model

    Friday, 28 Dec 2007 4 Comments Posted by:

    Occasionally it feels like those of us focused on the social media phenomena live a little bit in a vacuum.  While the circle seems to be growing, there are times where it feels like we are all preaching to the choir – to the already converted.  We read each others blogs, follow each other on Twitter, friend each other in Facebook, attend many of the same conferences, etc.  Most of this is great!  Heck, it is a bit of the theme of how I named this blog – "group therapy."  There’s a lot of value in those of us with common interests and challenges getting together and sharing experiences, ideas and new learning.  I do wonder how we all measure whether we are broadening the circle of those embracing social media.  It struck me at a recent conference (that was great by the way) that everyone in the room was essentially bought in on the topic in a significant way.  This is good in that it gathered really amazing people and inspired focused conversations, and we need that.  It was bad in that it didn’t feel like the circle really grew that day.  Out of that conference, I committed that in 2008, I will focus more of my conference time on industry events where social media is a track, vs THE TRACK – for example, I just committed to speak at SSPA in May. 

    What gets missed sometimes in our swarming with each other is capturing the simple examples that help illustrate how the business and user engagement model changes in a web 2.0 world.  Content is one of my favorite illustrations of this.  Many companies spend extraordinary amounts of money on content for their users – for this post, let’s focus on help and support content.  Here are a few examples:

    Once the investment is made in an authoring model (in house or vendor), more money is spent to localize the content – all of which, at best, serves the fat part of the long tail of help and support content needed to really assist the breadth and depth of users.  There’s nothing unique about this model, this has been in place for many years and as we know, changing the model is not simple.  This is obvious ground for community models (Q&A support forums and wikis).  Most are doing this, though in very few cases are these different models integrated – look at the sites and it’s clear these are silo’d efforts.  If your users can draw your org chart just by navigating your web pages – you have an integration problem…ok, opportunity:)  Does a single search crawl both in-house and user generated content?  What about user generated content beyond the bounds of yourcompany.com.  For example, look at this 6 minute video on Youtube of How to Create a Gantt Chart with Excel.  Note the # of views, stars, favorites and the two most recent comments!

    image

    How should Microsoft (Disclosure – I work at Microsoft right now) treat this content on Youtube?  What are the processes to discover content like this?  How do you decide what to include or not?  How much risk do you take with dead links to external content that can vanish?  What should be done about the video creator – this is an influencer – probably should thank him at a minimum – but much more should be done (another day, other posts on influencer program development). 

    A more radical view of this would be the following question:  When do you stop authoring content in house? (and re-deploy that investment to drive a user generated content model?)

    Before I go further, let’s be realistic. You probably can’t just stop authoring content.  There will be some content you may always need to author.  Security content for example – where many users will expect vendor created (and legally indemnified content).  You may also find that this enables a shift in which content you write – more pre-release and deployment/training content and less help and how-to content.  Likewise, there is a business scorecard problem.  Businesses measure results on a monthly/quarterly/annual basis – particularly when we are talking about investments like content.  So, how can you achieve a breakthrough in results from a new, user driven model, when your scorecard is assuming continuous quarter over quarter improvement.  This conflict quickly converts companies from being risk takers to risk averse. 

    What would happen if you stopped writing content and converted your entire KB/FAQ process to a wiki?  In the near term?  There’s a high probability the quality of your content would initially go down (at least that is the right expectation to set).  User generated content is not the holy grail, it won’t solve world peace.  This is where the scorecard conflict is key – you need executive patience in longer term goals than quarterly results.  Look at Wikipedia…a few years ago there was plenty of debate about its accuracy – now it is generally accepted (and research has supported) to be as accurate, or more than, commercially published encyclopedias.  In fact, a simple example is to look at how current it is.  When will that old school publishing model be updated with yesterdays assassination of Benazir Bhutto.  Wikipedia took less than 24 hrs and it’s not just in English, but here in French, Spanish, Dutch…and many more. 

    The real answer is more about percentage of content authored in-house vs via community – move from 80-90% internal to 80-90% user generated.  While the quality might initially go down, there is little question that ultimately a user generated content model will be more complete (topic and language) and at least  as good (likely far better) than anything that can be done in house.  Depending on your business, you need to forecast how long this transition might take – will it exceed the old model in 6 months, 1 year, 3 years?  What’s the bet?  What’s the tolerance for the duration?  How do you risk mitigate the potential quality dip?  You know you will have resisters who on day 1 will email around links to some user submitted piece that is terrible – are you prepared – is the corporate culture ready to withstand these bumps?

    By now you should also be thinking about the revised scorecard.  Why are you doing all this?  To save cost on content?  Deflect calls from your call center?  Reach more users?  Increase satisfaction (users find what they want)?  All valid goals, but with only these elements, it’s likely a richer scorecard than what most organizations have today around help and how-to content.

    Practical social media for busines
    s.  I like it, wonder what you think?

    Sean

  7. Influencer Marketing: An Oxymoron?

    Sunday, 18 Nov 2007 8 Comments Posted by:

    I recently found myself in a roomful of Brand marketers, Agencies and Boutique consultancies discussing the growing authority of influencers.  As social media has amped and marketing eyes a mixshift of investments to new media and Word of Mouth, the importance and debate around the role of Influencers has exploded. 

    Just last week, Ad Age reported on research by PQ media that Word of Mouth Marketing crossed $1B in 2006…up from $76M 5 years earlier, in route to $3.7B by 2011. 

    …in 2006, according to an independent research report on the field that will be unveiled during a session at the annual Word Of Mouth Marketing Association conference in Las Vegas today. The analysis, believed to be first in-depth look at word of mouth, reports that spending on the emerging discipline has increased from $76 million in 2001 to $981 million in 2006 and is expected to grow to approximately $3.7 billion by 2011.

    These influencer conversations generally fall into a couple of buckets:

    • Data and examples designed to convince you that Influencers matter
    • How to find and "activate" them in the brand conversation
    • How to measure

    I find myself invited to participate in a lot of these discussions as I have pretty strong views on the topic after 5 years of building one of the largest Influencer programs (www.microsoft.com/mvp).  Probably more important than the strong views, is the practical lessons learned from operationalizing a global program designed to find, thank and engage influencers both online and offline.  Like most things, the best way to learn about something is to go and personally engage in it.  I estimate that I’ve talked to over 3000 influencers of our brands from over 50 countries during the past few years. 

    So, back to the conversation at the conference…As we sat in the room having the discussion, several people used the term "Influencer Marketing."  Each time I heard it, I cringed.  Something about this phrase seemed wrong.  In the moment, I couldn’t articulate why this phrase dug so deep, but by my afternoon presentation I had to discuss this topic.  I like to keep the following core assumption in mind:  Influencers don’t do what they do in order to help you (the brand)…they do what they do to help other users.  Forgetting this core point is probably the fastest path to a failed influencer initiative.  The term "Influencer Marketing" to me feels like it is attempting to get a direct response from an influencer.  Find the right people, tell them about "A" and they will go tell everyone about "A."  In my experience, it just doesn’t work this way.  There are a few "influencers" with whom this works – but they rarely influence much or sustain over the long term – they may just be loud.  Perhaps my issue with this is that most marketing feels very one way.  If you really want to get influencers talking, it’s about a two way, trust based conversation. 

    Wrong model (marketing dream):  I tell you about "A," you tell everyone you know about "A"

    Right model:  I tell you about "A," you tell me about "A1, B and C."  I listen, I make some changes or I don’t make changes but I tell you why.  This creates outbound conversation – but it’s a by-product of a relationship, not a channel for push communications.

    In truth there probably isn’t anything wrong with the term itself.  There are influencers and brands will invariably market to them – and that’s not evil.  What might be "evil" is thinking there is a shortcut here – forgetting that this really only works when social media is creating a conversation between a brand and the users…and remember, "listening is not just waiting for your turn to talk!"

    And finally, the right model makes another strong point – that the conversation isn’t just between your influencers and the marketing department – it’s the influencers and your company – cross functions.

    Sean

  8. Busy week ahead (actually 2 weeks…)

    Saturday, 13 Oct 2007 1 Comment Posted by:

    I’m really looking forward to the next few weeks.  I’m off Monday to the Bay area where I’ll be meeting Monday with Support Space and going onsite with the online team at Tivo.  To say I’m a fan of Tivo as a user would be an understatement and their community is legendary, so I’m anxious to learn about any secret sauce they might share.  I’ll have some 1:1 time Monday driving from Tivo to Downtown San Fran with peers from the LA Times, Citrix and Weather.com.

    Tuesday and Wednesday I’ll be participating in a two day event hosted by Creative Good.  This event brings together senior leaders from a wide range of companies to discuss best practices, current challenges and networking for ongoing business collaboration.  Looking at the list of my fellow attendees, it promises to be an amazing 48 hrs.

    I close my trip to the bay area Wednesday night with Dinner with Bright Ideas.  I’m anxious to learn more about what they are doing to productize innovation via the "wisdom of the crowds."

    On Thursday I’m off to Orlando to attend and speak at the Consortium Member Summit put on by the Consortium for Service Innovation. 

    I’ll be happy to get back home to Seattle for the weekend ahead of leaving for MVP Events in South America the following week.

    I’m sure I’ll have some insights to share from these visits in the weeks ahead.

    Sean

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  9. Some word-of-mouth on “Word of Mouth Marketing”

    Monday, 3 Sep 2007 4 Comments Posted by:

    I’ve been on hiatus from online for most of the past two weeks – a bit of needed vacation.  I didn’t quite spend the time the way I had planned, but I think I spent it the right way.  I had planned to read a couple of books, stay on top of my blog, catch up on RSS feeds that I’d fallen behind on, and work on some longer range personal objectives.  Well, I read one book.  Beyond that, I frankly just relaxed and enjoyed the time with family and friends.  Good for me!!  Not sure why I thought I could or should try to do all that other stuff while on vacation!

    As I prepare to immerse tomorrow in my day job, I’m anxious to catch up on what I missed and get on with planning for what looks like a very busy fall schedule.

    The one book I did read was a good one.  Earlier this year I joined the Word of Mouth Marketing Association.  I certainly didn’t see myself as a marketer, but I felt it would be a good way to connect with some industry peers focused on similar issues involving social media.  Well, it was – and I certainly recommend it.  I have met many great thinkers and experts on the topic of WOM over the past several months.  I’ve been particularly taken by the convergence social media is driving between marketing, customer service, online support and product feedback functions – driving connections across these silos should be a top priority for any company that wants to continue to have long term success.

    A friend introduced me to Andy Sernovitz who I’ve had the pleasure of talking with now on several occasions.  Andy wrote an excellent book called Word of Mouth Marketing:  How Smart Companies get People Talking.  Andy has been a great contact for me and I certainly owe him a personal thanks for the conversations, but also want to recommend this book to anyone looking for smart, easy to follow guidance on how to implement Word of Mouth in your marketing strategy.

    WOM

    This is the book I wish I had read 3-4 years ago (though it wasn’t out then:)).  I can certainly see how this book would have changed how I thought about and implemented the programs, practices and internal negotiations I’ve been responsible for in recent years.  Andy brings nice structure to action planning through the 5 Ts:

    • Talkers:  Find the people talking about you
    • Topics:  Give people a reason to talk
    • Tools:  Help the message spread faster and farther
    • Taking part: Join the conversation
    • Tracking:  Measure and understand what people are saying

    Now, here I am "Word-of-Mouthing" on the book – uh, hmmm – nice job Andy.

    Hope to see you in November at the Word of Mouth Marketing Summit where I get to present this year!

    Sean

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  10. Some word-of-mouth on "Word of Mouth Marketing"

    Monday, 3 Sep 2007 4 Comments Posted by:

    I’ve been on hiatus from online for most of the past two weeks – a bit of needed vacation.  I didn’t quite spend the time the way I had planned, but I think I spent it the right way.  I had planned to read a couple of books, stay on top of my blog, catch up on RSS feeds that I’d fallen behind on, and work on some longer range personal objectives.  Well, I read one book.  Beyond that, I frankly just relaxed and enjoyed the time with family and friends.  Good for me!!  Not sure why I thought I could or should try to do all that other stuff while on vacation!

    As I prepare to immerse tomorrow in my day job, I’m anxious to catch up on what I missed and get on with planning for what looks like a very busy fall schedule.

    The one book I did read was a good one.  Earlier this year I joined the Word of Mouth Marketing Association.  I certainly didn’t see myself as a marketer, but I felt it would be a good way to connect with some industry peers focused on similar issues involving social media.  Well, it was – and I certainly recommend it.  I have met many great thinkers and experts on the topic of WOM over the past several months.  I’ve been particularly taken by the convergence social media is driving between marketing, customer service, online support and product feedback functions – driving connections across these silos should be a top priority for any company that wants to continue to have long term success.

    A friend introduced me to Andy Sernovitz who I’ve had the pleasure of talking with now on several occasions.  Andy wrote an excellent book called Word of Mouth Marketing:  How Smart Companies get People Talking.  Andy has been a great contact for me and I certainly owe him a personal thanks for the conversations, but also want to recommend this book to anyone looking for smart, easy to follow guidance on how to implement Word of Mouth in your marketing strategy.

    WOM

    This is the book I wish I had read 3-4 years ago (though it wasn’t out then:)).  I can certainly see how this book would have changed how I thought about and implemented the programs, practices and internal negotiations I’ve been responsible for in recent years.  Andy brings nice structure to action planning through the 5 Ts:

    • Talkers:  Find the people talking about you
    • Topics:  Give people a reason to talk
    • Tools:  Help the message spread faster and farther
    • Taking part: Join the conversation
    • Tracking:  Measure and understand what people are saying

    Now, here I am "Word-of-Mouthing" on the book – uh, hmmm – nice job Andy.

    Hope to see you in November at the Word of Mouth Marketing Summit where I get to present this year!

    Sean

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