What fun! I got tagged to do a post on Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing - focusing on
membership marketing for associations - by the Social Fish mavens, Maddie Grant and Lindy Dryer. They said it was supposed to be fun and not take a lot of work, so I admit I'm recycling a bit here and including non association examples, but it'll fit the bill and it gives me a soapbox to address the frequent association angst around the question Should we be on Facebook and LinkedIn?
On to the meme!
Word of mouth marketing is what happens when someone other than you talks about your organization, product or offering. There's a whole Word of Mouth Marketing Association that has some good definitional stuff. When I started in marketing (before you were born), WOM was a happy accident, something that happened because of some cool promo at a trade show worked better than expected or because a goofy or touching employee story that happened to hit the big press thanks to serendipity or an industrious PR person.
Now that social media is here, WOM is enjoying a revival for several reasons: 1) it's easy to design WOM campaigns that social tools can enable and 2) the speed of dialog with customers is so much faster (some would say more natural, being two-way and all) that marketers can adjust WOM campaigns on the fly to better hit the customer's sweet spot and 3) through the magic of technology, WOM is more trackable than ever before and thus can earn its way into an actual marketing plan. WOM has its dark side of course (*cough* Motrin and a bunch more), but for the most part it's a good thing.
WOM is always easier to get going with customers who already know you and are predisposed to be positive towards you. These can be traditional brand champions (who we had a hard time finding until Google came along - though try Twitter Search or TwitScoop! Twitter is even better than Google for quickly tapping into the last few hour's WOM sentiment with your puny human brain). In the social media world, these predisposed WOMMs (Word of Mouth Marketers) can also be fans that have opted into messages from you on Facebook or Twitter or your own eblasts or RSS feeds. For trade associations, your members are your best WOMs; not only do they know you but they are already committed to you and thus more likely to talk you up naturally.
What is the secret to a good social-media-age WOM campaign? No secrets really, just two basic no brainers:
- Do or say something worth talking about - from the point of view of the people who will be doing the talking and from the point of view of their friends (who will be doing the listening).
- Do or say it in such a way that it's easy for them to share your interesting stuff with friends who might be interested.
The first thing you'll notice about the above statements is that they seem duh! obvious, but there's a catch; did you notice I said "from the point of view" of your audience? As with all successful marketing campaigns, the success starts with a good understanding of your target market. What do they care about? What do they care about so much that they'll pass it on? Since this is the age of dialog, why not ask them? Run a contest. Run a poll. Listen in on their public conversations (and private ones if they'll let you) and listen to what they like to talk about. You'll get more ideas quickly that way than through all your navel-gazing brainstorming sessions. Save your navel gazing for after you've got all their great ideas and use it to hone in on the ideas you can execute well.
There isn't enough space on this page to list every cool idea out there, but I'll mention a few that are good examples of successful WOMs in social media.
- The International Society for Technology Education included a very buzz-worthy WOM campaign element in their recent member drive (which grew their member base by 54% in two years). Specifically, as I document here, they offered Second Life gatherings to class-room-isolated teachers where people could socialize and get up to speed on some professional development info too. They also recruited a volunteer "docent" corp to hang out in Second Life and practice WOM on people who wandered in, perhaps out of curiosity or perhaps out of encouragement through other media channels. Although they couldn't pin their membership grown specifically on the Second Life initiative, their Second Life event attendance went up and anecdotally they believe it was a key aspect of their success.
- Hewlett Packard ran a WOM campaign to generate buzz about a new laptop (the Dragon). They targeted 31 top bloggers in their space and supported each blogger in running a contest on their own site (by providing content and promotion). It was a win-win-win. HP got good buzz, the bloggers got more traffic (150-5000% more) AND product sales went up and stayed up after the WOM campaign finished (check out slide #7 on this Buzz Corp case study)
- Don't forget the ability for social media word of mouth to pique interest in offline events. As I wrote about before, using Facebook in a multimedia marketing strategy around events works on this sample of one (me) because getting the invite in my social context of friends and colleagues cuts through the clutter of my email where I received the same invite. It also gives me social options to network before and after the event, stirring the WOM so to speak. I've also attended events that I saw my friends attending on FaceBook's news feed, exposing me to organizations I never new existed. Online social combined with offline traditional marketing can be a powerful combo if well coordinated.
The second part of the challenge is to engage your campaign so people can easily "talk" about you in this new socially mediated world. Think. Word of MOUTH. What do people use for their mouths nowadays? Email, embedded blog content, "becoming a fan", Digg voting, bookmark sharing - sharing! As I've said before, if all you did was put a ShareThis button on every bit of information you want people to pass on, you'd be going a long way towards enabling WOM. Add a ShareThis (or similar sharing widget) to some really interesting content (see above) and you've got yourself a WOM campaign in the making.
Other ways to become easily referred to is to have a presence on the social sites where your customers or members are. If your members are on Facebook, be there! If they're not, don't waste your time (but watch to see if they move there).
There's a lot of discussion in the Association sector about whether or not to have an external presence on sites like FaceBook and LinkedIn. A lot of this discussion is fueled by the fact that some enthusiastic members are setting up groups before the Associations wake up to that opportunity themselves. When the members do that, who "owns" the group? Some slow-moving Associations are finding themselves in the difficult position of trying to wrestle control of their brand name from their own members.
There is also a lot of expressed concern about allowing non members to join or view the Association's group or fan page. I suppose I can see their worry if the organization were publishing member's only information there, and those may not be the right venues for that - but they are perfect venues for WOM! What better way to get your members talking to non-member/prospects about you than to let them fan you and give them things to do there (e.g., sign up for events, vote in polls, join discussions etc.) - all of which their contacts can see also? It allows them to WOM you simply by engaging with you in their own social context. It's also a great place to attract prospective members to check you out. How successful a networker would you be if you only went to your own parties? Go to your member's parties and meet their friends sometimes. Maybe then you can grow your own invitation list for your next party (i.e., annual conference).
I could go on. This is a rich and deep subject, but it's dinner time as I draft this so I'll stop. Other examples you'd like to share? Feel free to leave good examples in a comment below or post something on your own blog and leave me a comment with the link (tag yourself on the meme and pass it on if you like). If I get enough new stuff I'll do an updated post.
