Pat McGraw isn’t a big fan of word-of-mouth marketing. Regardless, he’s a marketing strategist and goes-deep on marketing and research-related topics that are worth a read. Below are my comments on Pat’s post about WOM as a fad, recruitment, and how our study — Perceptions, Practices and Ethics in Word of Mouth Marketing – reached 10,000 downloads in two weeks.
Word-of-mouth marketing is not a fad. Word-of-mouth marketing-related dialogs are a reality that started in the mid-90’s with real-time communication tools that facilitated human-to-machine exchanges with agents that allowed individuals to search and find information that was important to them. Today, Web 2.0 applications that allows for human-to-human open collaboration and sharing across groups whether small communities or large audiences are changing not only the process of how advice and marketing-related conversations are initiated but also empowering each of use to become a referrer and publisher of content that we control.
Regardless, your comment about recruitment left me with the impression that you’re missing the bigger picture:
“And help me understand how you ‘recruit’ customers to participate in a WOM campaign? You see, I thought a WOM Campaign would be finding your best customers and providing them with a new product or service before launching it into the market.”
In the Web-2.0-word-of-mouth-world, marketers don’t control recruitment. Participates control recruitment by controlling who they will contact and what they will say. It’s why Google has been so successful with product launches. Google lets participants take charge of targeting audiences with recognized interests. And, anyone talking about a Google tool becomes a participant.
If you want an example of a successful word-of-mouth marketing campaign, look no further than the study BoldMouth published. Since publishing on May 11th, we’ve had over 10,000 downloads and three potential clients have contacted us to request proposals.
Here’s how we reached 10,000 downloads of our study in two-weeks:
1. We started with no marketing budget and decided to use a free e-book framework.
2. We became members of community to hear what was going on and to gain qualified participants for the survey. This platform also allowed us to announce to the community when the study was available.
3. Created a database. We captured the email addresses, names, and company names of all survey participants. We also included email requests for the survey that were appended to the database. There are 217 records in the database.
4. We communicated. We thank individuals for participating.
5. We said something important. The study took 6 months from formulation to publishing and we focused on giving readers valuable and actionable information. The focus was on tips and techniques
6. We focused on co-creation. This is an important step. We reached out to 45 industry experts and competitor firms in our industry ten days before we published and, asked them for their feedback and insight. 38 individuals responded, and 17 of those people provided lengthy comments and insight that enhanced the quality of the work and required us to rethink some of the conclusions and rationale. Personally, I’m still thrilled and humbled that competitor firms say that the work is incredibly valuable and comprehensive. These individuals became owners and when we published it got blogged.
7. We recognized the contributions of those that contributed via emails as well as in the study itself.
8. We did a blogged press release. Having a blog press release really helped to drive distribution.
9. We created a counter so that we could track downloads.
10. We provided links to relevant publishers that cover the WOM industry.
11. We talked about the study at industry events.
12. We commented on comments to be part of the conversation.
13. We shared our success by publishing download counts.
14. We published snippets of content from the study with additional insight on our blog.
TAGS: Pat McGraw, BoldMouth, Word of Mouth, Word of Mouth Marketing
1 response so far ↓
Pat McGraw // May 28, 2006 at 2:26 pm
First, thanks for the comments (and the compliment). And yes, I can miss the bigger picture which is why I enjoy talking with people like you in an attempt to broaden my horizons. (We never can stop learning, can we?)
Second, congratulations on your successful WOM campaign. 10,000 downloads of your study is impressive.
It’s just that I am so old that what you describe is what we used to call a public relations effort. Involve industry and media experts etc. Now everyone wants to call it WOM advertising. It’s not that I am against the work related in the effort - it’s the renaming that has me scratching my head.
I look forward to future conversations!
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