Mediaboss Marketing

Word of Mouth Marketing By Andy Sernovitz Greenleaf Book Press, 2012 204 pp; $15.95

First, give people something to talk about. Then use the tips in this book to get a conversation going about how wonderful your company or product is.

Thats the essence of Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking, something author Andy Sernovitz contends cant really happen unless your product or service makes people so passionately happy that they cant wait to tell their friends about it.

Sernovitz says five elements must be in place for word-of-mouth buzz to be effective: talkers (happy customers, product experts), topics (your awesome new product; a clever sales promotion), tools (like a tell-a-friend-button on your product webpage), holding up your end of the conversation (your company replying to emails and comments posted on blogs, fixing the things people complain about, answering your phone) and tracking what people are saying about you (online tools exist for this).

He lists ways to keep people talking about you. For example, theres always one expert in every forum or chat room who likes to show how much he knows about your industry. Sernovitz suggests turning these people into allies by giving them product samples to share and updates on new technical information they can pass on.

Offering paid incentives to get people talking is a bad idea, he says. It turns a friend-to-friend relationship into a salesperson-customer one, and friends are less believable when theyre being paid.

Sernovitz cautions, word of mouth marketing only works if its honest. Posting fake reviews or product endorsements will be found out and turned against you, giving people something to talk about for all the wrong reasons.

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Create good marketing buzz with these tips