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A word of mouth story based on fear

February 6, 2010 By 1 Comment

I love spreading word of mouth about things that are remarkable. But last week a small restaurant tried shut me down in my efforts to do so.

Whenever I go to San Francisco I schedule my business calendar so that I can have breakfast at Boulette’s Larder in the Ferry Building. The food is extraordinary, the restaurant  design remarkable. So while waiting for my breakfast I took out my Droid to snap a couple of photos to share with you.  Because no words can quite capture the beauty of this small little space.

After the click, owner and renowned chef Amaryll Schwertner came over and asked me to stop taking photos immediately. It was against her policy.

“But why,” I asked. “I wrote a book about word of mouth and like to spread the word about great experiences, and photos are a great way to do that.”

“We’ve had a lot of problems with people taking photographs and stealing our ideas,” she explained. “Photographs of our restaurant have ended up in places without our permission. We need to control who takes photos.”

The exchange left me cold and wondering. Just what could anyone “steal” by taking a picture of a  little restaurant?  A restaurant’s assets are its food, its service, and its vibe. How can one steal that total experience in a one-dimensional photo?

And why be fearful of letting people take a picture and spread word of mouth, the most vital marketing for a restaurant. Sure, my photos aren’t professional but I doubt I would hurt the restaurant’s image.

My advice for all businesses and Boulette’s Larder is to let go of  fear, and let people who love you spread the love, especially with photos. The greater the love, the less likely that any negative remarks or pirate photos will ever hurt your reputation.

Here’s a photo of the restaurant taken from Boulette’s web page. I hope I don’t get reprimanded again. :)

BoulettesLarderjpeg

Filed Under: Conversational Marketing, Dumb company stories, Word of mouth Tagged With: , , , , ,

If you think your company is boring…

December 18, 2009 By Leave a Comment

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‘Tis the season for marketing planning, which can be painful if you’re in a rut. From many years of experience I believe every company has remarkable ideas to talk about, but finding those ideas can sometimes be challenging.

This week I talked at the Word of Mouth Supergenius conference about how to shake things up and find those ideas. Thanks to Merritt Colaizzi of SmartBlog on Social Media for her post that sums up those ideas. You can find it here.

Finding those interesting ideas to talk about is well worth the work. Consider:

  • What do sales reps to say to engage prospects?
  • What makes your proposals and RFPs stand out?
  • Social media only works if you have interesting ideas to talk about
  • How do CEOs get employees’ attention?

To get more interest, you have to be more interesting.  It doesn’t mean you have to be cool like Apple. In fact, much of my work has been with “boring” B2B companies.  Everything in marketing and sales gets much easier when you find the “talkable” ideas.

If you get stuck, call me to help jump start your thinking. If your company is really stuck, let’s do a workshop in 2010  to uncover those amazing ideas just waiting to be found.  While I am slightly biased, this is the best marketing investment you can make next year.

Filed Under: Activating change, Communicating, Conversational Marketing, Language, Point of View & Messaging, Word of mouth Tagged With: , , ,

A social media knowledge benchmark

October 12, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Thanks to Kishore Partchasarathi, a marketing student at York University in Toronto, for this social media overview and thoughtful review of my book.Review of Beyond Buzz

Filed Under: Books, Communicating, Conversational Marketing, Language, Social media strategy, Word of mouth Tagged With: , , ,

What's a talkable brand?

October 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association has put out a request: What makes a brand talkable? Here’s my take.

Filed Under: Communicating, Communities, Conversational Marketing, Language, Marketing trends, Public Relations, Sales, Social media strategy, Word of mouth Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The sound experience

July 1, 2009 By 1 Comment

The experience a person has influences word of mouth — good and bad. This week I’ve been in a Hilton Hotel in San Diego with a beautiful setting, but I’d never recommend it. There is one restaurant and the food is mediocre, which I can live with for a few days, but the canned music blaring out of a sub-standard tinny sound system is god awful.

At 6 a.m. this morning I felt assaulted, with bad early 1990s pop/rock music screaming at me. Think Alanis Morissette using a megaphone in a hallway shouting “Like rain on your wedding day.”   The poor choice of music and terrible sound system gave the hotel a feeling of being dated. Worse, the sound made me not want to eat in the restaurant nor recommend the hotel. Perhaps, too, the droning sound was causing the staff’s lethargy.

Interestingly, Conrad Hotels, Hilton’s luxury brand, did a survey a few years ago confirming the importance of music in hotels and finding the musical atmosphere an essential part of guest satisfaction.

One finding:

In the restaurants, there was a surprisingly high demand for classical piano and strings, taking 33% of the votes, while other musical tastes had low showings.  In public areas there was a strong desire to hear classical and jazz (82%).

The Conrad Hilton hotel study said it is “committed to monitoring and evolving musical environments to meet guest expectations.”

Until its US Hilton brands do the same, I’d suggest that silence can be golden.

Filed Under: Musings, Research, Word of mouth Tagged With: , , ,

New research: word-of-mouth effect on sales

May 15, 2009 By Leave a Comment

A new “buzz action score” from researchers at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management shows that  positive and negative online conversations are leading indicators of sales performance.

The research found that a relatively small group of people in online communities can have a substantial influence on purchase decisions, much like in face-to-face word of mouth.

Some implications for marketers:

  • Tracking online conversations is becoming essential. By understanding the “buzz” — good or bad — you can can act early to either change strategies to improve performance, e.g., pricing, longer warranties, or boost performance, e.g., increase promotional budget for product receiving a high “buzz score.”
  • Re-evaluate sales forecasting: rather than waiting until retailers report sales figures, you can being to get a sense of how well a product is doing real time by evaluating the buzz.
  • Ask your brand ambassadors for help, either providing an assessment of the buzz you’re seeing or  more actively sharing their views into online conversations. (And if you have no brand ambassador program or community, start now. These folks are invaluable to helping any brand succeed in a world where word-of mouth-is becoming so influential.)

Filed Under: Conversational Marketing, Research, Sales, Word of mouth Tagged With: , ,

8 ways to "social mediafy" marketing, PR campaigns

May 6, 2009 By 1 Comment

Creating marketing and public relations campaigns within a social media context requires some new steps– and greater attention to steps that hopefully have always been considered.

Here are eight ideas to “social mediafy” your campaigns.

1. Know what’s relevant and current: First, know what your audience cares about. What issues, topics, ideas are front of mind.  Not what your company wants to talk about, which is usually your own products and service features/functions (boring), but what people are already concerned about and interested in. Do this by analyzing the digital ecosystem for your category — blogs, tweets, news articles, YouTube videos,  Digg posts/rankings, Google searches, etc. What’s most popular, triggers the most responses?  If you have a corporate blog or a customer forum — what are the most popular topics?

2. What’s the business goal: Before doing anything, clearly understand the intention of the campaign. Is it to develop preference for your brand vs. another? Change a perception about your company? Make people more aware of the company’s expertise in a particular area? Help people understand an issue that is an obstacle to sales? Generate leads? Make your brand more likable?  The more specific you can be, the more effective your program will be — and the easier it will be to measure it.  I see far too little time spent on this important step. “General Awareness” is too superficial — nor does it guide how to execute.

3. Formulate a provocative point of view: What’s your take on a topic of current interest to your audience — and how does your point of view connect with your goal? Make the point of view is fresh, thought-provoking and even provocative.  As word of mouth author Emmanuel Rosen points out in an interview with Sean Moffit of BuzzCanuck, one of the worst practices in marketing is having nothing interesting to say. My research has found that there are nine themes that people like to talk about; here’s more on “The Nine Best Story Lines for Marketing” from Guy Kawasaki’s blog.  My favorite is taking a contrarian or counterintuitive view. Done right, this approach creates interest, debate and longevity — and can help address a number of goals.

4. Put that point of view together in a shareable form: Take your point of view and develop it in a form (or multiple forms) that people can easily share with other people — eBooks, videos, ChangeThis manifestos, blog posts, presentations, white papers. And put those not just on your own site but where people are browsing — YouTube, SlideShare, Delicious, etc.  Some recent examples of content easy to share: Disney Park’s “make your own personalized video,” which you can then share with friends. IBM’s “Art of the Sale” mainframe videos by Tim Washer. And a great white paper, “EMC/One: A Journey in Social Media” by Chuck Hollis. Having some thing makes it easier to share. Of course, it needs to be interesting enough that you want to share it with your colleagues and friends.

5. Get your views out into the ecosystem: Now stir things up and let people know about your point of view– and where they can go to learn more.  Use Twitter, Facebook, blogger outreach, Slideshare.net, YouTube, Digg, Sumbleupon and all the many, many other places out there.

6. Stay in the conversation: As people start talking about the topic, stay in the conversation, adding new perspectives, answering questions, providing other people/places about the issue. Set up Google alerts at a minimum to keep up with the conversation and post responses to what;s being said. The days of dropping a press release, talking to some media, and calling it a campaign are over.

7. Repackage: Take the highlights of what ensued and repackage them to further achieve your goals — use for customer newsletters, sales presentations, management reports, in employee communities/Intranets.

8. Measure what sticks: Lastly, learn from all the issues you initiate. Which garnered the most interest — and why? What fell flat? Was it the topic — or was it the execution. This execute-and-measure-and-learn is the only way to find what works for your audience — and is an ongoing education for you.

Filed Under: Communicating, Conversational Marketing, Marketing trends, Point of View & Messaging, Public Relations, Social media strategy, Word of mouth Tagged With: , , ,

Positioning that helps word of mouth

April 28, 2009 By 2 Comments

Good brand positioning should be easy to talk about, especially since word of mouth remains the most effective marketing principle.

Many of these brand positionings exist and don’t need to be overly “created” — just ask a couple of straightforward questions and tune into what people knowledgeable about the brand say.   Yet  many marketers ignore these conversational jewels, instead creating starched, politically correct and bland positioning statements that people rarely use in conversations.

Here are a couple of good examples.

Before a recent talk at Fisher College I asked an instructor two simple questions: “Why do people come here? What’s the appeal?”

He didn’t even have to pause before answering: “It’s like a good community college but the students get much more attention and hand holding here.”  How interesting.

I asked similar questions at University of Massachusetts and got great though “off the record” answers that I use in explaining the university when the topic of colleges comes up with friends. (Talk about colleges dominates the conversations of parents of teenagers at social gatherings.)

University of Massachusetts Lowell is like a MIT-light, a great science and technology education with very successful alumni but at a state school’s lower tuition. University of Massachusetts Dartmouth is like a small, private New England liberal arts college. Good programs, lovely campus by the sea.

What I especially liked was that the explanations were grounded in meaning making:  they explained the brand in context of the category and then said what’s different and relevant.  Meaning sticks, where buzz and traditional marketing materials usually do not.

Over at the School of Thought blog Andrea Jarrell explains that the best school marketing publications  “intrigue, inform, and entertain.”  Amen. And the best positioning statements do the same — and are “talkable.”

Filed Under: Communicating, Conversational Marketing, Word of mouth Tagged With: , , ,

Most valuable and under-used social media strategy

March 24, 2009 By 6 Comments

“What’s the best social media investment? Where we can really see a good ROI?”

The answer is easy. Getting companies to implement it is not. The most valuable and under-used social media strategy is embedding customer reviews in your Web site.  Not blogs, Twitter, communities or tagging.

An eVoc Insights study found that 48% of consumers need to read reviews before making a purchase decision. Neilsen’s research has found that consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising among 78% of study participants.

What gives? Fear of having negative reviews on the company Web site.  According to Sam Decker, CMO of BazaarVoice, companies have three options if they’re selling a bad product and are afraid of negative reviews:

  1. Without reviews, you keep selling the product and risk costly returns and low customer satisfaction
  2. With reviews, you can use the leading indicator of negative reviews and quickly remove this product from inventory to reduce returns and improve satisfaction
  3. Or, just allow the negative reviews to steer customers to a more satisfying purchase within the category. Let the best products win, and you will win.

“In cases 2 and 3 you remain a trusted editor of the best products; customers are happy; you maintain their loyalty, and avoid a return,” says Sam. For more on overcoming this obstacle, check out this classic article “Positives about Negative Product Reviews.”

Example: Consumer reviews on Panasonic.com

Filed Under: Advertising, Sales, Social media strategy, Word of mouth Tagged With: , , ,

Brag books

March 24, 2009 By 1 Comment

Sometimes the small things can set your products and brand apart.

Yesterday I received a beautiful cloth-covered photo album from  Rag & Bone Bindery. But the company calls the album a “Brag Book.”  Wow, it’s so much more fun to have a brag book than a photo album — and I know what special photos will go into a brag book vs. any old album. (See how a unique name garners word of mouth recommendations like this?)

One of the company’s other appealing product lines is their “Twelve Way” books — Twelve Wishes for Baby, Twelve Ways You Made A Difference.

If someone you know is seriously ill, depressed about losing a job, coming up on a milestone birthday, a wonderful gift would be to create a Twelve Ways You Made A Difference book.   I received something similar on my 50th birthday and it was the most inspiring  gift of my life.  My mother, who is dying, has also been receiving notes about how she has made a difference in people’s lives and she says it’s the best gift of all.

Oops, there I go with the word of mouth again. See how approaching a commodity category in fresh new ways can get you out of the commodity business and into a good market niche?

PS — Jason Thompson of Rag & Bone has a very cool blog, too.

Filed Under: Smart company stories, Word of mouth Tagged With: , ,

Released

December 15, 2008 By Leave a Comment

The secret to word of mouth marketing is to create products people love to talk about. Here’s an example from Deborah Kracht of Art Head Studio.  I’ve bought a bunch of her note cards and magnets for holiday gifts — especially for friends who need a little inspirational push for 2009.  Let’s all fly on this rocket next year.

Filed Under: Activating change, Word of mouth Tagged With: ,

Political advertising goes Broadway

October 23, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Filed Under: Political communications, Smart company stories, Word of mouth Tagged With: , ,

New online community study: what's working, what's in the way, advice from trenches

July 16, 2008 By 3 Comments

Today my firm, Beeline Labs, Deloitte, and the Society for New Communications Research released highlights of an online communities study among 140 organizations which create and maintain communities. Some of the highlights, more of which can be found here:

Greatest value of communities:

  • increasing word of mouth (35%)
  • increasing brand awareness (28%)
  • bringing new ideas into the organization faster (24%)
  • increasing customer loyalty (24%)

Greatest obstacles

  • getting people involved in the community (51%)
  • finding enough time to manage the community (45%)
  • attracting people to the community (34%)

What contributes most to effectiveness:

• ability for community members to connect with other like-minded people: 54%
• ability for members to help others: 43%
• focusing community  around a hot topic or issue: 41%
• quality of the community manager/community management team: 33%

Advice for others

When asked what their most important piece of advice is for others creating communities, survey participants’ advice focused around these eight areas:

1.    Start with the end in mind: “Start with a business strategy, defining carefully what you want to accomplish through the community.”

2.    Focus on the value to the members:  “Make sure you deliver real, special, unique, obvious value to the core group you’re hoping to attract.”

3.    Don’t start with the technology: “Too often people get drunk with Web 2.0 tool excitement and then try to push their business and customer goals into the wrong tool.”

4.    Keep it simple and intuitive:  “Focus on the least common denominator first. Keep it easy to navigate with simple tools to use.”

5.    Keep it fresh and active:  “Keep activity levels up, constantly add new content.”

6.    Have dynamic community leaders: “Make sure you devote enough time to managing the community; letting it fester is worse than not having it in the first place.”

7.    Think through who to involve – or not. “Get Legal and PR to buy-in and help on design, but keep them out of active management.”

8.    Get a passionate core of participants active before launching:  “Make sure you have a committed core of passionate users before you launch.”
Many thanks to everyone who took the time to take the survey and talk to us as part of the qualitative surveys. The complete results are on their way to you this morning.

Filed Under: Communities, Research, Social media strategy, Word of mouth Tagged With: , , , ,

Events! Word of Mouth, Innovation, Web 2.0

July 10, 2008 By 1 Comment

I don’t know about you but I feel overwhelmed by the number of events and conferences out there. So here’s some editing: here are three where you’ll learn a lot, meet some interesting people, and feel that it was well worth your time and money.

  • Word of Mouth Crash Course: My friend and WOM expert Andy Sernovitz is hosting a small-group word of mouth marketing seminar on July 30 and Sept. 4 in Chicago. Usually he only does private training for companies at a very large price, so this is a rare chance for 50 people to get a good overview of WOM. (If you use this code when you register you’ll get a $250 discount: “welovebeelinelabs.” For more: http://events.gaspedal.com.
  • BIF-4 Collaborative Innovation Summit: Oct. 15-16 in Providence, RI. This is an amazing two-day conference that I think is better than TED. Hosted this year by Bruce Nussbaum, editor of Business Week and author Bill Taylor, speakers are fascinating innovators from business, science, education, the arts, non-profits. It will open your head up in a big way.
  • Web 2.0 Expo is coming to New York for the first time, Sept. 16-19. We at Beeline Labs are running a three-hour experiential workshop on the morning Sept. 16 on how to create and run thriving online communities. Based on private community-building workshops we’ve recently done you’ll come away with a blueprint for creating a community for your organization. Hope you can join us! Drop me a line, lkelly@beelinelabs.com, if you want to know more.

Filed Under: Communities, Innovation, Word of mouth Tagged With: , , , , ,

10 Marketing 2.0 lessons from the Ryan Montbleau Band

May 28, 2008 By 5 Comments

[photopress:RyanMontbleau.jpg,full,pp_image]

The Ryan Montbleau Band is an amazing up-and-coming group that knows how to use Marketing 2.0 to build a fan base and sell tickets and music, with almost no money for marketing. Here are 10 Marketing 2.0 lessons from the band for all marketers:

  1. Love what you do: passion is the center of marketing and propels all tactical components. The greater the passion, the more powerful the marketing.

2. Listen to your customers (fans): Ryan Montbleau hung out after a recent performance, talking, signing t-shirts, and genuinely connecting with fans in the lobby. I had a great conversation with him about some of his lyrics and how he’s so come to be so wise at such a young age. (Which goes back to listening and passion again; he’s in the world.)

3. Make it easy for people to help you: The band makes it easy for people to act as word of mouth advocates, inviting anyone interested to join the Bleau Crew, their street team community.

“What is the Bleau Crew, you ask? We’re a community of fans that do our best to help the band on the road, giving them time to do what they do best: make music! Projects include postering for local shows, handing out handbills, posting banners on our Myspace pages, adding new songs to our profiles, and more! Benefits include free tickets, music, and being part of something truly special. We also get personal teleporters. Awesome, I know.”

4. Go where your fans are online: (Which also makes it easy to help you again.) The band doesn’t just rely on its site or a social network. They’re all the places their fans — and potential fans are — MySpace, FaceBook, Flickr, even a simple message board community aptly named Bleauboards that is thriving.

5. Reveal your points of view and personal stories so people can connect with people in band, not just band. You get a sense of the artist and person Ryan is through his blog, and you get to know all the band members through their quirky profiles. (I especially love band member Ted Wilson’s profile — and that the other members welcomed someone like him.)

6. Keep “old” marketing tactics that work: Want to stay in touch through email? Montbleau also offers a newsletter.

7. Say thank you: When a recent tee-shirt order arrived there was a a handwritten note on the order form, thanking me for supporting the band. Small touches grow fans.

8. Be distinctive, even if people can’t categorize you. Old marketing was that you had to fit into an established category or create a new category. Yet too often trying to fit in to a category blands down the product or service. In today’s super-competitive world, distinctiveness can be a powerful differentiator. So what kind of music is Montbleau? He describes himself as “something of a Martin Sexton by way of Van Morrsion and Stevie Wonder.”

9. Give away free “products”: Giving away free stuff helps people experience the “product,” have something to share as they pass along word of mouth, and  builds fan-dom. You can download for free one of the band’s most popular songs, “How Many Times,” as well as tour posters and handbills. The band is also  contributing 50 cents from each ticket to Rock The Earth, and  contributing 50 cents from each ticket to HeadCount’s “Cents for Sense” campaign until the 2008 presidential election.

10. Make it easy to buy: The band makes it easy to buy music whether it’s on their site or on MySpace, and you can buy concert tickets right on their site.

One of my favorite lyrics from Ryan’s music is:

“It’s time to ease from concentration to focus.”

This is true for so many things in life, and  relevant to marketing. It’s time we stop concentrating on the tactics and tools, and flip our focus on earning customers with all the new 2.0 tools.

PS –  Montbleau won second prize in the 2007 International Songwriter’s Competition, competing with 15,000 songs written by amateur and professional songwriters from over 100 countries.

Filed Under: Communities, Smart company stories, Social media strategy, Word of mouth Tagged With: , , ,
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