Word Of Mouth | Foghound

A word of mouth story based on fear

February 6, 2010 By Lois Kelly 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: Beelinelabs, Boulette's Larder, marketing control, marketing fear, marketing restaurants, Marketingtwo, Word of mouth

If you think your company is boring…

December 18, 2009 By Lois Kelly Leave a Comment

‘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: Beelinelabs, messaging, sales messages, Social media, Word of mouth

A social media knowledge benchmark

October 12, 2009 By Lois Kelly 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

View more presentations from York University-SSB.

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

What's a talkable brand?

October 4, 2009 By Lois Kelly 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: Beelinelabs, Conversational Marketing, corporate video, John Chambers, Social media, WOMMA, Word of mouth, word of mouth marketing

The sound experience

July 1, 2009 By Lois Kelly 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: customer experience, experience marketing, Hilton hotels, Word of mouth

New research: word-of-mouth effect on sales

May 15, 2009 By Lois Kelly 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, Marketing effectiveness & measurement, Research, Sales, Word of mouth Tagged With: buzz, online conversations, Word of mouth

8 ways to "social mediafy" marketing, PR campaigns

May 6, 2009 By Lois Kelly 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: Beelinelabs, Point of View & Messaging, Public Relations, Social media, Word of mouth

Positioning that helps word of mouth

April 28, 2009 By Lois Kelly 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: Beelinelabs, higher ed marketing, positioning, Word of mouth, word of mouth marketing

Brag books

March 24, 2009 By Lois Kelly 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: naming, Rag and Bone, Word of mouth

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A word of mouth story based on fear

The sound experience

New research: word-of-mouth effect on sales

Positioning that helps word of mouth

Brag books

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