About a week ago I met up with another entrepreneur here in Buenos Aires named Eric Northam (he is running a cool software-as-a-service business down here called EasyBroker.com – check it out if you get a chance).

He loaned me a book to read while I was down here, Word Of Mouth Marketing, since I’m a little bit short on English reading material.  The book turned out to generate some good ideas.  Below are my notes while reading it.  At the end I posted some ideas it generated for my business.  Maybe it will help you out too.

My notes…

* 90% of WOM marketing happens offline, people mentioning you in passing to friends and colleagues.  We focus on the 10% that happens online because it’s easier to measure and track, but remember it’s only 10%.

* It’s easy to lose track of how important WOM marketing is.  We think of lead generation in terms of things we pay for (like Adwords) but since WOM is free we often don’t realize how many of our new customers came from it.

* give a weird perk to customers, ex. water guns at the car wash, free drinks at the barbershop, enterprise car rental offers to pick you up.  People will talk about it and remember it, it sticks in their head.

* WOM works against you if you suck

* no ad will convince someone if they have heard through WOM that you suck

* be known for something, like the 7 inch high corned beef sandwich in new york – nobody actually needs a 7 inch sandwich, but it’s memorable so it gets repeated to tourists who are looking for something to do

* stop buying ads, thrill your customers and they’ll advertise for you

* be funny, White Castle let people reserve tables for Valentines Day

* give people metrics to show off to their friends

* you can screw up WOM by offering to pay people for it, when the person gets to your website and finds out their friend got paid for it, the recommendation feels less sincere

* search engines only pull one link from the New York Times, but they pull hundreds from blogs, individuals now have the power to talk about you and get noticed, individuals (as a whole) are more important than major media now

* search engines are going to be death to bad companies (side note: why hasn’t this happened already? tons of bad companies still exist – reviews are still too spread out all over the internet in blog comments and forum posts – they don’t have the impact they should, this is one thing I wanted to fix with BuyersVote.com, consolidating reviews into one simple number)

* marketing is what you DO now, not what you say will do.  people will report on what really happened

* if the first couple reviews for a new product on Amazon are negative, it can kill the entire product

* cheap call centers, giving unpaid bills to collection agencies – these steps which companies take to be more profitable are actually going to start hurting them as word of mouth gets recorded online – everyone is a watchdog now, reporting on your actions

* happy customers are the best advertising (cheaper and more effective than Google Adsense)

* advertising is the tax you pay for having an unremarkable product

* negative WOM is an opportunity for you to fix something and show you care

* put a “Tell A Friend” link on every page of your website

* give free food (a weird one) when customers are waiting in line

* remarkable packaging helps start conversations as people carry it around town, make people ask them “what did you just buy?”

* your best WOM customer could be your newest customer, not the one who has been around a while

* every time someone emails you with a problem it’s an opportunity.  Go out of your way to do AWESOME customer support and they’ll tell a few people.  The bar is set pretty low since people are used to terrible call centers.

* You have to become known for something.  Something that is short and simple that people can repeat in casual conversation.  Like “Enterprise, they’ll pick you up” or “go to Joe’s sandwhich shop, they’ve got the biggest meatball sub in New York” or “Have you tried Pandora?  It builds a radio station just for you”.

* Try filling in the blanks about your business: You should really try _______, it’s _________.

* There should not be an ‘and’ in the blank.  Lists don’t work…it’s friendly, affordable, and fun.  It has to be one simple thing, like “they give you free ice cream while you wait”.

* Don’t underestimate the power of doing something silly.  Duct Tape brand has a contest where high schools students make prom dresses and tuxedos out of duct tape.  People talk about it.  Pictures get forwarded around the internet and to relatives.

* Progressive insurance gives you the prices of competitors, even if they’re lower.  Risky right?  Well, no…customers were probably looking at competitors prices anyway, but it’s remarkable they do it so they get word of mouth.

* Don’t be so professional and show some personality, like Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” button.  Or Facebook let’s you change your language to talk like a pirate.  Be weird.

* Give people a free postcard at your hotel (with your Hotel’s name on it).  They needed to send one to their relatives anyway and will happily use yours.

* On your “tell a friend” form, make sure it allows for multiple recipients.  Also make sure the message comes from the referrer, not your website.  They don’t know who you are, but they’ll open a message from their friend.

* YouTube got popular (at least in part) because on every single page they ask people to “Share This Video” and embed it in their own website.

* Hotmail went from 0 to 8 million users in less than two years.  How?  They included a short line at the end of every email “Get Your Free Email From Hotmail”.  Possibly the most pure WOM product of all time.

* Skype spread by WOM because if you wanted the call to be free, the other person had to install Skype too.  Same thing with Fax machines.

* If you ship products, put something unusual in every box you ship.  Like a bag of M&Ms, or a coupon people will hand out.  Or a note asking if they’ll leave you a review on Amazon.

* If you’re going to give away swag (free t-shirts, cups, etc).  Make them cool and stuff that people will actually use.  Can’t tell you how many free t-shirts I’ve seen that are extra large and I will never wear.

* You should have a blog (duh).  It takes time to build it up, but it’s an essential tool today.  It is the modern day resume.  If people can’t find what you’ve done or what you are doing in your career online, it seems less important.  Choose your name as the domain name, if you are doing anything important people are going to Google you.

* Include “easter eggs” in your products.

Some Ideas It Generated For My Businesses

So as I was reading, I would take a few minutes to think about how each idea applied to my various web businesses.

BuyersVote.com is a naturally viral product because it ranks things.  Whenever you claim something or someone is better or worse, it generates controversy and gets people’s attention.  So I came up with some ideas to help multiply this effect.

• Make an “awards” page with the highest and lowest rated items across the entire site.  You could also do best and worst this year, and month also.  This could definitely generate some WOM if people could say “did you see XYZ was the worst rated company of all time?” or “We had the top rated product on BuyersVote this month!”  If you loved the company you’d go there to defend it.  If you hated the company you’d go there to throw gas on the fire.
• Make some badges, little images, that people could display on their site.  They could say thing “top rated cell phone of 2009 on BuyersVote.com” or something like that.
• Make some swag at CafePress.com like maybe a t-shirt that said “Careful, I’ll be rating your performance on BuyersVote.com”.
• Let people Tweet their reviews out!

This last one was quite simple to do, so I actually threw it together and it’s now live on the site.  People can tweet their reviews!  When you’re signed in a little link like this will appear:

For UniversityTutor.com I was thinking about swag I could send to tutors…t-shirts, coffee cups, etc.  But none of these sounded very exciting.  Then I had an interesting idea: what about business cards?

I have a feeling tutors would actually use these because business cards are new and cool for college students (you probably haven’t gotten them before) and if you had them in your dorm room, your friends would probably ask you about them.  I wouldn’t be able to send them to all tutors obviously, but for paying tutors perhaps it would be a worthwhile investment.  How much could it cost to send 250 business cards to a paying tutor?  Maybe less than $10, which is what they pay in their first month.  So it would break even quickly and help generate WOM.  I’d have to investigate this further and see what companies out there could make this process really easy.

Conclusion

The book was quite simple and an easy read.  It didn’t tell me anything earth shattering that I didn’t already know, but at the same time it was very helpful in generating some ideas while I was reading it.  If you’d like to check out the book on Amazon you can see it here.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments about WOM.  Which of these techniques do you think has the most potential?  Which have had the greatest effect in your business?

Finally, just for fun here is a picture of my “office” in Buenos Aires where I spend an average work day.  Pretty tough life, right?

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong