If you never knew there were actual "mechanics" to word-of-mouth in today's sales and business world, Seth Godin has set you straight with his latest post about the topic (as well as a link to a fun post about why Mims is hot...but you'll have to dig deep into his post to find out why that made me smile when I typed it).
Seth's main point: We like talking about stuff that we like.
An excerpt from his thoughts:
Last weekend, I saw The Hoax, with Richard Gere. It's a fantastic movie, one of the best I've seen in a while. As soon as it ended, I had a compulsion to tell you about it. So I sat down and had a long talk with myself about why.
Why was it so important to me to tell other people? It's not a movie that will make the world a better place. It won't increase my reputation or give me a sense of power to be able to tell people about it. So why?
I don't know. It's just a really good movie.
It stopped and made me think, "What is it that I have enjoyed sharing with other people that has nothing to do with improving me professionally or monetarily?" Here's a short list of things I remember word-of-mouthing about this week:
- The fish taco combo at Rubio's.
- How I loathe AT&T and their incompetence from top to bottom.
- My ex-college roommate, Johnny G. Watson, is a great track coach who can help runners become faster.
- Shafter is a great place to live. Great people, growing community. We love it here.
- GoDaddy is one of the best all-around online business resource providers on the planet. I love them.
- If you want a cool website designed quickly for a staggeringly miniscule sum of money, check out my friends at HotPlum. You won't believe how good their work is and how great their prices are. Seriously.
Those are just a few that came to mind that I talked about during actual conversations this week. There was nothing in it for me, but there's definitely something in it for each of the things that I talked about. If I'm talking about them, so are other people like me.
So what are they saying about you and your company, product or business?
I think much of WOM's strength's stem from the fact that people are getting more and more insecure today, about everything. That is why sometimes it works like a checkpoint for not making mistakes and getting a bruised ego, sometimes as a net to find people similar to us, sometimes to prove that we are so smart that we can tell other people how to do things exactly like we do.
No matter what the WOM is the way of the future for Marketing.
For details about it, read my post in http://shammograffity.wordpress.com about "Remedy to media madness"
Posted by: shahriar amin | April 12, 2007 5:07 AM | Permalink to Comment