Doug DavidoffWord of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking by Andy Sernovitz promises to give you, the busy executive, an easy-to-read, easy-to-understand methodology that will help you reduce customer acquisition costs, gain an incalculable amount of free advertising, provide you a better return than traditional advertising and it will make your salespeople more productive. Better yet, it delivers on most of the promise.
Servovitz says there are four key rules to effective word of mouth:
- Be interesting,
- Make people happy,
- Earn trust and respect, and
- Make it easy.
One of Sernovitz’s most interesting lists is his ‘Word of Mouth Manifesto’:
- Happy customers are you best advertising
- Marketing is easy. Earn the respect and recommendation of your customers. They will do your marketing for you, for free.
- Ethics and good service come first.
- Negative word of mouth is an opportunity. Listen and learn.
- People are already talking. Your only option is to join the conversation.
- Be interesting or be invisible.
- If it's not worth talking about, it's not worth doing.
- Make the story of your company a good one.
- It is more fun to work at a company that people want to talk about.
- Use the power of WOM to make business treat people better.
- Honest marketing makes more money
This book is not written for ‘marketers’, but for ‘doers.’ Regardless of the experience of the reader, Word of Mouth Marketing is chock full of ideas that will get you to think and act differently. As a word of mouth proponent for years, and a consultant that enables companies to stimulate positive word of mouth, I have to admit that I was slightly embarrassed as I was reading the book, underlining ideas that my own company had not yet implemented. Needless to say, my marketing department has a much longer to-do list than it had previously.