Every once in a while, your talkers need a little something to keep them going. Try feeding them frequent servings of the following:
1> Detailed data
2> Progress reports
3> Company news
1> Detailed data
Share all the geeky technical data and product manuals with your talkers. You’ll be surprised at how much of what you think of as mundane is of great interest to your fans. You’ve probably got all of this information already, throw it on your website somewhere and let everyone know about it.
2> Progress reports
Let your talkers know about your new products in development, future menu items, or next season’s plans. It doesn’t have to be in any fancy format, a simple newsletter or email will be plenty for your fans. If you’ve got something in the works, your current talkers are your best place to start when you’re ready to tell the world.
3> Company news
Fill your talkers in on the personalities and happenings in your office, the new hires, promotions, and anniversaries. Remember, talkers want to be part of your family. Not only will they love to be included, but you’ll put a human face on your organization.
Back in 1994, MIT’s Media Lab created Ringo—an algorithm-based system designed to automate the process of “word-of-mouth” music recommendations.
Here’s the overview of the project:
Recent years have seen the explosive growth of the sheer volume of information. The number of books, movies, news, advertisements, and in particular on-line information, is staggering. The volume of things is considerably more than any person can possibly filter through in order to find the ones that he or she will like. … We need technology to help us wade through all the information to find the items we really want and need, and to rid us of the things we do not want to be bothered with.
Ringo allowed users to create personal “profiles” where they rated bands on a scale of 1-7. Recommendations were then made to users based upon values assigned by other people of similar tastes — a bit like a crude Pandora or iTunes Genius.
Though Ringo was designed as an “automated word of mouth system,” perhaps most telling in terms of word of mouth findings is the rapid adoption and success of Ringo itself, which achieved 1,000 users in less than a month (in a time before Twitter, modern blogging, or Google) with little to no advertising. The system eventually expanded into movie, website, and community recommendations and amassed such large amounts of profile data from end users that they worked with the federal government to help define consumer privacy protection in the digital age.
While there isn’t a lot of info as to what ultimately became of Ringo, we were able to dig up this article from Seattle Weekly which describes how Ringo became known as “Firefly,” made its founder, Pattie Maes, a millionaire and was acquired by Microsoft in 1998 when the system was integrated into the company’s Passport Web ID product.
Read the original MIT paper outlining Ringo.
In a study of more than 300 internet users, the Society for New Communications Research reveals how customer care experiences lead to online word of mouth conversations. The findings include:
- 74% choose companies/brands based on others’ customer care experiences shared online
- 81% believe that blogs, online rating systems and discussion forums can give consumers a greater voice regarding customer care, but less than 33% believe that businesses take customers’ opinions seriously
- 72.2% of respondents research companies’ customer care online prior to purchasing products and services at least sometimes
- 59.1% of respondents use social media to “vent” about a customer care experience
Word of mouth and social media represent keys to success for a large number of CEOs, according to the 2008 CEO Survey by PRWeek and Burson-Marsteller.
Mark J. Penn, President of Burson-Marsteller said of the survey, "CEOs should understand that many of their stakeholders are active users of social media and it can be an extremely effective means for communicating a message. I would argue that companies that are not engaging in social media are taking a bigger risk than the companies that are."
Key findings:
- 60% of CEOs report word of mouth influence has increased in the past three years, making it the fasted growing perceived source of impact on a business’ overall reputation
- 42% of CEOs personally participate in social media
- Nearly 1 in 3 CEOs believe social media tools can be an effective way to communicate with stakeholders
Learn more.
