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Love from fans and happy customers isn’t worth much if prospective customers don’t see it. How to bring yours into the open:
1. Post reviews and testimonials 2. Promote the positive conversations 3. Pull fans together
1. Post reviews and testimonials
Reviews and testimonials are powerful word of mouth tools, but only if potential buyers can see them. Unbury yours by featuring them on your home page, your product pages, your sales collateral, on store shelves – anywhere customers might see them. If buyers can’t find your praise from happy customers, what good is it?
2. Promote the positive conversations
Look for people saying good things about you and get it in front of your potential customers. Simple tools like Google Alerts and Twitter searches will help you find these discussions. When you find them, look for opportunities to link to them, to include them in your content, and to point new customers to these third-party discussions.
3. Pull fans together
A great way to show off your word of mouth is to create opportunities for your talkers to come together. Potential customers take notice when you host rallies, user conferences, and fan get-togethers. This is word of mouth that becomes highly visible — and highly contagious.
[Welcome back to the You Can Be a Word of Mouth Marketing Supergenius! newsletter. This is text from the great issue all of our email subscribers just received. Sign yourself up using the handy form on the right.]
When you’re beginning to track your word of mouth online, it helps to look at how big brands — companies that often track tons of conversations — do it. A few ideas to get you started:
1> Create a baseline
2> Focus on the key topics
3> Put a team behind it
1> Create a baseline
Finding your baseline of conversation levels should be your first priority when starting to track your word of mouth. When The Home Depot launched their monitoring program, finding their initial baseline helped them figure out what “normal” conversation levels looked like. Once you have your baseline, you can then measure how effective different topics and tactics are at moving the needle.
2> Focus on the key topics
For UPS, using automated systems to track online conversations is a challenge because it’s tough to filter out the unrelated discussions — comments about “sit-ups”, “pick-ups”, “tweet-ups”, “mash-ups”, etc. So instead of sifting through millions of unrelated conversations, administrative assistants at UPS are each given a specific topic related to the brand to follow online. The program takes advantage of an underutilized staff resource and gets a human eye involved in the filtering.
3> Put a team behind it
At Dell, they’re serious about making listening to the customer a key priority. They just launched their Social Media Listening Command Center staffed by a team focused on the real-time conversations about Dell. And while most brands don’t have the resources to pull this off, you can get your program off the ground by putting someone in charge of listening and giving them the tools to get started.
Come to BlogWell: How Big Brands Use Social Media on November 9 to hear SAP, SunGard, American Express, Scholastic, BlackRock, Johnson & Johnson, The Hershey Company, and Pfizer share case studies in corporate social media. You’ll learn how to get started, get past roadblocks, and make your social media program phenomenal — in one afternoon, for just $250.
You’ll get practical, how-to advice on creating great content, getting management buy-in, educating employees, keeping lawyers and regulators happy, simple and ethical disclosure, and engaging fans. You’ll ask questions, discover new ideas, and get answers from people who have been there, done that — all in four hours.
In his BlogWell case study, “Chevron Pulse Report: The State of Online Conversation About Energy Issues,” Chevron’s Manager of Corporate Interactive Communications, Robert Raines, shared how they are taking social media monitoring to the next level to build awareness of energy issues.
You know your company needs to pay attention to how it’s being talked about online… you’re just not sure of the best way to make it happen. Learn from Dell’s Manish Mehta and UPS’ Debbie Curtis-Magley who deal with this every day.
You’ll learn:
What kind of conversations to watch for
What tools are available to help you monitor
How to find the right time to join the conversations
This is GasPedal's blog about all things word of mouth marketing. We cover everything from the best word of mouth case studies to the latest research, focusing on the practical ideas you can use to get your fans talking about you.
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2. Promote the positive conversations
