Your best talkers aren’t always your customers — rather, it’s often the people who talk to those customers.
When looking for your next group of talkers, think teachers, doctors, industry analysts, journalists, neighbors, barbers — anyone who has regular contact with your customers.
How a word of mouth supergenius does it:
Each month during the summer, Chicago’s Hard Rock Cafe hosts a “Taxicab Tuesday.” The event is pretty simple: They set up a small stand in their parking lot and hand out fresh coffee to passing taxi drivers.
But the cab drivers get pretty excited about it, making sure to pass by the Hard Rock on those mornings, with a few even cutting across traffic to make the stop.
It all adds up to a cheap and simple way for the Hard Rock to start conversations with the people who offer restaurant suggestions to tourists all day.
[Welcome back to the Word of Mouth Marketing newsletter. This is text of the great issue all of our email subscribers just received. Sign yourself up using the handy form on the right.]
In this issue, our Social Media Business Council Chief Evangelist, Bob Pearson, shares his tips for creating your word of mouth marketing plan:
1> Know your talkers first
2> Avoid getting lost in tools and tactics
3> Fans love to help
4> Listen to Bob’s live Supergenius preview
You can see Bob — as well as 30 other brilliant word of mouth marketers — live at GasPedal’s Word of Mouth Supergenius on December 16 in Chicago. This “How to be Great at Word of Mouth Marketing” conference features 12 how-to classes, 12 real-world case studies, and 6 brilliant authors.
1> Know your talkers first
Your plan to get people talking should begin with identifying who you hope to talk. Bob recommends initially focusing on your potential talkers by learning the language they use, the communities they join, and who they seek influence from. Bob suggests the simple step of putting your brand and key topics into Google and asking yourself if you have a personal relationship with everyone who shows up on the first page.
2> Avoid getting lost in tools and tactics
Word of mouth is much bigger than social media tools — it’s something you build into everything you do. While a YouTube channel or Facebook page may be part of your overall strategy, Bob says real word of mouth is the result of all the work you’ve done to get to know your customers. If you start thinking tactics instead of talkers, you’ll immediately narrow the potential ideas and strategies you could use to get people sharing.
3> Fans love to help
When building your plan and thinking about how to reach influencers, don’t overlook the people who already buy and love your stuff. Bob says that customers typically want to do one of three things: 1) Share ideas to help each other, 2) Share knowledge about products to help peers, or 3) Help solve a fellow customer’s problem because they’ve been there before. Before you get too far in your plan, be sure to ask: How does this involve our existing fan base?
4> Listen to Bob’s live Supergenius preview
Hear Bob expand on his big ideas for creating your word of mouth marketing plan, as well as reveal his word of mouth superpower here:
[Welcome back to the You Can Be a Word of Mouth Marketing Supergenius! newsletter. This is text of the great issue all of our email subscribers just received. Sign yourself up using the handy form on the right.]
There are certain products, issues, and groups of talkers that have natural word of mouth barriers. Here are three common examples and how to overcome them:
1> The secret advantage
2> The embarrassing issue
3> The busy group of talkers
1> The secret advantage
Sometimes your stuff is so good it creates a competitive advantage that people don’t want to give away. While it sounds like a good problem to have, you’ve got to work extra hard to spread the word by creating case studies, how-to videos, and stuff that people can easily pass on. If you’ve got something fantastic that people aren’t readily sharing, it’s up to you to create the material that everyone can spread.
2> The embarrassing issue
If using your product reveals something embarrassing about a customer, it’s going to be difficult for them to tell friends about you — much less strangers. You can overcome this by making it easy for them to share reviews in an environment where they don’t have to specifically identify themselves or by creating a forum for people to ask questions and post tips anonymously. If you make it easier for folks to talk about the embarrassing issue without attaching their face to the topic, you’ll dramatically reduce the word of mouth barrier.
3> The busy group of talkers
If you’re targeting a busy group of talkers to help spread your stuff, you’ve got to radically simplify the sharing. Put everything in email form (because it’s still the easiest to forward), give them ready-to-forward whitepapers (without making them enter a bunch of annoying information), and give them lots of simple links to quickly share stuff via Twitter or Facebook. Busy talkers can be fantastic at spreading your word of mouth — they’ve often got big networks and are constantly making new contacts — but you’ve got to make it easy on them by making it extra simple.
When brainstorming groups of talkers, it’s important to think beyond the people who buy your stuff. Ferrari’s biggest talkers, for example, aren’t expensive car buyers, they’re the 15-year-old kids with posters on the wall. Your best talkers may be local cab drivers, waiters at area restaurants, or bellhops.
Gap got it right when they reached out to NYSE traders, introducing their new line of 1969 Premium Jeans. Here’s the article from New York Magazine:
Gap’s aggressive marketing push for its new 1969 denim line included sending jeans to a bunch of fashion bloggers, but also, apparently, Wall Street traders. On Friday, the company dressed 1,200 New York Stock Exchange traders in its new 1969 Premium Jeans. Gap only recently stopped losing money after months of double-digit losses, so now they just have to convince the financial community Gap shares are a smart investment. When the bell rang on Friday, Gap stock had climbed to $19.48 per share — the highest it’s been since last September. Free clothes do magical things.
The Lesson: Fresh topics represent only a portion of your word of mouth opportunities — great word of mouth marketers are always hunting for new talker groups as well.
Thanks to @emoran19 for sharing the story with us.
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.
The Social Media Business Council, formerly the Blog Council, is a brands-only community that helps large organizations build successful social media programs.
When brainstorming groups of talkers, it’s important to think beyond the people who buy your stuff. Ferrari’s biggest talkers, for example, aren’t expensive car buyers, they’re the 15-year-old kids with posters on the wall. Your best talkers may be local cab drivers, waiters at area restaurants, or bellhops.
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