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Topics are the ideas, features, and attention-grabbers you use to give your talkers something to talk about. You should be creating and testing as many as you can, as often as you can, until you find a few that really take off.
What to remember when developing yours:
1. Keep it simple
2. Make it organic
3. Look for the unexpected
1. Keep it simple
Simple topics are easy to share and are much more likely to get repeated than long, jargon-filled ones. Recent favorites to inspire you are IKEA’s “Manland,” JetBlue’s auctioning of seats on eBay, and the library where you can check out a human being. All these topics are great because they’re simple, they’re fun, and they’re easy to tell a friend about.
2. Make it organic
Organic topics are built in to your products. They’re key features, perks, and bonuses that inspire conversations. The best all-time example of this is the flower vase built in to VW Bugs. This simple feature continues to start conversations every day, even though it originally came out in the 1950’s. (Note: VW removed this feature for the 2012 model, which is a topic for a future issue on how to kill a great conversation.)
3. Look for the unexpected
Some of your best topics will come not from you, but from your fans. Watch how people use and talk about your stuff and if you see a great topic emerge (even if it’s not perfectly aligned with your brand message), go with it. Think like Duck brand duct tape when they saw kids creating prom outfits with their tape. They saw a great topic and created a scholarship to encourage other kids to do it, and have since created a whole bunch of new conversations.
[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.]
Topics are what fuel your word of mouth program. They’re the experiences, features, and moments that drive conversations about you — and it’s important you’ve got a plan to keep them going. The three stages your plan should include:
1. A topic you can use today
2. A campaign worth talking about
3. A commitment to making everything buzzworthy
1. A topic you can use today
The beauty of word of mouth is that you can get started, right now, with no budget or extensive preparation. The first part of creating your topics plan is to dive in and start experimenting. When you see what gets shared (and what doesn’t), you’ll start to develop a good idea of how to get your talkers excited. So give it a go. Try something, see what happens, and try again.
2. A campaign worth talking about
You can create fantastic topics from campaigns specifically designed to generate word of mouth. This is stuff like repeatable advertising, content with viral potential, and the occasional goofy stunt. These will require a little more planning, but you can probably get most of them going in just a few weeks.
3. A commitment to making everything buzzworthy
The best topic of all comes from fundamentally being a brand worth talking about. This is why we love Apple, Southwest Airlines, Chick-fil-A, and Moleskine notebooks. It’s a combination of great products, uniqueness, personality, remarkable brand experiences — and a fundamental commitment to word of mouth.
[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.]
You can have amazing word of mouth — and you can get started on it today. There are a lot of advanced techniques you could use, but all you need to get your program going are these basics:
1. Start with a single group of talkers
2. Try a new topic today
3. Track, measure, and repeat
1. Start with a single group of talkers
Start your word of mouth program by focusing on getting a single group of talkers telling more people about you. Aim for a specific group of customers or people that talk to your customers. Think cab drivers, waiters, business travelers, new customers, longtime customers — the more focused, the better.
2. Try a new topic today
Once you’ve decided on your talkers, your job is to give them something to talk about. Things like sales and discounts, a special event, or new product features are classic ways to get people talking. Don’t get too complicated, just focus on a topic that is simple, portable, and repeatable.
3. Track, measure, and repeat
Add simple tracking tools to help you measure the results. Try special coupon codes you can track, follow the online conversation levels about you, and start asking “How did you hear about us?” on all of your forms. Whether you’ve earned a bunch of new talkers or just a few, you’ll now have a framework to quickly test and measure your next word of mouth experiment.
[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.]
A great word of mouth topic drives long-term word of mouth. There’s no magic formula for creating them, but here are a few signs you’ve got one:
1> It gets your staff excited
2> It survives after being passed along
3> It has room for improvement
1> It gets your staff excited
Your staff can be a great test audience for your topics. They work with you and the brand every day, so anything that gets them buzzing stands a good chance of doing the same for customers. Take a lesson from SNL’s Andy Samberg and his crew behind all those viral video hits — they only move forward with an idea if it gets them laughing first.
2> It survives after being passed along
Remember the telephone game? As it turns out, it’s a pretty helpful word of mouth test. After your word of mouth topic starts getting shared, watch to see how second and third-party talkers repeat it. If it comes back recognizable, you’ve got a strong topic. If not, simplify and repeat until it does.
3> It has room for improvement
You don’t have to wait until your topic is perfect before you can run with it. Actually, it’s often better if it isn’t. With room for growth and improvement, you can keep breathing new life into an older topic. Think Google Maps. Every so often they add some great new feature (Satellite View, Street View, and now, Map Maker) that gives us a whole new reason to talk.
