The Word of Mouth Bandwagon Gets Crowded
January 19th, 2006
There’s a great post by Ben McConnell over at Church of the Customer talking about how the universe of word of mouth marketing companies is getting rather crowed with all the brand-spankin’ new agencies that are popping up. After all, if BzzAgent can charge six figures for a six week “campaign,” there has to be plenty money to go around, right?
This is what Ben calls the beginning of the word of mouthbubble. And we all saw it coming even before the first WOMMA conference back in March of ’05. I still hold to the statement I wrote earlier that if someone calls themselves a WOM expert, be wary. There is no such think – yet. This brand new world of harnessing (I prefer to use the words supporting and nurturing) WOM is in its infancy and is still very fragile. When you visit the majority of the websites for these new companies (me2u marketing, BoldMouth, BazaarVoice, Buzzoodle, Tell-A-Pal, etc.) it is still very unclear as to what they’re selling and what you’re getting as a deliverable. (And guys, you could do a little better with your names, as well.)
No one is telling the story about building word of mouth into your identity. It’s all about “we’ll generate some buzz” or “we’ll find some influential cool people to make your product be hip.”
Ugh.
Start with a great product or service. Build a culture around it. And then reflect that in your story. We’ve said it once, we’ll say it again: sustainable word of mouth can never be found in a campaign. Oh, it exists – but only if you build it into your company, into your culture and into your identity.
Other posts by Spike.
Olivier Blanchard says:
That last paragraph is the key to it all. You can generate buzz around an event or a product release, but the real when it comes to WOM starts with the company itself. With its products and people and purpose and impact. A company’s culture definitely drives all of these things. That being said, many of us (BoF included) were already knee deep into this long before WOM became the acronym of the moment.
February 21st, 2006 at 8:44 amBuzzoodle Ron says:
We did not know about WOM when we started either. We were just fed up with employees not feeling like they needed to create some buzz for where they work. Whole thing has taken on a life of it’s own.
February 21st, 2006 at 8:45 amRachel says:
After attending the WOMBAT training I realize that yes, WOM or WOMM (I’m not quite sure) should be integrated into your company or in my case the movement. However, my question is now how do you integrate it when it wasn’t there in the first place? And how mind you do you convince an agency of our lovely government that they need to put more power into the hands of their constituents? As I gear up for legislator visits with 15 yr olds it all bumbles around in my head…that and words like RSS, blog and WOM units, c’mon man how the heck is the state of NY ever gonna buy into the concept of the WOM unit? And now I’m imagining our governor writing a blog…now that right thur…that’s funny. I would say they very appropriatly call you the firestarted Spike…lets just hope my fire doesn’t burn the wrong people.
February 21st, 2006 at 8:45 am