Word

Recently, Partner Ted Wright offered up this response to Mike Hoffman’s Inc. Article, “Lies, damn lies, and word of mouth.”

To brief; in his piece, Hoffman draws on the practices of companies like BzzAgent to address the topic of full disclosure, and grapples with various subsets of word of mouth marketing, specifically attempting to gauge the methods' effectiveness and longevity.

Here’s what Ted had to say.

Full Disclosure: Liquid Intelligence is a WOMMA charter member and I’ve spoken on the topic of word of mouth at several industry conferences including WOMMA.

Mike, thanks for the interesting article about WOMMA and word of mouth. I was particularly interested in your idea that the conventional wisdom today is that “everybody lies.” The inference I picked up from that sentence was that maybe the effectiveness of word of mouth suffers because people think that everyone lies. This is an interesting point and gets close to what I think distinguishes good word of mouth programming from GREAT word of mouth programming. To be most effective, a word of mouth program should have its recommendations come from people (we call them Influencers) who are perceived as experts by the person to which the communication is being sent.. Most often this perception has been established by previous conversations or actions but can also be established by something as simple as the Influencers personality, speech or style of dress.

Example - I have a friend who is a chef. I know him and his wife and have been to their house before and seen book shelves full of cook books, chef autobiographies, histories of kitchen tools, etc.. Last week he told me about a great new restaurant. I booked a reservation the next day without hesitation, further research or consulting others. Since we have a three year old, “going out” requires a logistics to rival a small invasion so this was no small leap of faith. I took this leap because I perceive this man as an expert in fine dining. If he had talked with me about a new CD he was listening to or car he enjoyed I would not have reacted in the same way because I don’t perceive him as having a particular expertise in those areas.

Finding experts who are also Influencers, getting them to listen to a brand story and then having them adopt the story as their own are the three keys to having a GREAT word of mouth program. Internally we refer to it as having Influencers that are “close to the brand”. When you have word of mouth programs that are populated by people that are close to the brand, then questions like “Are we obliged to talk about a product we don’t like?” which you noted crop up in programs like the ones created by BzzAgent don't even get raised.



We hear you, Ted. -LR