Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM)

Word-of-mouth is what is generated when someone talks about somebody else. Somebody gets excited about something they saw on TV or bought and tells a friend, and they "catch" the excitement and go out and buy it too.Word-of-mouth marketing is the art of generating positive word of mouth, harnessing excitement around the product or service, and riding it all the way to the bank.

Buzz, viral marketing, grassroots campaigns, blogs, influencers, social media, customer engagement, referral marketing, customer evangelism, reputation marketing-- all part of word-of-mouth marketing.

Positive word-of-mouth spreads like a disease, which is why viral marketing is such a great name for it.

There's negative word-of-mouth marketing too. The old chestnut that if someone has a good experience they tell two people but if they have a bad experience they tell ten is quite true even if the numbers aren't precise. It could be 3 and 7 or 1 and 10. Still, negative word of mouth can kill you. Think what the prospects are of a restaurant succeeding if a food critic shows up the first night and a cockroach walks across his table. Nada is what that place's prospects of success are.

Not everything spreads quickly. Some things spread faster than others. To read more about what spreads and what doesn't, there's a host of books. Or you can read the Wikipedia article on Word of Mouth and follow their links.

You want to generate lots of positive word of mouth. It will make you rich.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Word of Mouth

Have you heard about this? If you haven't you've been spending a significant amount of time off in cave somewhere reading Proust or something.

Here's what Wikipedia says about it:

The passing of information by verbal means, especially recommendations, but also general information, in an informal, person-to-person manner. Word of mouth is typically considered a face-to-face spoken communication, although phone conversations, text messages sent via SMS and web dialogue, such as online profile pages, blog posts, message board threads, instant messages and emails are often now included in the definition of word of mouth. There is some overlap in meaning between word of mouth and the following: rumour, gossip, innuendo, and hearsay; however word of mouth is more commonly used to describe positive information being spread rather than negative, although this is not always the case.

Go read the Wikipedia article and google word of mouth because there are rafts of stuff on it.

It's important for us to be conscious of word of mouth (WOM) because spreading awareness about your product or service is the fastest path to growth. It means you have people out their working for you that you don't even have to pay. If news of your product spreads twice as fast as news of a competing product, everything else being equal, your sales are going to grow twice as fast as your competitors. Lots of factors enter into it but learning about what WOM is, how it's generated, and pulling the levers is an important thing for you. Faster growth, more sales, more cash, more news coverage, more investors, etc.

Any ideas on WOM? I'd like to know. Maybe we can get people talking about it. Post a comment.

My ideas on entrepreneurship informs all my professional activities. For entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com and for entrepreneurial writing to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blotspot.com

Watercooler Effect

From Wordspy.com: "The effect created by two or more employees having an informal, face-to-face conversation, as though at a watercooler." To read the entire entry go to www.wordspy.com.

Wordspy.com is an excellent source of words that have come into common usage but haven't yet made it into the dictionary. Most of them are silly, but some are good, like "cleanout", the act of taking everything out of a house and hauling it away. If you want to keep track of what's new on the block, look at neologisms. They tell you what's new. I prowl Wordspy.com just to get new ideas. And if the change continues to accelerate, the dictionary may get more and more out of date. Plus, I like learning about words.

The watercooler effect is basically viral marketing. Information and opportunities are passed from person to person. Back when we all watched I Love Lucy, people used to congregate around the watercooler and talk to each other. Of course that was when you could work for the same company all your life. Now, they project 5-20 careers in a lifetime.

What do you think? Post a comment.

Entrepreneurship informs my entire professional life. For entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for entrepreneurial writing go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.com

Sticky Content

For "Sticky Content," Wikipedia gives us:

Sticky content refers to content published on a website, which has the purpose of getting a user to return to that particular website or hold their attention and get them to spend longer periods of time at that site. Webmasters use this method to build up a community of returning visitors to a website. Examples of sticky content include the following: Chat room, Online forum, Webmail, Internet games, Weather, News, Horoscopes, and much more. Sticky content is also sometimes called sticky tools or sticky gear. Websites featuring sticky content are often referred to as sticky sites.

Having a sticky website is important because users are more likely to come back to it and to tell other people about it. These are called network externatlities, and in everything we do we need as much as we can put ourselves in a position to leverage network effects. Imagine Velcro that sticks to everything. The ideal website is like that.

Is your website sticky? What do you think? Post a comment.

Entrepreneurship informs my real estate practice and my writing. For entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com for entrepreneurial writing and publishing.

Incidence

The spread of innovation through networks mimics the spread of disease through populations. Hence the term, "viral marketing." So the concept of "incidence," a term from epidemiology may be appropriate for entrepreneurs to use.

From Wikipedia, the free, on-line encyclopedia, "incidence" is

A measure of the risk of developing some new condition within a specified period of time. Although sometimes loosely expressed simply as the number of new cases during some time period, it is better expressed as a proportion or a rate with a denominator."

The Wikipedia article also gives the term, "incidence proportion," also known as "cumulative incidence":

The number of new cases within a specified time period divided by the size of the population initially at risk. For example, if a population initially contains 1,000 non-diseased persons and 28 develop a condition over two years of observation, the incidence proportion is 28 cases per 1,000 persons, i.e. 2.8%.

And then, the article also describes the "incidence rate":

The number of new cases per unit of person-time at risk. In the same example as above, the incidence rate is 14 cases per 1000 person-years, because the incidence proportion (28 per 1,000) is divided by the number of years (two). Using person-time rather than just time handles situations where the amount of observation time differs between people, or when the population at risk varies with time.

Anyone interested in the term should read the entire Wikipedia article and follow all the links and references.

Epidemiology offers offers the entrepreneur a way of shifting perspective to think about the creation and adoption of new products in new ways. Rather than time-worn jargon such as "market share," "market potential," and so forth, think of markets in terms the extent to which various networks are at risk of adopting new products.

If you like what I say, post a comment. Entrepreneurship informs all my professional activities. For entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for entrepreneurial writing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blotspot.com.

Wilson's Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing

According to Dr. Ralph F. Wilson,

Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.

Wilson goes on. To paraphrase, an effective viral marketing strategy (1) "Gives away products or services"; (2) "Provides for effortless transfer to others"; (3) "Scales easily from small to very large"; (4) "Exploits common motivations and behaviors"; (5) Utilizes existing communication networks"; and (6) "Takes advantage of others' resources." To read more about it, go to www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles.htm. He elaborates using Hotmail as an example.

Everything I do is entrepreneurial. To see my thoughts on Real Estate 2.0, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog. For entrepreneurial writing and publishing, go to www.thekearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com