Secrets Of Word of Mouth Marketing George Silverman
Secrets of Word of Mouth Marketing by George Silverman
Book Summary Review
The full title of this book review is "The Secrets of Word of Mouth Marketing: How To Trigger Exponential Sales Through Runaway Word Of Mouth" by George Silverman.
Current Situation
We are overloaded with so many advertising messages that our minds subconsciously screen out the vast majority and we just never become aware of the products that the adverts are pushing. See Seth Godin's book "Permission Marketing" for a very interesting discussion.
At the same time we are becoming increasingly distrustful of advertising. It seems that some people don't tell the truth - see another of Seth Godin's books "All Marketers Are Liars".
The way to deal with all this hype and advertising noise has been to rely on word of mouth recommendations and referrals (although I should point out that you can read as well as hear word of mouth.)
This topic and the battle to win attention of our prospective customers, particularly in a Web 2.0 environment was discussed by Rich Schefren in his Attention Age Doctrine Part 2 and I recommend that you grab your free copy while it is still available.
It is also consistent with the extracts from the Jay Conrad Levinson and Monroe Mann book "Guerrilla Networking" that I recently featured.
We believe other people before we believe advertisers and the companies themselves and therefore word of mouth can be the most powerful and persuasive of marketing weapons available to you.
The Secrets Of Word Of Mouth Marketing
< p>The impression I have from reading the BusinessSummaries report is that The Secrets of Word of Mouth Marketing is packed with information to help you to increase your sales and speed up your customers' decision time through the effective use of deliberate word of mouth tactics and strategies.
The BusinessSummaries reports are usually 8 to 12 pages long while this one runs to 13.5 pages and my one criticism is that it is dense. Ideas come too thick and fast as the summariser has struggled to pack everything necessary into the allotted space.
The Power Of Word Of Mouth
The book is based around a central concept:
- The best way to increase sales and profits is to accelerate prospects' favourable buying decisions.
- The best way to accelerate decisions is to make them easier.
- The best way to make the decision easier is by using word of mouth recommendations rather than low credibility advertising, sales people and other traditional marketing methods.
That sounds reasonable to me.
I am sure that you have seen the benefit of referrals in your business and also when you are buying. Decisions are made easier and faster and the book says that on average two out of every five recommendations are acted upon.
Positive & Negative Word Of Mouth
While the aim is to encourage positive word of mouth recommendations, the book identifies nine levels of word of mouth, four positive and four negative with indifference in the middle.
There are statistics that show that unhappy buyers tell many more people about a bad experience than happy buyers boast about a good one. That makes a deliberate word of mouth strategy essential to minimise bad news as well as to encourage positive statements.
The spreading of opinion is certainly one of the most interesting phenomena of the Internet Age. Bad news can spread very quickly through viral emails and social networking sites.
Harnessing Word Of Mouth
The book proposes a six step process for implementing a word of mouth strategy to speed up decision making and increase the proportion of favourable buying decisions that are outlined in the BusinessSummaries report.
One of the issues I liked and found intriguing was the concept of designer your word of mouth tactics to the decision making process of the different types of buyers.
Some people like to be seen as innovators and want the latest products, others have be to be dragged into purchasing new technology almost on a "there is no alternative" basis with a wide spectrum of people in between these two extremes.
This is covered by a technique called the Decision Matrix.
Conclusion
I have only scratched the surface of what the BusinessSummaries report covers.
It is packed with information to make you think about how you are currently using word of mouth recommendations and what you can do to encourage more positive word of mouth.
I had not expected a book about word of mouth which is really a specialised area of marketing to contain so much and reading the Business Summary has helped make me aware that I could do more to encourage word of mouth recommendations in my own business.
I rate the "Secrets of Word of Mouth Marketing" by George Silverman a four star business brief - I am very glad that I have read the summary but I need to know more so I have added the book to my list of future purchases.
You can buy the book from Amazon UK or USA (note - buying it from the UK is currently very expensive because only the audio version is available). Alternatively you can join BusinessSummaries.
There is also a Nightingale Conant audio version of The Secrets of Word of Mouth Marketing if you prefer listening to reading.
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