Tag Archives: word of mouth

Dec 3 2009

The 3^3 Project: 2009

Around this time last year, I came up with 3^3 — an idea to endorse genuine word-of-mouth by promoting products and services that deserve recognition.  If the Super Bowl is the day where we stop and appreciate great advertising (and occasionally football), then maybe 3^3 can be a time for us to stop and spread great WOM for things that more people really should know about.

And yes, I did just compare an idea for a blog post to the Super Bowl.

If you didn’t take part in the 2008 round of 3^3, here’s the full explanation (scroll to the bottom to get the gist of it):

Over the year, we all discovered new things that we now love and recommend to everyone.  Restaurants, food, beer, movies, songs, albums, bands, books, websites, blogs, articles, software, Youtube videos, etc.  We recommend them because we’re confident that they’ll enrich another person’s life in some way or another.  This is genuine word-of-mouth marketing. The person making the suggestion has nothing to gain from it personally, other than the satisfaction that he gets from knowing that he’s made someone’s life a little better.

But when you’re online, it’s a bit harder to find authentic recommendations.  You don’t know if the source is being paid to write something or if they’re doing their friend a favor or what.  But I’m not going to let that happen on this post.

I’m calling this “The 3^3 Project” (three to the third) because you need to recommend 3 things, describe each of them in 3 sentences, and then ask 3 more people to join this discussion.  It allows us to find really cool stuff through word-of-mouth, and possibly even come up with some Christmas gift ideas.

What I want you to do is this:

  • Post (preferably in the comment section below or on your own blog) your top 3 favorite things that you’ve really gotten into this year and want other people to check out.  Your suggestions can be anything.  They don’t even have to be things that came out this year; you just have to have fallen in love with them in the last 12 months.
  • For each of your recommendations, you have to sell us on each thing in 3 sentences or less.  No paragraphs — just a few sentences.  Bonus points if you make it actionable by including a link, which will make it easier for everyone to actually see what you’re talking about.
  • After that, you should ask 3 more people to add to the list.  Or you can blog about it and pingback to here.

Rules / Guidelines:

  • No more than 3 things. Think hard about all the stuff you’ve fallen in love with this year and really narrow it down to the best of the best.
  • Be specific. Don’t say things like “Film – Get into watching movies!”  Tell us which 3 films you really loved this year and why we’d love them, too.
  • Give us a link. Where can we find / buy the product you’re recommending?  Where can I listen to that song by your favorite band?  Can I test out the software you love?  Make it easy on us and LINK IT UP!
  • Avoid mainstream recommendations. No one wants to hear about how great the iPhone is.  But if you’ve found a really great iPhone app, tell us about that.
  • NO SELF-PROMOTION OR PROMOTING SERVICES YOU’RE AFFILIATED WITH. If you try to make your recommendations about you, your friend, or your company in any way (“I recommend my blog – I really got into it this year LOL!!1″), you will have officially killed the spirit of this list.  I will delete your comment if I get a self-promo vibe from it.  And so help me god if you post an affiliate link…

So that’s it.  Your 3 favorite things from 2009, in 3 sentences or less.  Then ask 3 more people to join.

Here are my 3:

  1. Backpack by 37 Signals – I use this everyday to keep me on schedule and my life in order.  Only $7 per month for an incredibly easy, painless way to store, organize, and collaborate on documents/projects over the web (and more).  Take a tour here, or try it free for 30 days at the link above.
  2. HBO’s “Eastbound and Down” – Funniest new series on TV this year.  It’s about a wildly narcissistic ex-major league baseball player who is forced to live in a small town as a substitute teacher.  Check out this classic scene (1:30), or buy the first season for $10 at the link.
  3. “Feed the Animals” by Girl Talk – Classic pop riffs + Rap = Greatest party mix of all-time!  I’ve come across a ton of artists doing mashups, but Girl Talk is the best I’ve heard, by far.  Listen to a song from the album, then download the rest for free at the link.

Looking forward to what you guys come up with!

Feb 15 2009

How to market Australia

Or more specifically, the Great Barrier Reef.

This contest is one of the best marketing ideas I’ve ever come across.  Here’s why it works so well:

  1. It makes everyone obsess over the destination. Before this, I’d never really considered going to the Great Barrier Reef.  I’ve always wanted to travel around Australia, but I never thought much about the GBR.  Now I’m looking at pictures of it, seeing how beautiful it is, and actually doing research on what it’s like.  One of the more brilliant requirements in the application process is that you have to prove your knowledge of the GBR.  So think of the thousands of people who are taking time out of their day to willingly learn as much as they can about it and then parroting that information in their video.
  2. The prize is extremely remarkable. Therefore, it’s worth talking about.  The “wow” factor is that the winner will be paid a very large sum of money to just have a blast in the GBR for six months.  The money they’ll spend paying the lucky winner will be made back many times over in the long run.
  3. They’re attracting all the right people. What kind of people do you think apply for this?  Travel nuts.  Basically, people who are both open and willing to go to Australia.  Even after the winner is announced and the thousands of other applicants lose, you can bet they will all still want to go down there.  In fact, it’s probably the number one place to vacation now for many of them.
  4. Insanely high number of applicants/visitors. From their twitter account: “14,500 applications from 176 countries, < 3 million people have visited islandreefjob.com viewing more than 20 million pages!”  All these people tell their friends and watch each other’s videos.  And because they’re doing it on Youtube, the videos will be stumbled upon and rediscovered for a long time.
  5. Applicants do all the marketing. Instead of shoving an ad campaign down people’s throats, Queensland Tourism is doing something that makes people want to spread their marketing message for them.  Even the selection process markets the GBR.  How? They left room for one “wildcard,” i.e. the person whose video gets the most votes.  So every applicant will be frantically trying to get people to vote for them — friends, family, complete strangers…  Everyone in their periphery will suddenly have the GBR on their mind.  By the time this is all said and done, millions and millions of people will have found out about this contest solely through word-of-mouth.
  6. The marketing campaign will last an entire year. They started this contest in January.  The winner will live in the GBR until December, and they’ll be doing blog posts every week about their experiences.  And you can bet Queensland Tourism will do everything they can to ensure the winner has an amazing time.  The blog will be nothing but a six month rave review for the area.  Cheap, yet super effective.

It’s not hard for your company to do something like this.  Naturally, any prize you offer will never be as sexy as the GBR.  But you can still look at the underlying principles of what Queensland Tourism is doing and use those in your next big marketing campaign.

There are still a few days left to apply, so give it a shot.  Some of the applicants have pretty solid videos (like this one – the ending is great) but most of them are boring and mediocre.

And yes, I did apply and will be posting my video on here soon.  I want to do a separate post for it and explain the process of how I came up with the idea, what other ideas I had, and how I actually created the video.

Feb 1 2009

Piggybacking trust

Telling somebody how great you are isn’t convincing.  In order for them to believe your assertion, you either have to prove it repeatedly with your actions (which can take months or even years), or you can piggyback on trust.  Here’s how to do the latter:

  1. Pick your target. This is someone who you want to have trust you as quickly as possible.  Your target can be anyone — a customer, a prospective employer, the most attractive girl at the bar, etc.
  2. Find out who your target already trusts. Track down their influencers.  Who has already done all the hard work for you and earned your target’s trust?  Is it an online message board?  A secretary?  The attractive girl’s group of friends?
  3. Establish your credibility with the influencers. You don’t have to earn their trust right away — you just need to prove you are legit.  Add value to the message board discussions by providing content/responses that other members will love.  Call up the secretary and be genuinely interested in what her work routine is like.  Make the attractive girl’s friends laugh.
  4. Give them a reason to talk to the target about you. Be remarkable and go over the top so that they’ll be really enthusiastic when you come up in their conversations.  Write a hilarious rant on the message board about all of the most popular members.  Mail the secretary a handwritten note the next day, thanking her for her time, and enclose an interesting article about that movie she referenced while you were talking with her.  Get extremely into Foreigner’s “Jukebox Hero” on karaoke night, complete with a face-melting air guitar solo on top of the bar.

After doing those kind of things, the influencers will actually want to talk to the target about you and they’ll have nothing but good things to say.  When they talk about how great you are, the target will actually believe it and will be about 100 times more receptive to whatever message you want them to hear.  That’s how you successfully piggyback trust, and you can work on building a deeper relationship from there.

Some of you might think piggybacking trust is kind of devious because it’s consciously using people as a means to an end.  But the nature of these interactions really depends on the person who is executing the strategy.  You can be a sleazeball if you want, or you can be ethical and caring.  It’s really up to you, but approaching it from a moral standpoint will yield far greater results in the long run (for your bottom-line, happiness, etc.).

Piggybacking trust is just a smarter way to promote yourself.  It’s a circuitous strategy that enables you to build a relationship very quickly.  Most of us take an unexamined, one-dimensional approach to earning someone’s trust, which is why most of our approaches will fall short of expectations.  For instance:

A company wants everyone to love them and buy their products after seeing their clever Super Bowl ad…

A college grad wants an employer to see how smart she is by emailing them a boring, bullet-pointed, Times New Roman, cookie-cutter resume…

A desperate guy wants an attractive girl to realize how awesome he is, even though they’re in a crowded and noisy bar with way too many distractions…

The company, the grad, and the desperate guy all have one thing in common: they don’t deserve what they want because they haven’t earned their target’s trust. This ultimately stems from them being selfish and egocentric.  They need to put themselves in their target’s shoes and find out who influences them.

The company wants to provide value to their customers, so they should join a select message board and interact with the community.  It will help them understand their customers better and ultimately improve their business.  They’re not trying to make a quick buck — they’re in it for the long haul.

The grad wants to get a job at Company X, so she needs to distinguish herself from every other applicant.  She can’t expect them to notice her because she’ll be in a stack of hundreds of other faceless resumes.  If she spends 15 minutes on the phone making the secretary feel special and appreciated, then the secretary will be sure to put in a good word for her to the person who makes the hiring decisions.

And every guy wants to have the most attractive girl in the bar interested in them.  So why do so many of them try to sell themselves with their self-aggrandizing prattle?  She doesn’t care how great you say you are — you just met her and therefore you have no credibility.  We’re social animals and our opinions are swayed by what the people we trust think.  So make her friends laugh and ensure that they’re having a good time while they’re around you.  Once they give you their approval and actually enjoy your company, you’ve won.

And even if they don’t like you, at least you rocked the house with your sweet karaoke performance.  You win either way.

Dec 24 2008

Grapevine

cover1-207x300I recently read “Grapevine,” a book about word-of-mouth marketing written by the guys who founded BzzAgent.  It’s a pretty solid book, although I still think Sernovitz’s is a bit more practical for most companies.

Here are some of the more important marketing ideas/concepts that I took away from “Grapevine.” Keep these in mind for your company:

  • The most influential people in a WOM campaign are the people who take interest in the product but don’t feel so personally attached to it that they can’t share.  The “light loyals” (not the heavy and passionate users) are the most influential because they’re motivated by an interest in helping your brand. The heavy users have been emotionally invested in your brand for too long.  It’s harder for them to rekindle the enthusiasm they felt when they first discovered you.
  • Attempts to create buzz are fruitless without transparency.  Over time, the consumer becomes more adept at spotting shills, and the press finds more news value in the negative results of a buzz campaign.
  • A single, everyday person’s review of a product — at no cost — can be far more influential than a multi-million dollar advertising campaign.
  • The way a company responds to negative WOM can actually create positive WOM.  If consumers feel they can connect with a company, are being heard, treated well, and the outcome is fair, they are far less likely to spread bad WOM.
  • Offer free samples of a new product to your customers in exchange for a written report of any conversations they might have about it in the next few weeks.  Early adopters love this.  Do not force them to talk about it; just ask that they write about the conversation’s context when the product came up. You’ll be surprised with the results.
  • There is only one way to measure WOM: compare sales of a product in two similar markets — one with a WOM campaign, and one without it.  (BzzAgent did this and found sales to be 66% higher in cities with the WOM component.)
  • Let your diehards get involved — it increases loyalty.  For example, do a survey asking what you should name your next product, and give them your two favorite choices to pick from.
  • Value comes from long-term engagement with customers because you’re gradually baking the customer into the brand. And when your customers feel as though they’re part of your brand’s DNA, you’ll have opened up a ceaseless stream of WOM.
Nov 30 2008

The 3^3 Project

It’s almost the end of 2008 and I want to try something different — something fun that will interrupt the relentless stream of business-related posts.

Over the year, we all discovered new things that we now love and recommend to everyone.  Restaurants, food, movies, songs, bands, books, websites, articles, Youtube videos, etc.  We recommend them because we’re confident that they’ll enrich another person’s life in some way or another.  This is genuine word-of-mouth marketing. The person making the suggestion has nothing to gain from it personally, other than the satisfaction that he gets from knowing that he’s made someone’s life a little better.

But when you’re online, it’s a bit harder to find authentic recommendations.  You don’t know if the source is being paid to write something or if they’re doing their friend a favor or what.  But I’m not going to let that happen on this post.

I’m calling this “The 3^3 Project” (three to the third) because you need to recommend 3 things, describe each of them in 3 sentences, and then ask 3 more people to join this discussion.  It allows us to find really cool stuff through genuine word-of-mouth, and possibly even come up with some Christmas gift ideas.

What I want you to do is this:

  • Post (preferably in the comment section below or on your own blog) your top 3 favorite things that you’ve really gotten into this year and want other people to check out.  Your suggestions can be anything.  They don’t even have to be things that came out this year; you just have to have fallen in love with them during 2008.
  • For each of your recommendations, you have to sell us on it in 3 sentences or less.  No paragraphs — just a few sentences.  Bonus points if you make it actionable by including a link, which will make it easier for everyone to actually see what you’re talking about.
  • After that, you should ask 3 more people to add to the list.

Rules / Guidelines:

  • No more than 3 things. Think hard about all the stuff you’ve fallen in love with this year and really narrow it down to the best of the best.
  • Be specific. Don’t say things like “Film – Get into watching movies!”  Tell us which 3 films you really loved this year and why we’d love them, too.
  • Avoid mainstream recommendations. No one wants to hear about how great the iPhone is.  But if you’ve found a really great iPhone app, tell us about that.
  • NO SELF-PROMOTION. If you try to make your recommendations about you in any way (“I recommend my blog – I really got into it this year LOL!!1″), you will have officially killed the spirit of this list.  I will delete your comment if I get a self-promo vibe from it.  Side note: if you really want people to find out about your blog, go talk to Chuck Westbrook.

So here are my 3 things:

  1. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia – Next to ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘Chappelle’s Show,’ this is the funniest and most creative show I’ve ever seen on cable TV.  You can watch all the episodes for free when you sign up on Hulu.  Start with this, this, or this.
  2. “Consolers of the Lonely” by the Raconteurs – My favorite album this year.  Almost every song is awesome, but my favorites are: “These Stones Will Shout,” “Carolina Drama,” and “Old Enough.”  Be sure to listen to the whole album.
  3. Delicious bookmarking – This is one of the most useful online tools I’ve come across.  You can categorize online articles, easily keep track of stuff, and passively send links to people in your network.  Be sure to download the Firefox extension which makes it A LOT easier to use.

In order for this to become a group effort, be sure to put a comment down below and ask others to join in.  I look forward to seeing your list!

UPDATE: This post has started a thread on Tucker Max’s message board (see it here).  It will obviously be way more developed than the comments section on this page, so be sure to check it out.