“And who raves these days? Who raves at a party,
‘You should have seen our tax return – it was brilliant!’”
Harry Beckwith, What Clients Love

Harry Beckwith, in his excellent book What Clients Love, makes the point that word-of-mouth advertising is dead. He cites three reasons for this:

1. Mobility: we all move around so much now that there is little sense of community.
2. Complexity: increased specialisation by business means that you don’t know whether or not a recommendation will be relevant.
3. Conversation: nobody raves about companies these days. Who ever goes to a dinner party and sing the praises of their accountant?

And to an extent this is true. The above three factors have had an adverse effect on “You should give such-and-such a call”.

What’s filling the vacuum? Beckwith suggests that good old-fashioned public relations and advertising are the means by which smart companies get their word out. But do people really trust advertisements and publicity junkets in the same way they’d trust a recommendation from a friend?

No, Harry, it’s the Internet that has replaced old-skool word of mouth. In the absence of real community and face-to-face conversation, people are turning to the Web for suggestions and recommendations.

Witness Amazon, a smart company if ever there was one. By giving visitors the opportunity to write reviews about the products on offer, Amazon has created a true community that many people use when making a purchase decision. On the Amazon page for my favourite album, Tom Waits Swordfishtrombones, you’ll see the following:

Scrolling further down the page, you’ll see a list of reviews. There are a lot of people like me who take notice of strong reviews, and Amazon lets people rate the actual reviews written by other users.

There are lots of other examples of online word-of-mouth. The Internet Movie Database’s Top 250 Films is used by millions of people who want to ‘culture’ themselves in cinema. TripAdvisor lets users rate hotels from one to five, and is one of the most popular sites on the Internet. The popularity of MetaCritic.com just keeps growing. And if you go onto Boards.ie, people from all over Ireland are looking for recommendations for books, dentists, MP3 players, software, and so on. On an industry-specific level, Irish forums such as the one on WeddingsOnline.ie can get over 300 posts a day and many times that viewing the debate.

Positive word of mouth online is great for two reasons. One, you don’t need to be friends with the people recommending a product or service.

Negative word-of-mouth online is just as prevalent. The age-old bank debate on Boards.ie is viewed by lots of Irish Internet users.

But if word of mouth has moved online, how do we harness it? Seth Godin, in his Unleashing the Ideavirus, opines that your business needs to be remarkable if you are to get positive word-of-mouth online. Pity that. Surely there’s an easier way? Well, we’ll get to that part. But, of course, if your business isn’t remarkable, outstanding, world-class, then everyone in your company needs to back up a bit and start at the beginning.

Of course, you can cheat. Before we start, there are good reasons for not cheating. For a start, it’s morally reprehensible. For another thing, it cheapens the value that online word of mouth provides to millions of users. That said, there are ways to cheat, obviously. A new book can be promoted on Amazon by registering multiple accounts and giving lots of 5 star ratings. You can respond to questions asked on forums and tout your business there. Or you can go on TripAdvisor and say lovely things about your hotel. But of course that’s cheating, and it’s wrong.

The most effective way to guarantee positive word of mouth online is to be outstanding; to have a world-class product or an unbeatable service. Whether it’s a book, a piece of software, a hotel room, a package holiday, a mortgage or whatever, consistently good service will work online as well as it used to do offline.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 11th, 2006 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.