As part of my AMA interview series, I have decided to tap into a very relevant but also a lightly-understood concept of Word of Mouth Marketing (WOM). I couldn’t have found a better person to clarify this concept than Dave Balter, the Founder and CEO of Bzz Agent (one of the first WOM agencies in the Unites States), whose also the co-founder of Word of Mouth Marketing Association.
As a marketer myself, I have always found the concept of WOM somewhat vague and ambiguous. I know that many of my colleagues perceive WOM marketing as a random occasion that happens if you are lucky enough with your marketing actions such as an eccentric or a crazy viral ad clicked million times by viewers. I was really looking forward to clarify some of these misconceptions and get some solid answers. So, I asked Dave. You can listen to my whole interview with Dave at www.socalama.org/resources or read the discussion of the key points from that interview in the remaining of this post.
Dave summarized Word of Mouth Marketing as an act of identifying consumers who have an opinion and engaging them to communicate effectively with others. Word of mouth is one of the oldest and most natural human communication form that ever existed he added. What marketers are doing is basically trying to harness this very natural human behavior. According to Dave, WOM can not be created as commonly mistaken by many marketers, it already exists out there just waiting to be harnessed and amplified.
Many marketers are also having problems in distinguishing WOM from social media and viral marketing. I asked that question to Dave and his explanation was simple but smart. “True WOM is about engaging individuals for the long haul. Social Media is a great platform, mainly an outlet, to help developing effective WOM which can be truly engaging. And, there is really no such thing as viral marketing, but there are viral concepts/tools you can employ. Simply put, viral marketing is a 50-yard sprint, WOM is a 26-mile marathon.”
Dave emphasized that we should not be thinking WOM as an event. Rather, it is a process and it needs to be embedded in everything we do, so that it can enable the conveying of a brand’s story in multiple ways. Don’t think of the story as a linear narrative of the kind you would tell in a product launch, he asserted. Think of it as a 3-dimensional dialogue and don’t forget that foundations are not built over night, they take time and consistent effort he summed up.
Tags: Bzz Agent, Dave Balter, Social Media, viral marketing, word of mouth, word of mouth marketing
