The power of ‘Word of Mouth’
Have you seen the results of a study done by Intelliseek and Forrester this fall?
The study indicates that word-of-mouth is far and away the most powerful way to influence the decision making of customers.
To quote, "Consumers are 50 percent more likely to be influenced by word-of-mouth recommendations from their peers than by radio/TV ads – a slightly higher level of influence/trust than found in the 2004 study co-authored by Intelliseek and Forrester."
"Word-of-mouth behavior among "familiars" trumps all forms of advertising and is more trusted than news or "expert commentary," the study finds. In addition, positive word-of-mouth from a personal acquaintance carries just as much impact as negative word-of-mouth. This has "critical implications for brands that nurture evangelism, brand loyalty, and advocacy."
This is big news for us little guys and gals who are considering traditional advertising as a way to get customers. But the question, then, is, how do you get people talking about you? How do you get people excited enough that they’ll be proactive and say something positive about what you sell?
Well, it’s not a science… and while you can influence word of mouth, you can’t really control it. The best thing to do in our experience is to create fabulous customer experiences and couple those with encouragement and promotions that make it easy for someone to pass along your company’s info to a friend.
If any of you have deployed specific word of mouth strategies that have worked well, please share!
March 17th, 2008 at 9:07 am
Has anyone out there heard about WideCircles.com. It seems like a way better service then regular pay per click. Apparently they are using refering websites ( forums, blogs, wiki, etc. ) and have a viral word of mouth distributed approach to it which is engaging rather ther then interrupting customers. My friend told me he got over 500 visits from single post which cost him around $0.40c, within a few days. I am going to give them a try today . In case you are intrested here is it. http://widecircles.com?imt=3
March 17th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
The new distributed viral forum/blog/wiki/classified/etc viral advertising engine is here. Spread the word about your product or service in short amount of time to millions of people. Get residual traffic and increase search engine visibility by using long lasting backlinks. Low cost, no pay per click fraud issues and great ROI. http://widecircles.com?imt=3
April 5th, 2008 at 8:09 am
This posting was of great use in learning new information.
—————
Chamila
Did anyone out there give a try to Wide Circles or WideCircles. They are new word of mouth advertising platform, apparently they can push massive amount of messages through social network mediums like forums,blogs,wiki’s and so on. They say that they only bill for posts active for minimum of 5 days and price seems pretty affordable. I am going to give Wide Circles aka WideCircles a try since I am tired of PPC fraud. http://widecircles.com