The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing: How to Trigger Exponential Sales Through Runaway Word of Mouth
Author: George Silverman
List Price: $17.95
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ISBN: 0814470726
Publisher: AMACOM (April, 2001)
Sales Rank: 1,349
Average Customer Rating: 4.83 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 4 out of 5
The Tips Are Easy to Grasp
The concept of WOM (word of mouth) marketing has always been in the arsenal of any experienced marketer. Silverman gives an abundance of tips and examples to put the concepts to work, and how WOM can be deployed in both the offline and online world. For example: word of mouth is accelerated if you give customers "experiences" to talk about. Silverman believes that WOM can significantly shorten the buying cycle.
This book may be especially good for small business owners doing their own marketing--there are lots of ideas they may have not thought of. For more experienced marketers, this book is certainly worth a skim, but maybe not an end-to-end read.
Rating: 5 out of 5
WOW! I never knew there was so much to learn!!!
This guy's some sort of genius or something! I learned more from this book than from all the other marketing courses I've ever taken - and that's a lot! He's right - word of mouth marketing is all that really matters. I observe myself telling my friends how great a movie is, and how that makes them want to go see it. The studios get word of mouth to create blockbusters and make millions. This author showed me how to use the same principle to create millions on my products. He's a business person's best friend! Buy this book - it will make you look at your marketing budget in a whole new way, and make what you do spend SO much more effective.
Rating: 5 out of 5
How you can make words of mouth work for you
I have 10+ years of experience marketing and launching high tech (and non high tech yet innovative) products of various sort and i found this information both accurate, invaluably concise and making good business sense. I find it an excellent complement to more theory oriented books like the "tipping point" and the "anatomy of buzz".
These last two books will explain you how words of mouth works but will not give you any really in depth insight about how you can make words of mouth work for you. "The secrets of words of mouth marketing" does.To give just and example: the "decision matrix" described in chapter 5 is an extremely concise and rich tool for anticipating the concrete information that customers need to hear in order to decide about a product. For instance if you are currently targeting early adopters kind of customers then the matrix will tell you the exact content of what they need to hear in order to help them "decide to decide", "weigh information in your favor", "engage in a trial" etc. The decision matrix will also tell you what middle majority/pragmatist customers will need to hear to make the same kind of decisions and of course it's not at all the same (those of you wondering what I mean by early adopters, middle majority etc will find the info in the book -- this belongs to the diffusion of innovation theory of Everett Rogers something that any person seriously interested about words-of-mouth need to know about anyway by reading the two other books or this one).
You might have notice that in the previous paragraph I have been speaking about what customer "need to hear" and not what your company "needs to tell them". I think it's one of the great success of the book in helping us to really see the difference between the two, to understand that what you company say is less important than what your cstomer say and think and to understand how words-of-mouth can be "organized" in order for the two to match better.
Great book!!
Bruno Levy
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