As a hobbyist Scrabble/Scrabulous with a middling career record of 38 wins, 32 losses and 2 ties (there should be a rule aginst tying in Scrabble), I certainly recognize the power of individual words. Words have meaning beyond their definition.
As inspiration, I site Gaston Bachelard from The Poetics of Reverie "I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young." Priceless.
In this post, I want to marry my love of words with my professional love - word of mouth. Hope you;ll help join me in finding the 26 most powerful words in word of mouth:
AUTHENTICITY - stealth is the enemy of true word of mouth - we need to render programs and experiences that are authentic in word, motive, activities and results
BUZZ - we buzz about the remarkable, the edgy, the innovative, the authentic and the trusted; just plain "good" does not make it past our brain and wallets to our lips anymore
COLLABORATION - so many choices, C is a very popular word of mouth word - community, co-creation, crowdsourcing, customer centicity...we'll choose collaboration as it is the stir stick allowing many of these other things to happen. marketers that are willing to acknowledge their customers have something valuable to say and responding "yes and.." and not reverting to no, but..." are winning the day
DIALOGUE - word of mouth is a two-way medium with conversation as its inventory, make sure you provide a culture, staff and enviornment to play with, distribute, build and measure that inventory
EXPERIENCE - "nothing is real until it is experienced" John Keats, and don't expect people to evangelize about you until you can provide them with an experience that immerses and transforms them into your brand cult
FACEBOOK - ok, so this may be the one word that needs to be replaced in a couple of years, but Facebook has changed our ability to social network on a lot of our own terms without the design-offensive barriers of its older sibling MySpace, it has also changed our definition of what "privacy" and "friend" is irrevocably
GRASSROOTS - ubiquity is the enemy of word of mouth - if, as a member/customer, I can get your information, incentive or entertainment anywhere, why should I talk about it...word of mouth almost always trickles up from the grassroots than forces itself down the mainstream
HAWTHORNE EFFECT - simply, the very aspect of asking for your target audience's opinions has value and motivation in itself...hopefully you may even act on it. The converse - knowing all the answers as the expert kills conversation before it even starts. (for full background on the effect)
INFLUENCERS - some of these people are not like the other - your most passionate 10% of your audience own more than 1/2 of the value of your chain of word of mouth benefits
JIUJITSU - a martial art with moves cleverly supplemented by a clver use of your attacker's own weight and strength - sounds like a blogger outreach program to me
KINSHIP - "a close connection marked by community of interests or similarity in nature or character", the tighter the kinship, the more trusted and valued the word of mouth. Brands that can help build and incubate these micro-communities of interest are thus enhanced.
LEAPFROGGING - it's a poweful metaphor of using so called "weak ties" (acquaintances vs. close friends) to jump across the conversation barriers and produce runaway clusters of word of mouth, made signifcantly more easiliy by the emrgence of web 2.0
MEASUREMENT - companies will spend to what they measure - whether we like that fact or not it's true - whereas, good word of mouth requires an intuitive mind, it also needs the discipline to measure the value created by peer generated insight, engagement, content and advocacy (see under net promoter score for help)
NETWORK - "build a platform and they will come", well not quite, but as Facebook has learned with its social graph and countless brands have learned with their brand communities, a platform that can house these disparate and geographically far-flung member releationships can untap great value
ONLINE/OFFLINE - ignore one at the expense of the other, most conversation-worthy stuff now starts on the web but over 75% of it still remains in the offline domain of lunch rooms, office meetings, cafe conversations and school yard gossip
PERSUASION -any good word of mouth marketer should grab a book by Ciadini and figure out the 6 most potent psychologiocal forms of influence - reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity - and put them to work for their business
QUALITY > QUANTITY - in the word of mouth world, a conversation has significantly more value attached to it than an impression - in most cases, it is an intimate medium that facilitates your front row of users doing the "heavy lifting" of convincing others
ROI - many of my community-minded peers lose sight of the fact that we live in a commercial reality, many word of mouth applications need to have a return on investment and thankfully many do...whether they are reductions in costs or increase in revenue, word of mouth has real financial and occasionally exponential value
SOCIAL - humans have been social for all of humankind, we talk to connect, to survive, to relieve stress, to reduce risk and to benefit economically and now that we have a range of media and tech. platforms that allow us to reach out and touch "people like us", we do, at the expense of more aloof corporate offerings...wheras a generation ago, you might have had 4 regular numbers to phone, you now have 164 friends on your Facebook list reinforced by hundreds of email, IM and cellphone buddy lists
TRIPLE PLAY - the triumvirate principle of smart customer generated content - create, rate and develop - mostwell-structured community sites are leveraging this approach to build content (create), develop fans and followers (rate) and build better more validated and creative stuff (develop)
USER-GENERATED - as Time mentioned last year - "YOU" are the person of the year - we have trained a generation of young and old to chime in, post blogs, submit photos, craft stories, contrive videos and find better solutions - blurring the lines between employee and fan, journalist and citizen pundit and marketing and activism
VIRAL - the "and they told two people...and so on...and so on" has never been more powerful - people use old and new media to get their passalong messages to others - with the potency of these media and networks - the ripples are larger, faster and longer than they have ever been
WEB 2.0 & 3.0 - the collaborative and semantic webs have allowed people to particpate not merely consume and access info through a different breed of internet platform; and Web 3.0 will usher in more open source, integrated and intelligent platforms that will allows users to take an active role in manipulating their web from whatever device they choose
X MULTIPLE -initial CPMS make word of mouth formats appear a very poor investment compared to tradional media formats, the scales tip the other way when you multiply how many gnerations of word of mouth are being repeated multiplied by how many people are averagely being told at each stage (otherwise known as the X multiple)
YOUTUBE - if a picture is a thousand words, what's a moving picture? With 65,000 new videos uploaded a day, 70+ million unique visitors/month and 60-70% of video traffic, video and YouTube specifically is a juggernaut. From a word of mouth standpoint, video can sometimes more easily max out on the 6 principles of sticky ideas: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotion and storytelling
ZEALOTRY - at its most successful, word of mouth helps create fanatical devotion to a cause; the highest form of advocacy is whetehr your brand can be tattoo-worthy - think Harley's HOGs, Grateful Dead's Deadheads of later Phish's Phishheads, although no official moniker, Apple qualifies here too
Hopefully we haven't missed any obviouses...keep us honest if you know of a word that should be on this list, let us know.
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