The Word of Mouth Playbook - Unlifting the Veil on Word of Mouth

To be candid, I love industries and segments of business that are so new that part of the reason they're successful is because they have no standards or conventions.

These are the business landscapes where the concept of "true innovation" and "creative inspiration" exist and the lexicon "can't be done" is not found in the dictionary.

With the maturation of "word of mouth" marketing as a thriving industry segment, some of us pioneers begrudgingly recognize the need to move to establish norms and make what we do sensible to others...the people who haven't spent nearly as much time, energy or passion on the topic but would like to participate in it too.

However bittersweet, it's likely the time to legitimize "word of mouth marketing" as a respected standalone channel fighting for the $300 billion US and $12 billion Canadian communications pie alongside ads, pr, promo, direct and online. With its growing and sometimes blind faith acceptance, word of mouth has become a kind of "popular house party" that's started to allow some strangers in the side door...thankfully, the house is plenty big enough to fit them - we just hope the keg doesn't run out of beer.      

What I've found is that most everyone I evangelize to in my business development travels, whether they are word of mouth addicted, curious and cynical,  immediately want to know the Fodor's Guide to Word of Mouth "what is the scope of word of mouth marketing, what flavours do I use? and when?".

...and with the "mushrooming" of terms like buzz, viral, word of mouth, product seeding, experiential marketing, social media, podcasts, wikis, grassroots marketing, blogs, social networks, product placement brand communities, advergaming...we've created such a colourful set of vernacular to unfortunately blur the lense and confuse the marketer trying to get their head wrapped around the subject.

Check as we did, we couldn't find a resource that mapped the full "word of mouth" terrain...so we've created our own handy reference guide called the "Word of Mouth Playbook" explaining WOM's 22 umbrella categories, identifying 230 possible tactics of word of mouth pursuit and providing what we thought were great client examples and prescriptions on when to use which tactic based on type of business, appetite for risk and amount of resources.

Thanks to WOMMA, Wikipedia and various seminal works on word of mouth that assisted in pulling together are lense on the subject (particularly good resources are Emanuel Rosen's The Anatomy of Buzz, George Silverman's The Secrets of Word of Mouth Marketing and McConnell/Huba's Creating Customer Evangelists).

Feel free to use and be sure to let us know what you think. Click here for Agent Wildfire's Word of Mouth Playbook.