Word of Mouth - The Bigger Umbrella and Its 14 Types

Have you seen what's going on with social media? Are you joining the conversation in social media? Have you built the latest application in social media? Have you seen what Scoble just said on social media?

Ahhh...a portion of our marketing industry has been infected with Social Media fever. It's quite virulent.

As shown by some of our latest research, it is the type of new media tool that is being used the most by our marketing and communications industry. Good times right - the notion of the social media dream finally coming true.

I'm here to be contrarian. Don't get me worng - social media is a very appetizing tool with continuing potential but for a company who wants to wade into the world of 2.0, it is not remotely close to the whole game.

Some of this argument is semantics and some of this is a real need to expand the universe of what organizations can do to get noticed, talked about and collaborated with in the new marketplace.

Let's deal with the semantics - social media tends to get served up in a majority of conversations as a media, tactic or technology. It may be all those things but at the end of the day, it is a tool, a conduit not the end objective for a company who wants to participate. Although companies may state "we need to get some social media", what they really are looking for is a different strategy and outcome. 

I would serve up that most smart companies are trying to use the tool of social media amongst a number of other tactics to build their grassroots following and word of mouth. And before you immediately go down the road of word of mouth = buzz, I have a much bigger umbrella for what word of mouth should mean (see bottom of message).

The challenge of any marketer in this attention and trust-starved world with a customer base taking a more activist role is "how do I get my customer's talking positively (with each other, with me, with prospects, online, offline)." Word of mouth is all of that, it truly is the bigger umbrella that leverages four things from the peer to peer grapevine:

• word of mouth advocacy
• word of mouth engagement/support
• word of mouth insight
• word of mouth content

And guess what - social media, albeit dominant and in vogue, exists as only one of 14 tools on which word of mouth can be orchestrated. I'll admit there is a fascination  with it - stoked by PR agencies who believe it is a breakout strategy for them with their clients and web startups who believe their knowledge of it can provide them millions in V.C.. Make no mistake though - when clients say they want social media, what they really want is word of mouth.

So to broaden the view of the world and downgrade your Social Media fever to mere Social media common cold,  here is a definition of social media and the other 13 types of word of mouth tools and tactics that get chins wagging, grapevines moving and people acting.   

It's tough hill to climb to change people's perceptions here. My evidence using Google search:

Word of Mouth - 5.6 million pages

Social Media - 49.4 million pages

I guess on some occasions, the crowd is misguided.