Reaction to Beyond Buzz: listening, something to talk about
I’ve been on the road this week talking with marketing and public relations people about the ideas from my new book, Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word of Mouth Marketing. What fun this is.
The two big things people seem to be struggling with as they get into conversational marketing and Web 2.0 communications:
- How to listen in new ways . (If marketing is a conversation, at least half the process is listening.)
- Finding something interesting to talk about. For face-to-face and online communications. And that connects to the business strategy. People seem to understand the mechanics of tools, but they struggle with how to uncover interesting ideas to talk about that are genuine to people in the company and interesting to folks they want to talk with. (My view is that most of our companies don’t have cool, buzz-worthy products. But we all have the ability to talk about our companies in fresh, interesting ways when we uncover points of view that are engaging, and get the reaction, “That’s interesting. Tell me more.”)
I’ve tried to lay out how to do both in the book – as well how to overcome the five biggest obstacles to conversational marketing and operationalize conversational marketing into marketing functions and tactics. If you read the book, please, please let me know what’s been helpful. Or where I need to elaborate.
If you want the Cliff Notes version, you can download the ebook by clicking on the link to the right of this blog post — or check out the podcasts.
If your professional organization or company is looking for a fresh, “how to” perspective on the topic, let me know. While I’m promoting the book I’m willing to do these for free – as long as you pay travel expenses and can pull together at least 30 folks. So far the reaction from the sessions have been really great.
An email from yesterday’s American Marketing Association/New York event:
“I think I am an open-minded, “willing to admit everything I don’t know” type of guy………But it’s rare I go to a marketing seminar and actually learn something new and / or useful. But, yesterday with you, I came away informed and entertained.”
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April 2nd, 2007 at 10:49 am
Very interesting. You’re definitely on to something, and if that book comes out soon, I’ll have to check it out. I’ve been trolling around and trying to get a fuller grasp of this whole “Web 2.0” thing that everyone is talking about. Part of what I have found definitely follows what you’re talking about. Word of mouth marketing is powerful! A great example of that is to look at MySpace’s success. Their invite system alone is a great way to get people sucked into the site. Another point of interest (at least to me) is the rise of the meta search sites in the travel sector. These sites seem to rely heavily on word of mouth. I ran across an article by Travel Daily News that pointed out an interesting stat about the site sidestep.com. It said
"…some metasearch suppliers were more effective than others at converting awareness into visitation. SideStep was found to the be the meta-search supplier most effective at this kind of conversion, with 48% of those already aware of SideStep having visited it in the past 12 months."
To me that just shows a small example of how word of mouth can be really effective in increasing Web site traffic.
Thanks for the thought provoking piece!