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ASAE/CAL: Talking About the Word-of-Mouth Revolution
ASSOCIATIONS NOW, January 2009
Get your members talking! Word-of-mouth expert Andy Sernovitz tells you how.
By: Lindy Dreyer
In a down economy, could word of mouth make all the difference? Andy Sernovitz thinks so.
"How did you hear about us?"
You probably ask this question after a member joins for the first time. The responses can be frustrating. Was it the first brochure we sent? Was it the third email? Maybe it was our Google ad?
More often than not, it's something else entirely. It's word of mouth—a referral from a friend or colleague about something remarkable that your association does. And few people know more about word-of-mouth marketing than Andy Sernovitz.
Andy teaches word-of-mouth marketing at Northwestern University, taught entrepreneurship at the Wharton School of Business, ran a business incubator, and has started half a dozen companies. GasPedal, his consulting company, advises brands like TiVo, Dell, Ralph Lauren, Sprint, and Kimberly-Clark. His book Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking is number one in the direct marketing category on Amazon.
Besides all that, he's also an experienced association executive, having led the Word of Mouth Marketing Association through astounding growth from its beginning in 2004 through 2006. I was lucky enough to interview Andy recently by phone. Here's what he had to say.
Lindy Dreyer: Why should associations be paying attention to word-of-mouth marketing?
Andy Sernovitz: It's what you already do. Associations are great at word-of-mouth marketing. You build communities of people who tell each other about what they're doing, and you build communities designed to support each other and talk to each other and spread the word about various professions. So, you've always been doing it. The choice is a) get better at word-of-mouth marketing or b) spend a lot of money on traditional advertising.
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Andy's Four Rules of Word of Mouth
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Rule 1: Be interesting. Nobody talks about boring associations, boring events, boring brochures. Everyone can be interesting. Before you mail a brochure, before you promote an event, ask your spouse about it. Trust me. If he or she finds it interesting, you've got a winner.
Rule 2: Make people happy. Create amazing publications and events. Provide excellent member service. Go the extra mile. Make sure the work you do gets people—members as well as your extended community—energized, excited, and eager to tell a friend.
Rule 3: Earn trust and respect. Nobody talks about an association that they don't trust or don't like. Earn the respect of your members. Be good to them. Talk to them. Honor their intelligence. Fulfill their needs. Stay honest. Every association can be nicer, and every one of us can work to make our association a little better to its members and extended community.
Rule 4: Make it easy. Find a simple topic that is easy to repeat. Not your formal brand statement, not your member benefits. Forget the elevator pitch—it's the pass-in-the-hall test. What can people tell a friend about you in one sentence? Then do everything you can to make it easy to share that topic. Use tell-a-friend forms on your website. Put it in an email. Pass out fliers. Blog it. Stick it on a T-shirt.
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Aren't associations already doing enough by our very nature as membership organizations?
There's always more. There's no conference that couldn't be bigger. There's no membership that couldn't grow. There's no situation where you couldn't have a little bit more with less spending and less work if you had a few more people talking for you.
Think about it. You do an email campaign or direct-mail campaign and it goes to a certain number of people. What if 20 percent of them would hand it to a friend? You get one plus 20 percent. Everything works a little bit better.
In the down economy, with our marketing budgets taking a hit, what kind of resources will we need to invest in WOM in order to accomplish that extra 20 percent?
Just a little bit of time. Word-of-mouth marketing isn't about a new campaign; you hear the phrase "word-of-mouth campaign" a lot. It's not really a campaign. It's a way of doing things. It's a way of thinking about what you do so that you build forwardability and viralness into everything you do.
So, when you're creating a direct-mail piece, are you making sure it's the kind of thing that people will share? When you do an event invitation, are you doing it in a way that people are dying to show it to their friends?
Who within the association should be responsible for word of mouth? Is it a marketing function? A membership function? An event-planning function?
Really, one person in each department should at least have their eye on it. Someone doing events should be thinking about, "How can we make our events more buzz worthy?" Someone who's doing member services, someone who's doing member recruitment, and so on. For each program there are different word-of-mouth tactics that apply.
Take building membership as an example. How can an association figure out who the talkers are?
For membership, you have a pretty narrow definition of who your customers are. There is a certain type of person inside an organization who is going to join. The talkers are not necessarily potential or existing members. Sure, a subset of your existing members are talkers, but also, who are the vendors who talk to your members? Who are the reporters who are talking to people who could be a part of the association? Who are the junior staff in your association who are reaching out and talking to folks? So there are all these people who surround the person who is making the membership decision. See if you can find ways to get them talking about the awesome things the association is doing.
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But Can You Measure It?
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Is it possible to measure ROI for word of mouth? In a blog post last year, Andy admitted, "What's the ROI? I get twitchy when I hear it, because it should be self-evident that deep, quality relationships with your customers are a fundamentally good thing."
That said, there is a growing discipline dedicated to measuring word of mouth. Understanding that marketers feel the need to use ROI to justify decision making, Andy points to some valuable resources.
The WOMMA Word. This blog by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) includes valuable research to help you understand and communicate the effectiveness of word-of-mouth programs.
Measuring Word of Mouth, Volumes 1 & 2. Also from WOMMA, these books include research data and measures from leaders in word of mouth.
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Is word of mouth something that you can control? What happens when members only want to talk about the great party that happened at the event and not the actual education?
That's all right. To a large degree, it doesn't matter what people are talking about, as long as they're talking. That's frustrating if you're in the control mindset, if you're dying to position the message as part of the press release and the brand statement. But your goal is to get more members and to get members more excited. As long as they're talking about something, that's good.
This is the concept of the word-of-mouth topic. Your word-of-mouth topic is different from your brand message. Your brand message is the coordinated campaign you're putting out there. Your topic is whatever people would love to tell a friend.
A great example of this is when Steve Jobs came back to Apple 10 years ago. They wanted to get everybody talking about Apple again. They didn't do a big ad campaign about their operating system or product design. The topic that got people talking about Apple was, "Look how cute the computers are. They're yellow and blue and green, and isn't that wonderful!" Nothing could have mattered less. The color of the machine is completely irrelevant. But it was the thing that caused the buzz to happen. And that was what was important.
What happens when word of mouth trends to negative messages?
If there's negative word of mouth, it's caused by something. There's always something that's making people upset, so you have to go out there and figure out how to address the core cause. But it's OK if negative word of mouth is out there. What's important to do is respond to it. People who are angry or complaining without hearing from you come to believe that the organization doesn't get it or it's aloof or just doesn't care. You'll find it's amazing how fast folks will forgive you when you go out there and find those angry blog posts and say, "Hey, I'm really sorry" or "What can we do to make it better?" and start engaging with them. It's the lack of response that really causes negative word of mouth to snowball.
You mentioned finding blog posts. How much of word of mouth happens in the real world versus online and how do you go about finding these conversations?
Google! The best way to start tracking what's going on and what people are saying about you is to go to Google. They have a Google Blog Search. This is the kind of thing that either a receptionist or an intern can do. They can just type in your organization's name every day and see what people have said about you. You'd be amazed how much there is—how much positive there is where you can reply and encourage it and thank them, and how much negative there is where it will just take a quick "I'm sorry" to end the negative conversation.
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Resources to Talk About
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Want to dig deeper into word-of-mouth concepts and ideas? Here are some places to start.
Andy Sernovitz's websites for additional WOM ideas and resources:
Resources from the Word of Mouth Marketing Association:
Places where you can network online with WOM experts:
Links to articles, blog posts, and tips from more WOM experts:
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Should an association be worried if they Google themselves and not much pops up?
Yes! It's sort of sad. For an organization who has hundreds of thousands of members who aren't getting enough out of the group for them to bother to talk about it? That means you have a value problem. First, you must address the value problem and get people excited again. Then you can get into some of the word-of-mouth techniques I talk about in my book. For example, if there's something to talk about, how do we make it easier for members to talk about it? How often do we blast out a newsletter versus sending a private message to members saying, "Hi, we've got some big news. We'd appreciate if you'd blog it. Here's some sample text and a graphic."
Give us an example of a word-of-mouth technique you've used at an association.
Here's one of the best things we did back when I was running the Word of Mouth Marketing Association: We were one of the first groups to do a blog about our conference. It was a blog months before the conference happened. The reason wasn't so that everyone would think it was the greatest, most interesting blog in the world. The reason we did a blog about our conference was to get the speakers to start spreading word of mouth.
And so, for about three or four months before the event, we'd do an interview with each of our speakers. And sure enough, when they got written about, they'd write about it on their blog and email it to all their friends. And then we started doing audio interviews with our speakers. As soon as we loaded up a podcast with a speaker being featured, again, they'd blog and tell everyone they knew how excited they were to be on the podcast. So it was less about a great blog as opposed to giving our talkers—the stakeholders in the conference—something to link to and something to talk about.
A lot of us use member-get-a- member campaigns for member recruitment. What makes a campaign like that work?
The more forced and difficult they are, the less likely they are to work. If you're doing a formal membership campaign where members have to identify the people they're recruiting and they get some kind of referral fee or some kind of bonus, it feels like work. And people are much less likely to participate if it feels like work. If it is incredibly easy, you'll get a much better response. That's one of the biggest rules of word-of-mouth marketing: You've got to make it easy. So create a message like, "Here's an email ready to go, please forward this to two friends today," and you're going to get a better response than an overbuilt, structured campaign.
Another interesting thing about word of mouth is that the more incentives you provide, the worse it tends to work. If someone genuinely thinks someone they know should join, and then you're offering them some kind of bonus for bringing in their friends, it cheapens the referral. Here I am, just about to tell someone that they really need to become a member of this group, and then I think, "If my friend finds out I'm being paid for this, they're not going to trust me." I'm more likely to do nothing than risk making that referral. So the incentive actually killed the word of mouth.
You really want to focus on making that talker feel special. How do you make them look good? How do you give them status? Maybe by creating a special committee for top recruiters, giving them an award, or giving them some other special recognition. We participate, we volunteer, and we share because it makes us look good. Anything you can do to feed the ego is going to make a huge difference.
What role does social media play in all of this?
Social media is helpful. It makes things more efficient. It helps word of mouth spread faster. It helps get the word out on a much bigger scale. But it's not about blogs and Facebook and that kind of stuff. It's easy to get worked up wondering what is the latest, greatest thing and thinking we all need to get on the same platform. We all gotta get on Twitter or whatever it is. But it's not about the stuff. It's about finding out where your people are already hanging out and then participating in those platforms.
That's a long way of saying you don't need to worry about the latest, greatest thing. If your members are participating in a particular platform, that's a good enough reason to go there. But until that happens, don't worry about it too much.
Andy Sernovitz teaches word-of-mouth marketing at Northwestern University and is CEO of GasPedal, a word-of-mouth marketing consulting company in Chicago, Illinois. He authored Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking in 2006 and you can read his blog, Damn, I Wish I'd Thought of That , at www.damniwish.com. Email: andy@sernovitz.com
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