I must confess that I've been outside so much enjoying Oregon's beautiful summer weather that I've neglected this blog over the past few weeks. Well, time to get back to it...
Last week, I met a woman at a networking event who smiled knowingly when I told her that I helped companies sell more through word of our mouth marketing. "That's interesting. Do you help companies figure out how much they should pay people to talk about their product?"
I'm always surprised when I hear people say that word of mouth marketing is about paying people to talk about a product or service. A big part of this misunderstanding has to do with how journalists portray word of mouth marketing. A July 3 story on NPR's Bryant Park Project, a radio show which targets a younger audience than typical NPR news program, on "word of mouth advertising" began with a skit of people shilling products as an example of how companies use word of mouth to market their products and services. Fortunately, Walter Carl, a professor at Northeastern University and word of mouth marketing, was featured in the story and set the host straight telling him that effective word of mouth marketing does not involve paying people to recommend a product or service. He also mentioned an interesting statistic that I haven't heard before: his research indicates that approximately 15% of all converesations involve people talking about a specific brand, company, product or service.
