Remember Oprah’s Pontiac giveaway? It was a guerilla marketing strategy that generated tremendous buzz, but no corresponding uptick in dealer sales. What went wrong comes down to the difference between buzz and genuine word-of-mouth marketing, say Dave Balter and John Butman, authors of Grapevine: The New Art of Word-of-Mouth Marketing. “People were talking about how cool it would be to win a free car,” they explain, “but not that car.”

Buzz is long on getting attention and short on product information. Word of mouth is all about credibility — and that’s the secret of its power. Balter, founder and president of BzzAgent, a word-of-mouth agency, explains that just as word of mouth isn’t buzz, it isn’t viral, shill, seeding, or street teaming. Word of mouth is an uncontrived person-to-person exchange of ideas about a product or service. And according to the authors, it is more compelling than any form of traditional advertising.

To tap the power of word of mouth, BzzAgent has assembled more than 100,000 volunteers — real people who talk about clients’ products to family, friends, and strangers. BzzAgents don’t keep their affiliation a secret, because effective word-of-mouth advertising isn’t sneaky. And their field reports have given Balter a wealth of information about how word of mouth works. The readable book unpretentiously recaps many of those often-surprising revelations, such as:

• Everybody talks about products and services — not just celebrities and mavens. And they do it in everyday conversation.
• Word of mouth proliferates naturally and unpredictably, beyond demographically defined networks.
• Only 20 percent of word of mouth takes place online; 80 percent is in real time.
• There are limited word-of-mouth windows. If you miss out, nobody talks.

Permalink: http://www.fuelnet.com/?p=256