Courtesy of viralblog.com
Humour works in advertising. It grabs your attention, makes you laugh, and gives you a nice endorphin rush.
It also makes you more positively inclined towards a particular brand, especially if its cleverly done without trying too hard. In fact, some commercials can be even more entertaining than comedy shows on television!
In the age of social and digital media, your ultimate goal is to create a business that others will share freely about. That in a nutshell is what Word Of Mouth is all about.
But how can you increase the shareability of your business? What techniques can you use to improve Word Of Mouth for your business?
One of my favourite marketing gurus Seth Godin shares his ideas on how tribes are changing the world, community by community, in a grassroots evangelistic sort of way. In the age of social media with its platforms and tools – blogs, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, Twitter, Plurk etc – the barriers to entry in starting any movement is considerably lowered. The democratisation of publishing and content production means that anybody can leverage on these tools to create pockets of influence wherever they are.
While not every one of us can be as convincing or charismatic a speaker as Seth, his speech does give us much food for thought on what we can do as marketers, as communicators, as publicists and as leaders. Perhaps it is time for us to start our own movements today?
PS – I just heard from Jackie Huba (via Twitter) of Church of the Customer that Seth’s looking for stories for his next edition of Purple Cow. Sounds like a great way to get your local stories of extraordinary products and businesses in …. if you can meet Seth’s high standards! I will start to consider some options now…
Seth Godin, the world’s most recognised internet marketer, has identified three new positions that would be vital in the new age of Word Of Mouth (WOM) and digitally enabled marketing. These are as follows:
Other than these positions, perhaps I should also add in a fourth position that is vital in the age of social media as follows:
Are there any other positions that we should take note of? This is exciting stuff and is in fact how I intend to organise my team in the future. Loosely that is.
Wow and double wow. A tip off from my regular read Church of the Customer led me to this story by Virginia of Brains On Fire about how P&G is revolutionising toilet papers. Yeah, you didn’t read me wrong.
Apparently, what happened was that the FMCG behemoth fitted out an entire toilet and a lot more as part of the their efforts in promoting Charmin toilet paper. There are even two strengths available – Extra Strong and Extra Soft – depending on your inclination and err….vigour. What’s neat is that ancilliary brands like tissues, scented wipes, and serviettes were also promoted along with the necessary waste disposal expendable item. Check out the Youtube video on this here:
Now, if only we can create an entire bathroom completely decked out with the toiletry products of leading brands inside for a completely brand immersive experience? Of course, the experience must be great in order to generate positive rather than negative Word Of Mouth.
Anybody game for this here in Singapore?
Here’s yet another gem from Church of the Customer’s Jackie Huba on writing “Thank You” notes that rock! If you want to build a word-of-mouth focused and buzzworthy business, here is the way to go. I would probably add another point which is to handwrite the note – if you can help it!
Link here.
Courtesy of ChurchoftheCustomer.com
Got tipped off about this from Ian McKee at a recent lunch talk, and also found it on one of my favourite marketing blogs Church of the Customer. Apparently, a new study by Nielsen has revealed that Word Of Mouth (WOM) is yet again the number one motivating factor behind customer purchases. This isn’t surprising considering that most of us would much rather trust a friend or family member than an oh-so-slick and smooth advertisement.
What’s especially interesting is this chart below:
Came across this fabulous titbit from one of my favourite blogs Church of the Customer. I don’t think there is a better way to market one’s products or services, do you? If only, we can do that on supermarket aisles and also include customer testimonials into the whole proposition.
Check out the dude doing his Youtube plug for votes.
There are 5 good reasons why you should vote for Kevin Lim for the 2007 Blogging Scholarship.
1) He is a great guy and a good friend of Singapore’s blogosphere.
Once in a while, you stumble across something really neat that you want to share with everybody. Today I came across this Branding Periodic Table by Kolbrener which is really neat and concise. It tabulates the key definitions in the advertising, marcoms and branding world in a neat “periodic table” format which helps to make it easier for anybody to capture the different terms at a glance.
Built by Kolbrener, corporate branding experts
Of course, I would add that just knowing the terms themselves ain’t enough to make you a branding expert. Still, its a good start…