Power of Word-of-mouth

We all know that groundswell is important now, but at the beginning or for those who don't know social media well, It's hard to believe. How much impact will it have if only one of your thousands customers says something to your brands? None? little? If this one convinced ten and each of these ten spread the words to another ten people, how much impact will there be then? The effects can be much more than imagination!

That is the word-of-mouth effects, the power behind groundswell.

Let's look back the history before mass media. The main resource of learning knowledge and getting information is word of mouth. Even after we surrounded by newspapers, radios, and TVs, we still get most of our knowledge from the mouths of our parents, teachers and friends. That's what we trust and rely on!

Marketers know that, so they spend a lot of money on WOM (word-of-mouth) in order to build trust with customers (While mass media are mostly used for public awareness). Mark Smiciklas wrote in his blog, " Word of mouth marketing has the power to quickly build up or tear down the reputations of products, services and organizations."

Let's see how we can make WOM more powerful.

Understand word-of-mouth

• How to make the words be listened and spread?

The content we spread among the customers are important. People has inherent habits of choosing the words they want to listen and spread, even in the years long before social media appear. Heath brother's book, Made to stick, concludes several key factors to spread "stick" content, like simple, unexpected, emotional and stories. Also, engagement and other factors are important. That's why we frequently contains questions, "!" and links in the groundswell content.

• How to make the words go farther?

In fact, not all the participators in your groundswell are the same important. Like what shows in right picture, the social media users, or critics and creators (Groundswell, chapter 3), are keys for the spread of words. If we energize them well, they will help to spread the words, create more contents, engage more friends and followers as well as even support the groundswell system(Groundswell, chapter 7&8). As a result, your brand community and reputation will rapidly grow.

Revolution of word-of-mouth marketing

There are two new trends to strength the power of WOM: multimedia and mobile. Pictures and especially videos can draw more attentions and are easy to be understood and transferred. Flickr and Youtube are required for all companies and brands when social media development. In addition, the rapid growth of smartphone users are definitely revolution of social media. Sharing whenever and wherever seems give the spirit for groundswell. About half of Facebook, Twitter and Yelp users and traffic are made up by mobile users.

Negative word-of-mouth

When the good words are spreading among your customers, the bad words are the same. If you want more promoters and less detractors of your brand, you'd better give responds, especially for the negative comments. Are you wonderring what people will say if you don't treat the negative comments seriously, see what Gitsnjsli say about BodyShop!

On the other hand, the effect of negative words is not a problem compared with the positive impact of word-of-mouth. According to Kisrsten, the negative WOM has less impact than the positive one.