There’s a lot of talk about word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) as one of the fastest growing marketing disciplines. There are even people marketing WOMM — like the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), which will happily sell you a standard membership for $3,000 a year. I’m not sure what all you get for that.
But I delved a little deeper to WOMMA, the “official trade association for word-of-mouth marketing” and I read a book by its President Emeritus, Andy Sernovitz, entitled Word of Mouth Marketing. The organization offers research, best practices, webinars and the promise of measurable ROI. Whoa. They even have a manifesto: “Happy customers are your best advertising.” It seems I’ve heard that before, like a long time ago.
Anyway, they have these four basic rules of word-of-mouth marketing: 1) be interesting; 2) make people happy; 3) earn trust and respect; 4) make it easy. I’m thinking these aren’t rules for word-of-mouth marketing — these are rules of life!
