Customer Speak – A Marketing Blog from Bridgz Marketing Group

WOMM by Bridgz

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!

Then there’s the email solicitations from amy@researchandmarkets who is offering me a report titled: “Word of Mouth Marketing Forecast 2007-2011: spending, trends and analysis,” by PQ Media, “the leader in media ecometrics.” It promises definition, measurement, trends and data on industry growth for WOMM.

What I want to know is this: when did customers talking to each other become an industry? When did it become marketing? Let’s get real. Word-of-mouth is not marketing; it’s the market. And it’s been going on since the first skins were traded; now it’s a marketing discipline.

The most recent industry data offered is 2006 when WOMM boasted a total spend of $981 million. It’s starting to take off, according to the report, as more brand marketers are shifting budgets away from traditional media to interactive media and word-of-mouth marketing. I’m there. We need to get people talking about our products.

Cruising through a few websites on word-of-mouth marketing I find some very helpful tips for leveraging social networks and targeting influencers, and I am advised to just be myself. The intent is to initiate and instigate, to influence and percolate, but you can’t fake word-of-mouth; that doesn’t work.

I’m thinking this word-of-mouth marketing is a good thing. But I’m not springing for the three grand.

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