A couple of days ago I wrote a post about Do It Yourself Word of Mouth. Make no mistake, I believe that word of mouth is the most influential form of advertising a business or an individual can employ. I believe it is so important that I devoted a whole chapter of my book – Career Intensity: Business Strategy for Workplace Warriors and Entrepreneurs – to generating personal buzz.
Today I came across even more evidence of the importance of this powerful medium. A recent study conducted by Bigresearch found that word of mouth was the most influential form of media.
Like anything else, word of mouth requires planning. You need to understand what perception you want your potential customers to have and then you need to develop a strategy for generating the word of mouth that will help create that perception.
People will talk about you and your business. The question you need to answer is: How do you get them to say what you want them to?
Simple: Do the thing that you want them to be impressed by. They'll start talking to their circle of influencees all on their own.
Posted by: Olivier Blanchard | January 07, 2006 at 10:59 AM