2 Comments for The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing: How to Trigger Exponential Sales Through Runaway Word of Mouth

• 1. Anonymous  |  February 12th, 2010 at 11:40 am

  I’m a graduate from Wharton and a professional marketing consultant. When I first began doing marketing professionally, I longed for an integrated theory to guide me in whatever marketing challenge I would encounter. I started by turning to some very general marketing books (“The Portable MBA in Marketing” was one), but was quickly turned off by the stodgy tone of these books and the excess of information that beared almost no relevancy to everday marketing challenges! It seems the only thing classical marketing was albe to suggest was to find out as much as you can about the customer and then profile him, segment him, test out concepts on him, and keep doing this until you’ve found something that works.

  That approach seemed too brute force to me, so I continued looking around for my grand unified theory. Not at all thinking I’d found my golden chalice, I noticed George Silverman’s “Word-of-Mouth Advertising” in the bookstore and was intrigued by the prospect of sysmetically generating word of mouth.

  After reading it, I realized I’d finally found my theory. In fact, what I considered my ultimate marketing theory was only the foundation for this book! Silverman then went on to use these ideas to discuss how to create systematic word-of-mouth campaigns! The grand theory, by the way, is simply modeling the customer buying process–not a huge innovation at first glance, but when presented by Silverman it becomes clear just how overlooked an idea it is. I’ve seen the customer buying process in marketing textbooks before, but it was never presented as the foundation for all marketing everything as, in my opinion now, it should have been.

  The remainder of the book discusses how word of mouth works, the different levels of word of mouth, and plenty of other ideas. It tells you why people spread word-of-mouth (basically being so over-satisfied with a product/service that they feel compelled to talk about it) and how to help them do it (give them tools to quickly contact their friends).

  In the end, this book makes me feel like a better professional because now I have an intellectual basis for approaching all my projects, rather than just “instints”, “intuition” or other pools of ideas whose reliability and accuracy is somewhat flimsy.

  I hate to say it since I’m basically talking to competitors here, but if you’re in marketing, you pretty much need to buy this book.

• 2. Henrietta  |  February 12th, 2010 at 12:44 pm

  There are several good books on word of mouth and viral marketing (and I read everything on the topic), but none like this – written by a master implementer. Silverman reveals previously secret techniques he personally implemented for his clients in dozens of competitive wars. And because he’s done it all first hand, he’s able to illustrate every principle with fascinating real-world marketing examples. No one knows where word of mouth fits into the sales and advertising cycle better than Silverman. He’s at the forefront of turning the whole field into a technology and a new media – treating word of mouth as something you can massively cause, not just a side-effect of a great product or PR. He spells out the principles, strategies, and specific techniques – many of which he invented – and how they relate to each other and to other media. The book is full of checklists of do’s and don’ts, many of which aren’t at all obvious. He explains how to maximize the leverage, getting 5-10 times more per promotional dollar spent. (Was there ever a better time for that?!) Heaven help your competitors who haven’t read this book after you have.

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