Effective Word-Of-Mouth Tactics – Part XIV

Ten days ago, social media giant Facebook admitted that its “data scientists” conducted an extensive “mood” experiment on 689,003 of its users without their knowledge back in January 2012, where they manipulated the amount of positive and negative content people saw in their “news feeds” for an entire week in order to study how they responded. The Facebook scientists concluded that the manipulated users who saw more negative content were more likely to post negative updates themselves.

There have been many previous studies that have used Facebook data to examine “emotional contagion,” as this one did. The difference here was that while other studies merely observed Facebook user data, this one deliberately toyed with people’s emotional states by purposely manipulating users’ experiences, without their express permission or even knowledge of the experiment.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against Facebook over this unethical experiment.

Meanwhile, well over one billion users happily continue to login to the social media site for an average of over three hours per day, freely sharing all kinds of extremely personal information for Facebook to gather and use to its benefit.

Back in Part V of this series, I pointed out that Facebook was built entirely via Word Of Mouth (and its 1.28 billion current users form one of the most powerful platforms that has ever existed for Word Of Mouth advertising, as people put far more weight into what their “friends” do and buy than what they are told to do and buy by experts, Best-Seller lists and paid advertising messages).

How would you like to have a customer base that rabid and loyal that even if you acted unethically to deceive and manipulate their emotions without their consent, they would continue to do business with you as feverishly as if you actually cared at all about them?

THAT is a powerful example of a company built entirely by Word Of Mouth advertising.

In last week’s post, I shared how to prepare and research your Word Of Mouth campaign.

This week I’m going to discuss how to use that preparation and research to construct an effective Word Of Mouth campaign.

First, let’s take a look at the essential ingredients you’ll need to put together your campaign:

• A superior product or service
• A way of reaching key influencers in your marketplace
• A group of experts willing to go to bat for you
• A large number of enthusiastic consumers
• A way of reaching the right prospects
• One or more compelling stories that people will want to tell to illustrate the superiority of your product or service
• A way to substantiate, prove or back up your claims, and how your product or service will actually help people in the real world
• A way for people to have direct, low-risk experience with your product or service, such as a demonstration, sample, or free trial
• A way of reducing your prospects’ overall risk, such as an ironclad guarantee

Once you have all of those ingredients ready to use, you should consider the situations in which you can benefit from a strong Word Of Mouth program. This includes when…

• You have credibility problems
• You experience breakthroughs (or even slight improvements!) with your product or service
• Your product or service has to be tried in large numbers or over a long time
• There is high risk in trying your product or service
• You have older or mature products or services with a new story
• You are battling unfair practices of competitors who are spreading rumors or telling lies about you or your products or services
• There are governmental or other restrictions on what you may say or claim directly

Finally, a word of caution: While Word Of Mouth can be some of the most effective marketing you could ever do, you should not implement a Word Of Mouth campaign when…

• Educational marketing would not provide meaningful added value
• Your products or services can’t be tried and there is no consensus about them among experts
• Your products or services are so personal or emotional that rational discussion is irrelevant to your prospects’ decisions
• The decision value is so small (low price/low volume) that your efforts would not be cost-effective

These situations are clearly rare, however, compared to the many situations where Word Of Mouth is the most powerful, high-ROI type of advertising you can do.

Just ask the good folks over at Facebook.

If you dare login, that is.