Robert has been doing fascinating research on marketing using some really fascinating anthropology / ethnography techniques. (Example and Another)

I'm a big fan of his work.

Robert says:

I'm a marketing professor at Canada's top b-school, and I'm starting one of Canada's first dedicated Word of Mouth Marketing courses for MBA students. I chose this book to be the textbook for my course because, hands-down, it is the best, most recent, and most clearly written book on the topic. Andy Sernovitz has been around this field for a long time, and has absorbed a lot of knowledge from practitioners and pencil heads alike. What he has done in this book is offered us a highly organized system for thinking about WOM that makes a fairly complex and fuzzy topic almost simple in its dimensions. Moreover, he gives the topic the ethical spin it deserves. Good WOM marketing is inherently ethical he argues, and he tells marketers what they need to do to avoid the many pitfalls and temptations inherent in the WOM marketing practice.

If you are an academic looking for citations and thorough modeling of the WOM process, this book is going to disappoint you. But for practitioners and students, especially those with only a passing familiarity with WOM, this book is a powerful eye-opener that will take you from interest to ability very quickly. All in all, this is a practical book with lots of good examples and details. I highly recommend it.

More about Robert here.

Thanks, Robert.

• Dr. Walter Carl, Northeastern University
• Dr. Carl Mela, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University
• Dr. Robert Kozinets, Schulich School of Business, York University

This is great news. Word of mouth marketing can be taught, and is an essential skill for any potential entrepreneur. With the new focus on scientific WOM measurement, I believe we will see that word of mouth marketing does well when held up to academic standards.

(Professors and students, feel free to contact me for academic discounts.)

"After you read this you will never run another banner ad again!"

Now, I'm not opposed to advertising as such ... but free word of mouth beats paying for it any day.

Read the review:

Here's what he wrote:

I've got a give a shout out to the latest book I'm reading which is really GOOD. It's called Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz. Let me tell you why I think it's great. I read quite a few books, and these days a lot of them are on marketing. What many marketing books fail to do is give clear, actionable plans for the reader. I finish books and say "yah, but what am I supposed to DO about it?" This book delivers. It's a quick read (you can finish it on a plane ride) which makes it all the better. He doesn't spend time filling pages with a lot of blah, blah. He cites case studies and provides next steps all along the way. If you read nothing else check out the Manifesto . After you read this you will never run another banner ad again!

Thanks, Marty!

John focuses on something I love: practical, hands-on advice for small business marketers. He does it better than anyone. If you like my book you'll love his.

So here's what you should do:

• Get the newsletter
• Read the blog
  and
• Buy his new book

The book is great: It's all of his best ideas in handy reference.

One thing that John is particularly good at is getting other people to reprint his blog on their web sites (syndication, to use the fancy term). His post featuring the podcast keeps showing up on other blogs:

• Internet Marketing Newswatch
• Federated Media

This is a core word of mouth marketing principle: Share and share alike!

I wrote about them in the book:

PrintingforLess.com has become one of the most popular printing companies in America through extraordinary customer service. They printed a small order of brochures for me recently, less than $500. They actually went to my website, noticed that the logo on the brochure was a slightly different color than the one on my website. They called to make sure it was okay. Then they fixed it for free. As you can imagine, a little bit of extra service has generated a ton of word of mouth from my team.

Nick Runyon, their head of marketing, is a great WOMster and a great speaker -- and now I owe him a big favor. They were kind enough to include Word of Mouth Marketing in an email to their 100,000-reader email list. And they issued a press release too! Now that's good WOM!

I get all of my printing from them. You should too.

Thanks, Nick!

• Get "Viral" and grow!

• If it were easy...

• Jump In!

Check out Jim's site -- he has some real insights into practical WOM.

Thanks, Jim!

Janine wrote a great review that provides solid examples for my Four Rules of Word of Mouth:

1. Be interesting

2. Make people happy

3. Earn trust and respect

4. Make it easy

Read her post here and try out Vertical Response.

Thanks, Janine!

Here's the deal, quoted from the book:

A brief aside for all the editors and strict grammarians reading this: Yes, I do know that “word of mouth” is supposed to be hyphenated “word-of-mouth.” Actually, it’s hyphenated when it’s an adjective — “word-of-mouth marketing” — and not when it’s a noun. But no one ever gets it right, so I’m going to skip the hyphens. That’s the advantage of being one of the first people in a new industry — you get to define the terms.

(Now that this is written, I am allowed to return home to my wife, the professional editor, who still isn’t happy about all of this. But I hope she will settle for this note, as she graciously accepts many far-worse quirks.)

That's why word of mouth marketers love to talk about "evangelism."

(Of course, marketers' product doesn't have the same social/cosmic significance as religion, but we can learn from each other.)

So it's no surprise that several blogs about church marketing have mentioned the book recently.

• Steve Addison talks about how "life is relationships."
• Ed Brenegar talks about social networks and churches.
• And I'd love to be interviewed by one of my favorite blogs (hint hint): Church Marketing Sucks.

One of the books that helped me develop my early thoughts on word of mouth marketing was Rick Warren's Purpose-Driven Church - an earlier book that is a how-to manual for community-building.

Update: Yet another great post on the topic.

Here's some of what I said:

Still, there are several crucial points that anyone trying such a program should keep in mind, said Andy Sernovitz, the chief executive of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, a trade group in Chicago.

The most important thing, he said, is be honest. Too often, companies try to start word-of-mouth campaigns using people who have been paid to spread the message. If word of that gets out, it can do far more harm than good.

A better option is to use a blog or e-mail message sent to customers, and make it easy for them to borrow elements of that message, Mr. Sernovitz said. For example, provide silly or unusual content or Web links to special offers or coupons.

''If you want someone to talk about you, you have to give them something to say,'' he said. ''It's like stone soup: everyone throws something in and the message gets richer and richer. Don't talk in press releases about what you're selling because people already know what you do.''

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