Think About It . . .
I’ve been hearing myself repeat the same thought lately. It’s something that Andy Sernovitz said when he spoke last May at SOBCon07. Andy knows a few things about what people talk about. He wrote the book, Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking. What he said was . . .
Advertising is for boring businesses.
Andy was making the point that if our product or service was compelling, interesting, people would already be telling each other to check it out.
In his book, Word of Mouth Marketing, Andy explains that to people talking about us and our stuff, we need to know what people talk about. We talk about three kinds of things.
We talk about other people and their stuff.
We talk because it makes us feel smart, important, and helpful.
We want to feel part of a bigger group.
Talking to each other is what we do . . . on a regular basis.
Interesting, exciting, satisfying, compelling products that do what they promise are sticky. They get us talking. We share experiences that we find remarkable and defining.
Obviously Andy’s talk was anything but boring. Here I am telling you about it 5 months later. He doesn’t need advertising. His message stuck with me.
What was the last product or service you talked about? What about it made you want to tell the story?
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Find out about working with Liz.
Funniest inadvertent use of a comma this month:
PictureSandbox would be such a product. Dr. Fou’s design is the only way to search for images!
Mike
Hi Mike!
A real gotcha! I’m going up to fix that. His talk wasn’t boring. I would hate for anyone to think so.
YEA! for PictureSandbox!
hey Liz 🙂
(How nice it is to be back here!)
Andy has a powerful point there. Nothing beats word of mouth advertising. But that is for people who live in a community, in a society.
How about people like me who are the ultimate loners and who don’t talk? Who live their lives inside their minds and out of laptop screens.
Has anyone conducted any kind of research on how many people live and make their buying decisions based purely on what they see on TV or on Yahoo! ads?
What was the last product or service I talked about with another human being? The weather, I think.
Does it have a USP?
Here I am telling you about it 5 months later. He doesn’t need advertising.
Hey Zakman!
How nice to see your smiling face back here again!
It seems that if you only buy as you describe, then you can hardly be influenced . . . I’m not supposing that the ads you see thrill you enough to move to action over something you don’t already want.
Yet I find it hard to get my head around that you don’t share stories about something that you found remarkable with someone you think that remarkable thing might help.
Something I find myself talking about a lot is a stats program called w3counter.com
Sometimes I feel like a walking billboard for it and have had someone ask me if I am being paid to advertise it, but it’s not the case.
I’m a fan of the underdog I think probably because in some ways I relate to the underdog. This software was written by one person and I truly do LOVE it. I have used several others, but I prefer this to all of them to include Google Analytics.
The reason I spread the word about it is because I really think it’s great and I think others will like it too.
I did leave the link out of the comment but you can copy and paste it in if you want to check it out. As usual, nice post Liz.
Hi Liz!!! 🙂
Quote from your reply: […then you can hardly be influenced . . . that the ads you see thrill you enough to move to action… ]
Well Liz, come to think of it, I see that I am indeed influenced. My purchase decisions lean steeply on my innate desire to keep trying something new all the time. The ads don’t have to be thrilling, though…. if it’s new, I wanna try it, and guess what, more often than not, I do make some fantastic discoveries.
But your question is do I share my experience with others? No… I guess not. I very rarely share stories about something I found remarkable………. and that’s because I’m not sure if my judgement is ‘right’ … instead of worrying over whether it’s a mature opinion or not, I’d rather not share at all… and you know that… 🙂
But I’ll definitely give it a shot if someone recommends a great product–whether I need it or not.
And thanks for your comments Liz. They’re as warm as they always have been. 🙂
And I did check out ses5909’s w3counter.com, and it’s a hit counter… nothing to do with advertising?
You’re right zackman, it is a website stats counter akin to Google Analytics. Liz had posed the question:
“What was the last product or service you talked about? What about it made you want to tell the story?”
and that was a product that I noticed I kept raving about lately to anyone who will listen! Thanks for listening 😀
Hi ses5909,
You are doing exactly what Andy was talking about . . . and you sound so much like me that I’m smiling as I type this. I get excited when a great product does what it promises and I want to share it with others.
By the way, ses, you’re a friend. I trust you to leave a link that folks would want to follow. 🙂
Hey Zackman!
I’d be interest in your opinion. You have experience I don’t have and I value that. 🙂
Oh okay, I get it ses5909. You talked about a product/service that excited you.
And I was thinking about advertising all the time and missed the core of the question… sorry!
Let me get back on track then. What was the latest thing I can’t stop thinking about? I’d say it’s the Drupal CMS.
I think it’s a sophisticated CMS software and am still breaking my head over how to customize it… 🙂
@Liz – thanks 🙂
@Zakman – no problem at all.
sorry for my delayed response, for some reason my subscription emails just showed up today even though the comments were posted 10 days ago :S
Same experience here ses5909!
I received just now (Oct 26th) Liz’s response to my comment of Oct 16th!
Then I’m in good company!!
I have a feeling that something shook loose in my blog in the last day or so . . . when it was upgraded. 🙂