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January 13, 2008

Word of Mouth

About a year ago my family moved to Greenville, SC. Aside from being in a place much different than my stomping grounds of Northern Virginia, I suddenly found myself without many of the things that were so familiar and comfortable. I was starting over, and that’s not an easy thing to do.

One of my first priorities was to find a place to service our cars. In Virginia I was burned several times by opening the Yellow Pages and picking the places that had well designed ads (designer error). I finally asked a few friends who they used, and they unanimously raved about the same auto shop. I trusted their recommendation and it paid off.

Everyday we ask people things like, “What’s your favorite fill in the blank?” Even if you have a subscription to Consumer Reports, there’s a good chance that you’ll trust what a real person tells you over what a magazine or Google search says. There’s a level of trust that comes along with the opinion of a real person.

This phenomenon, which has really been around as long as things have been bought and sold, is called Word of Mouth Marketing. There are more companies including local Greenvillians Brains on Fire who make brilliant use of this concept, and work to create movements driven by the people who embrace a product or cause. Seems ridiculously simple and intuitive, doesn’t it?

Today, quite by accident, I was struck by the fact that something that I do almost daily falls into the Word of Mouth category. I’ve been working to firm up my creative brief that I use. Rather than defaulting to a Google search, I logged in to my del.icio.us account and searched for “creative brief”. In an interweb millisecond, 718 results ranked by their relevance to my search were displayed. While Google would do much the same thing, there were some distinct differences about the results that I received from del.icio.us.

For those who don’t know, del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site where you can save and share your bookmarks rather than using the bookmarks feature in your browser. Because I use del.ico.us, I know first hand that the results are generated by real people. I don’t really know these people, but I do know that they’re not a Google generated algorithm. The people who bookmarked these sites did so because the content was something that they considered to be worthwhile and relevant to them. No one paid money to appear at the top of the list, and nothing but the actual relevance of my search controlled the results. I tend to trust these results over what a computer algorithm decides I might be searching for because I know that real people just like me are building the content on del.ico.us.

There are two great features that allow me to get an even better sense of the legitimacy of my search results. Directly under each result is a highlighted link that says saved by 2093 people. So there’s not only one person who thinks that a particular link is worthwhile remembering, but 2093 people have latched on to it and spreading it to their friends like wildfire.

But wait, it gets better! Clicking on that highlighted link will display brief notes that people wote about the links. When I bookmark sites in my own list, there’s an option for me to share the link I found with people in my network. I’ll often create these notes for them to get a better idea about the link that I’m sending to them. It’s real, personal, and pure gold when I’m looking for something quick and relevant without sifting through a lot of sites that may not be of much value to me.

While this may be an indirect form of Word of Mouth Marketing, it still qualifies. The web is a haven for spreading this phenomenon through social networking and online communities. How do you directly or indirectly engaged in spreading information by word of mouth on the web?

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