Social Media MC - Reading Reflection 2

Through chapter 5 to 9, Li and Bernoff explain the strategies for tapping the groundswell. And in chapter 10, with a up-to-date new technology -- Twitter, Li and Bernoff show us how it works on listening, talking, energizing, helping, and embracing the groundswell.

I will concentrate on energizing the groundswell. 

When political candidates get their supporters riled up and spreading the word, we call it "energizing the base." It's the same with companies and their customers. Energizing the base is a powerful way to take advantage of the groundswell and amplify the "buzz" around products and services. In chapter 7, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff illustrate this key strategy- charging up your best customers and enabling them-using social media technologies-to recruit their peers through positive word of mouth. The techniques highlighted in this chapter are ratings, reviews, and online communities, with case studies featuring online retailer eBags, email services company Constant Contact, and toy company Lego. 

Josh and Charlene define "energizing the groundswell" as "tapping into the power of word of mouth by connecting with, and turning on, your most committed customers." In other words, find your fans, and empower them to sell for you. They start by discussing the ROI of word-of-mouth recommendations. Peer referrals are big business; the opinion of a friend or acquaintance is one of the most trustworthy sources of information about products and services, and the presence of peer reviews and ratings has been shown to positively impact sales. Amazon doesn't let you write reviews for the fun of it. They do it because it creates a credible, self-reinforcing engine of information about their products.

The book states that word of mouth achieves results that no other media campaign can achieve and it succeeds for 3 reasons: (1) It’s Believable, (2) It’s Self-reinforcing, and (3) It’s Self-spreading. Additionaly, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) says word of mouth “is the most honest form of marketing, building upon people’s natural desire to share their experiences with family, friends, and collegues”. Basically, people will always believe other people more than media. 

Just for fun, here’s a shampoo commercial from the 80s that touches on the whole word of mouth concept:

So, as a business, how to energize the most enthusiatic customers? How to do make it easy for them to spread the word? The authors of the book interviewed numerous companies that had succeeded in energizing their customers and reaping the rewards and found three basic techniques:

1. Tap into customers’ enthusiasm with ratings and reviews
2. Create a community to energize your customers
3. Participate in and energize online communities of your brand enthusiasts

The book then goes on to provide specific examples of companies that have utilized each of these techiques to successfully energize their most enthusiastic customers. This made me think about some websites like SnowSeeker and TripAdvisor. How could they do?

It’s a little more difficult in this situation because neither company is selling anything real to the general public. They provide valuable information centered around specific activities or needs that is relevant, fresh, up-to-date, is easily accessible in one place, and its all free. The actual service that is sold is technology based media in the B2B market. This significantly narrows down the number of customers and their likelihood to be energized and sharing word of mouth. That is, I don’t think it would be that difficult to identify those individuals in the general public who are very engaged with the companies through the companies' social media and find way to encourage them to let others know about the companies.

Energizing your customers can be a very powerful marketing strategy; however, energizing is much riskier than the talking and listening strategies discussed in previous posts. The authors warn that if you want to energize your customers you must prepare for a new way of thinking.

References:

Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff  Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies