8:50 — Kurt Vanderah introduces GasPedal CEO, Andy Sernovitz.
8:51 — Andy takes podium
8:51 — “Welcome, welcome to word of mouth supergenius, we are going to have a fantastic day today.”
8:52 — Happy customers are your greatest advertisers. Earning their respect and recommendation is most important
8:52 — Love most powerful force in marketing. Love earns customers. It’s not bought and paid for. It is earned through caring services.
8:53 — This stuff is not easy. It’s earned. It’s hard. It takes big ideas.
8:53 — It grows in any marketing economy.
8:54 — New Love. New Love makes us talk to lots of people. Just like new iPad and iPod. Love works for stuff.
8:54 — You can scale it & expand it. It breaks the relationship between marketing and money
8:54 — Two choices: pay for media or get someone to talk for you.
8:55 — Love is sustainable and grows with you.
8:55 — Customer love doesn’t cost anything.
8:56 — Why do we buy from Zappos.com? How do they sell billions of shoes? They make us fall in love with their service. They will talk to us about our bunions and they will take our returns.
8:56 — Zappos gets customers for free from other customers!
8:57 — When you pour money into customer service you get more customers and lower cost of customer acquisition. You build a recession proof company.
8:58 — You will have an army of people who believe in you. You will always win.
8:59 — Your brand isn’t what you say it is, it’s what other people say it is. You better hope those people have something good to say.
9:00 — Word of mouth is the last thing they hear after your salespeople leave.
9:00 — We probably don’t know if someone’s posted a review of our products. Marketing is what you do, not what you say.
9:01 –– All of the ads in the world don’t move products. Word of mouth moves products. Word of mouth works with good companies, good products and good people.
9:02 — We want to teach the world to be good at this. Good companies are open, honest and kind. Companies that use word of mouth are better companies
9:02 — Every Homer has a Marge….
9:03 — Whatever it is, there is love for you. Customers, workers, fans—they all want to talk about you.
9:03 –– Skittles. There’s nothing new about skittles. Except that 6 million people are Skittles fans on Facebook!
9:04 — Dell outlet store’s twitter account is followed by 1.5 million people. They sell 6 million dollars of stuff for every 20 minutes each day.
9:05 — Duct brand duck tape found that kids are using duck tape to make prom clothing. 120 schools, 1,6000 reporters, and 48,000 famlies compete for this scholarship.
9:06 — Heinz said, “Make a commercial for us!” 4,700 people made TV commercials for Heinz. 10 million people woke up and said, “Let’s watch some ketchup commercials today.”
9:06 — There’s love for everything! If we can do it for ketchup and ductape, we can do it for you!
9:07 — Help love grow: nurture it and invest in it. WOM isn’t luck, its marketing. If people like what you do and are happy with you, help people start the conversation and spread it loudly
9:07 — Definition of WOM: giving people a reason to talk about your stuff and making it easier for that conversation to take place
9:07 — Remember Krispy Kreme? Hot donuts are the reason to talk about Krispy Kreme.
9:08 — You know those emails you get from Gap and J. Crew? What happens is, some dude in the marketing department sends an email to employees telling them “Secret! Do not share.” Then they go ahead and share it anyway. Gap and J. Crew make it easy for conversation to take place by giving it to those will talk and share. This is much more effective than discount cards.
9:09 — The 5 T’s of WOM: Talkers: who will talk? Topics: what will they talk about? Tools: help the message spread. Taking part: join the conversation. Tracking: measure and listen.
9:09 — We’re partners with charity: water because they’re good at WOM. Thay have super easy and super clean WOM topics. They do more with WOM than multimillion dollar campaigns. WOM builds momentum. Study the charity: water page and make a donation.
9:09 — Here’s an important idea: it is not about social media! Social media helps WOM, but it is not WOM. It scales the online part, but email gets a lot of traction too. A personal recommendation from a personal friend beats a tweet any day.
9:10 — WOM is really hard. It takes big ideas and commitment. It must be earned.
9:10 — The point is to be a brand worth talking about. It’s not about the technology and the tools.
9:10 — How do we start to earn that love?
9:10 — It isn’t about saying to your sweetie that you’re in love. It’s about romantic gestures.
9:11 — Small gestures bring lots of talking
9:11 — Take Apple in 1996: the WOM topic that saved Apple was the colors! It got people talking. The brand message rides with topic. Real people don’t repeat marketing messages.
9:11 — WOM needs to be portable, repeatable, emotional.
9:11 — “Look at the hot donuts.” “Look at the pink computer.”
9:12 — As a relationship grows, we talk less. Like chocolate. There’s nothing to say about it, even though we love it.
9:12 — We all know Google maps is great, but now they have a chocolate problem. So they get us talking again with satellite view.
9:13 — And then an ultra-creepy street cam! Which freaks us out, but we talk about Google Maps. They keep giving us new WOM topics to keep us talking.
9:13 — A company needs to help people share the love. Give them the tools and the technology to share the message. Put videos on YouTube. Put offers on Twitter and Facebook. If people want to put your name places, give them hast, stickers, etc. If you can get 10,000 people to use your “Tell a Friend” form and you get some people to use it, it will grow. What’s your objective? To get leads or to sell.
9:14 — Back to donuts: how to keep the love alive. It’s not by putting Krispy Kreme in gas stations when they got cold! They lost the love.
9:15 — You don’t find love on the sofa. You need to participate, encourage, and earn the love.
9:15 — Every time a blogger says something nice, go say thank you to that blogger. It makes them feel good and maybe write another blog post about you.
9:15 — Turn simple stuff like that into WOM.
9:16 — Flag for the day: would anybody tell a friend? Think about it. This is the question that challenges you to be wonderful. Is this product good enough? Then ask this question? It has to be awesome.
9:17 — You can be special enough for people to talk about you. Or you can be boring and buy ads. Be different, be interesting and let people talk about you.
Love this live coverage? It’s all thanks to the amazing Tish Grier.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
[…] Love or Marketing? How Word of Mouth Will Save Your Brand — with GasPedal’s Andy Sernovitz […]