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Tracking WOM isn’t as hard as you think–try these 3 easy techniques:
1> Follow the tell-a-friend forms
2> Track the email forwards
3> Count blog mentions
1> Follow the tell-a-friend forms
Put a referral button on every page of your website and start tracking the clicks. Your star products that generate the most word of mouth may be buried in your website. Compare the number of referrals per page to views per page. This gives you the buzzworthiness index for every page on your site.
2> Track the email forwards
Look for an email message that gets opened from many different IP addresses. Or look for direct mail orders that came from a different name than the person you originally sent the catalogs to. That original recipient is a word of mouth advocate–track the value of their referrals.
3> Count blog mentions
Do a monthly blog search for your company name with Google, Technorati, or BlogPulse. Start tracking total mentions to create a baseline index of your WOM. Then compare links from more active blogs to get a sense of WOM from key influencers.
