I just finished Dave Balter & John Butman's new book
Grapevine.
Dave is the founder of the paradigm-shattering buzz marketing
agency BzzAgent,
and renowned nice guy. Wow! What a great look at this radical
proactive approach to word of mouth marketing.
The book is about BzzAgent's conception and young history. It
explores BzzAgent's approach to WOMM with great stories illustrating
lots of wonderful lessons learned. The usual suspects are in there -
honesty, transparency, remarkable product first, listen, listen,
listen - but they're presented in an unusual way - specifically with
concrete examples and anecdotes. There's new stuff too - The Myth of
the Influentials and The Weird Value of Negativity are both things I
want to talk about in later posts. But more importantly, this book is
really fun to read. Dave and John - them kids is funny.
In the interest of full disclosure, while reading this book I
became BzzAgent mattgalloway. I'm signed up for the BzzBlast of this
book but, as far as I can tell, I don't get anything for my efforts
and I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do. I really just
signed up to figure out what the hell BzzAgent is about and besides,
I'd be writing this anyway - except now I have to add this annoying
disclosure. I did get a free copy of the book at the NYC
WOMMA event - but I would have bought it anyway because, as Seth
Godin said, my friends, colleagues and competitors have probably
already read it. I met Dave Balter at the same conference we talked
for approximately 2 minute 47 seconds during which conversation he
offered me no compensation of any type. He did mention that he's
read my blog and I think I said something about wanting to find out
more about BzzAgent but it was typical conference small talk. He's
since sent me an email that said - and I'm paraphrasing slightly but
only slightly - "nice to meet you" to which I responded -
again paraphrased - "ya, right back at you". I'm not under
hypnosis or drugs - legal or otherwise - of which I am aware. My
wife works for a market research firm although I lie about this on
surveys because otherwise they don't let you take them. Oh, and I'm
Pieces in case that matters. I hope you guys at Commercial Alerts are
happy.
The thing that I love most about this book is the fact that you
can't tell the marketing from the market research. To me,
this is a clear sign that we're really talking about WITH* marketing
instead of AT* marketing. WOMM folks love to talk about listening -
which I agree is critically important. But listening is not really
marketing - it's really market research - so I'm gonna start calling
the listening part of WOMM - WOMMR. Online CGM monitoring, for
example, is not WOMM, it's WOMMR.
Recently, there have been some discussions of engagement or the
lack thereof, particularly of large consumer facing companies like
the incompetent folks over at Volkswagen. These large companies are
listening or at least monitoring but they take this information into
the conference room where it gets talked to death - way outside of
the consumers' view. So you know what people are saying - now what
are you going to do? The CGM analytics folks like to call the results
of their monitoring tools actionable business intelligence.
Great, so what's the action? You've got the WOMMR part now
what about the WOMM.
Well, here's where things get a little tricky. This is where old
habits die hard. This is where good ideas get melted down and
pounded into mediocre SparklyPerfect* marketing messages or worse...
the Subservient Chicken or Perky Squirrel*. Marketers that are
learning about WOMM and trying to jump on the bandwagon are taking
their WOMMR and going into the war room to design a killer
SparklyPerfect marketing campaign that will be just what people want.
They go into their branstormers and emerge six months later without
a clue what people actual want or what they are actually saying.
This is still traditional marketing. It might be based on six
month old WOMMR but it's still AT marketing. It's ain't WOMM.
Remember that with WOMM you don't control the message. You might
based your message on what WOMMR tells you people want to hear but
it's still your mouth. It ain't WOM if it is YOUR MOUTH - regardless
of the message or where the message came from.
So, one approach is then to call a company that has tens of
thousands of volunteers ready to listen to facts (not marketing
messages) or willing to try products and then talk with others - good
or bad - and report back. (That company would be BzzAgent
BTW.) You ask people to talk - they may not, they may say negative
things - and then they tell you how it went. Not only do you have
little to do with the actual message, you don't conduct your research
until after the (hopefully purple) cows is out of the barn. You can
have WOMMR without WOMM, but not the other way round. If you are not
generating WOMMR from your WOMM effort then sorry, it ain't WOMM
after all.
After reading this book, thats my epiphany. A litmus test
for (good) WOMM is whether or not it generates WOMMR.
WOMM, WOM, WOMMR
I think that's the real genius of BzzAgent.
*WITH marketing, AT marketing, SparklyPerfect,
Perky Squirrel are all terms from the book. I think they are all
destined to be as common as Godin's sneezers, Gladwell's connectors,
mavens and salesmen, and Keller & Berry's Influentials so I'm
gonna start using 'em now so I can say I knew Dave when...
