Your Allies' Moments of Truth








			by Ron Richards, President, ResultsLab

		The Moments of Truth for 3 kinds of people and what can be done about these moments to multiply results for publishers and advertisers

Developers: Managers, architects,
designers, authors, editors webmasters
Your visitors
Your word-of-mouth allies < Below on this page


	Your Word-of-Mouth Allies

OK’s vs. Raves
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the fact that if you doubled a dollar every day for 30 days you’d have over a billion dollars. Just a few months ago in a workshop I led for 15 editors writing e-mail letters to their on-line magazine subscribers, I pointed out a similar compounding phenomenon...

Suppose your site is so good that for each two people who comes to your site, one of them raves to 6 people about the site. The people they rave to could be colleagues, suppliers, clients, friends, relatives, neighbors, etc. Now suppose out of those 6 people, 5 visit the site and get reinforced enough for 2 of them to each rave to 6 people. If you work out the math, it turn out that those two initial visitors, after 18 such cycles of word of mouth, yield over a million visitors to your site.

Of course, at some point you saturate the population for whom your site is interesting, but there are solutions to that problem. I won’t go into them here; it would get us off track.

No wonder word-of-mouth is acknowledged as the most powerful force in marketing. I spent 9 years as founder and president of a company that delivered a word-of-mouth marketing system, as described in Ron Richards’ Background: An Unusual Career -- All New-Media Marketing.

One thing we learned was that allies saying “OK” is pretty worthless. When someone asks a past visitor about your site and they say it’s “OK... Good... Interesting... Enjoyable... Useful... Cool” you’re nowhere. It’s faint praise. The listener has too many competing alternatives.

Word-of-mouth only produces those snowball effects when the transmitter either (1) articulates specific reasons why the site is so valuable and fascinating, or (2) raves about the site in highly emotional terms to someone who trusts their opinion. Ideally, your ally does both, becoming what I call a “rational evangelist.”

To turn word-of-mouth into a marketing tool, you need to add things to your site that will both prompt runaway word-of-mouth, and cause it to be in a form that’s persuasive to the listeners. Just having a great site doesn’t make it happen, because people can love it but not be able to articulate why others should visit!

To prompt word-of-mouth that works you need to improve how your site is positioned. That’s key to ensuring that the core message in your site survives the person, to person, to person word-of-mouth without getting distorted along the way -- like in that game we all played as kids, called “rumor” or “telephone.”

It’s also possible to “package” great word-of-mouth comments, and put them in sidebars or separate pages on your site. See How to Get and Use Quotes to Double Your Response. Another way for you to see examples of word-of-mouth in “print,” is to look at the pages in this ResultsLab site that contain What Clients Say.

Yet another powerful tool, that arms your allies with everything they need to be effective word-of-mouth allies with their contacts, is my concept of a“Word-of-Mouth Tool Kit.” It can take many forms suitable to the Web. If you’re interested, ask me about it.

Guided Tour
Even more powerful than having your ally talk to a friend is having them “demonstrate” the site to the other person. If your site is fascinating enough this can happen spontaneously, as when someone says to someone at the next desk, “Wow, this is amazing; look at this” right at their moment of discovery.

But, it’s best not to rely on those random spontaneous moments. Instead, using the tools we discussed above, you can prompt allies to give demonstrations -- either at their own computer, or at their friends/colleagues computer.

How does this differ from your ally just talking about the site? Well, for reasons I don’t completely understand, most people have inertia. Having an appointment to see the site demonstrated removes the inertia and procrastination. The person receiving the word-of-mouth plus the demonstration also has the reassurance that they can’t get stuck since their savvy friend will be guiding them.

Maybe they think their friend will even guide them to the very best pages.

Demonstration also provides more reinforcement to your rational evangelist ally, because they actually see how much the other person shares their fascination with the discovery. In fact, your ally gets the feedback at its juiciest moment. With that intense reinforcement, your ally is more likely to talk with many others, or demonstrate again.

Show and Tell
A big missed bet, in the realm of prompting word-of-mouth, is encouraging your visitor allies to not only talk about the site, not only demo the site, but also to make and show printouts of key pages.

As I’ve discussed in one of the section of Link Architecture, great sites control how printouts will look, through the use of the right size link chunks, the use of tables, and other techniques. If you can be pretty sure pages will look good on printouts, you can encourage people to make printouts, show them, and tell others their significance.

Making sure your site causes decent looking printouts is especially important in situations where the person who visits your site may be doing so on behalf of their boss or colleague, who asked them for printouts.

Phone and E-mail
If your site is seen as exceptional, and if it does a great job of prompting word-of-mouth, your allies will do more than rave about the site when they happen to be with someone else. It’s possible to prompt your allies to get proactive and pick up the phone, or send e-mail about your site, to several people who they feel would appreciate knowing about it.

For a few clients, I’ve created a way to prompt (1) allies to forwarded that e-mail to their colleagues, suppliers, clients, friends, relatives, neighbors, (2) who may forward it again to their contacts, etc., etc.

Thus there are ways to package some of the e-mail word of mouth for the benefit of your ally and their contacts. If this is done skillfully, it is seen as a service, not an intrusion.

Persistence
A true word-of-mouth rational-evangelist is like a bird dog who’s got the scent. They howl your site’s praises every chance they get. And they don’t just wait for opportunities. They’re out looking for others who need -- and will appreciate hearing about -- what they’ve discovered.

If someone is a “wild-eyed-evangelist” they become a nuisance and turn others off. It’s a trap many enthusiasts fall into. But you can help them become “rational evangelists” by providing them with the tools they need.

They want to be supported as a word-of-mouth transmitter just as much as you want them to succeed. Thus, I developed the “Word-of-mouth toolkit” concept -- custom designed for each situation. It gives allies everything they need to be an effective rational evangelist with others.

Over the years, in designing word-of-mouth campaigns, one of the most frequent questions I get asked is whether to offer incentives to your word-of-mouth allies. In a nutshell, I think it usually backfires.

When your ally contacts their friend (or asks you to contact their friend) it must be seen as as favor to their friend (who needs the information) and a favor to your ally (to take labor off their hands). It must not be seen by the referrer or the referee as a favor to you!

Incentives backfire because they switch the polarity, and imply that the referral, or word-of-mouth, is a favor to you, the “seller.” Once your ally sees it as a favor to you, there are a half dozen concerns that enter your allies mind for the first time. At the top of the list is their worry that they’re exploiting their friend just to get a small incentive from you. In one project, we learned that we had to purge even the slightest hint that the referral was a favor to the seller, or the referrals were nil. Once we did purge all such connotations, referrals were 2 to 5 names from every other person on the average, with some people giving hundreds of names.

This concept applies not only to referrals, but to word-of-mouth commenting as well. Your allies will only do it if they frame it as a favor to those they care most about: their colleagues, suppliers, clients, friends, relatives, or neighbors.

When you have something great, that alone doesn’t give you the results you deserve. It’s worth choreographing things to help others sing your praises.


	The Moments of Truth for 3 kinds of people and what can be done about these moments to multiply results for publishers and advertisers

Developers: Managers, architects,
designers, authors, editors, webmasters
Your visitors
Your word-of-mouth allies < Above on this page


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