The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing: How to Trigger Exponential Sales Through Runaway Word of Mouth (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Let's start from the beginning..." (more)
Key Phrases: decision acceleration, harnessing word, telephone focus groups, New York, Soviet Union, Paddi Lund (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A fabulous road map to highly effective, very inexpensive marketing." -- Alan Weiss, Ph.D., author, The Ultimate Consultant

"In this thorough, useful book, Silverman tells you what matters. Buy it now...before your competition does." -- Seth Godin, author, Unleashing the Ideavirus

Product Description

In our hype-infested society, honest and positive word of mouth can multiply sales explosively. But for those who think it happens by chance (as most marketers do), this book will be an eye-opener.

The surprising truth is that word of mouth can be implemented as strategically as any other form of marketing--and at significantly lower cost! This is especially good news for any seller of products or services who must maximize every marketing dollar.

Central to this book is the innovative Decision Matrix, which helps readers identify who their potential buyers are and what messages those prospects need to hear from friends, coworkers, and trusted advisors. This matrix is followed by step-by-step guidance on how to construct an integrated "no vested interest" campaign that leverages all channels (including traditional media, the Internet, and PR), penetrates successive tiers of audiences, and builds sales exponentially. Marketers will learn how to:

* Target the predominate adopter type (innovator, early, middle, late, laggard) * Create the content--the actual words--needed to accelerate the process * Identify the sources and delivery mechanisms that will be most persuasive * Use a wide variety of the methods that trigger runaway word of mouth.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: AMACOM; 1 edition (April 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814470726
• ISBN-13: 978-0814470725
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #53,428 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally marketing that's systematic!, July 3, 2003

By	Joshua Padnick (Scottsdale, AZ) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm a graduate from Wharton and a professional marketing consultant. When I first began doing marketing professionally, I longed for an integrated theory to guide me in whatever marketing challenge I would encounter. I started by turning to some very general marketing books ("The Portable MBA in Marketing" was one), but was quickly turned off by the stodgy tone of these books and the excess of information that beared almost no relevancy to everday marketing challenges! It seems the only thing classical marketing was albe to suggest was to find out as much as you can about the customer and then profile him, segment him, test out concepts on him, and keep doing this until you've found something that works.

That approach seemed too brute force to me, so I continued looking around for my grand unified theory. Not at all thinking I'd found my golden chalice, I noticed George Silverman's "Word-of-Mouth Advertising" in the bookstore and was intrigued by the prospect of sysmetically generating word of mouth.

After reading it, I realized I'd finally found my theory. In fact, what I considered my ultimate marketing theory was only the foundation for this book! Silverman then went on to use these ideas to discuss how to create systematic word-of-mouth campaigns! The grand theory, by the way, is simply modeling the customer buying process--not a huge innovation at first glance, but when presented by Silverman it becomes clear just how overlooked an idea it is. I've seen the customer buying process in marketing textbooks before, but it was never presented as the foundation for all marketing everything as, in my opinion now, it should have been.

The remainder of the book discusses how word of mouth works, the different levels of word of mouth, and plenty of other ideas. It tells you why people spread word-of-mouth (basically being so over-satisfied with a product/service that they feel compelled to talk about it) and how to help them do it (give them tools to quickly contact their friends).

In the end, this book makes me feel like a better professional because now I have an intellectual basis for approaching all my projects, rather than just "instints", "intuition" or other pools of ideas whose reliability and accuracy is somewhat flimsy.

I hate to say it since I'm basically talking to competitors here, but if you're in marketing, you pretty much need to buy this book.

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why this is the forefront in how to cause word-of-mouth, May 15, 2001

By	Ron Richards (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

There are several good books on word of mouth and viral marketing (and I read everything on the topic), but none like this - written by a master implementer. Silverman reveals previously secret techniques he personally implemented for his clients in dozens of competitive wars. And because he's done it all first hand, he's able to illustrate every principle with fascinating real-world marketing examples. No one knows where word of mouth fits into the sales and advertising cycle better than Silverman. He's at the forefront of turning the whole field into a technology and a new media - treating word of mouth as something you can massively cause, not just a side-effect of a great product or PR. He spells out the principles, strategies, and specific techniques - many of which he invented - and how they relate to each other and to other media. The book is full of checklists of do's and don'ts, many of which aren't at all obvious. He explains how to maximize the leverage, getting 5-10 times more per promotional dollar spent. (Was there ever a better time for that?!) Heaven help your competitors who haven't read this book after you have.

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How you can make words of mouth work for you, March 15, 2004

By	Bruno Levy (Milan Italy) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have 10+ years of experience marketing and launching high tech (and non high tech yet innovative) products of various sort and i found this information both accurate, invaluably concise and making good business sense. I find it an excellent complement to more theory oriented books like the "tipping point" and the "anatomy of buzz".
These last two books will explain you how words of mouth works but will not give you any really in depth insight about how you can make words of mouth work for you. "The secrets of words of mouth marketing" does.

To give just and example: the "decision matrix" described in chapter 5 is an extremely concise and rich tool for anticipating the concrete information that customers need to hear in order to decide about a product. For instance if you are currently targeting early adopters kind of customers then the matrix will tell you the exact content of what they need to hear in order to help them "decide to decide", "weigh information in your favor", "engage in a trial" etc. The decision matrix will also tell you what middle majority/pragmatist customers will need to hear to make the same kind of decisions and of course it's not at all the same (those of you wondering what I mean by early adopters, middle majority etc will find the info in the book -- this belongs to the diffusion of innovation theory of Everett Rogers something that any person seriously interested about words-of-mouth need to know about anyway by reading the two other books or this one).

You might have notice that in the previous paragraph I have been speaking about what customer "need to hear" and not what your company "needs to tell them". I think it's one of the great success of the book in helping us to really see the difference between the two, to understand that what you company say is less important than what your cstomer say and think and to understand how words-of-mouth can be "organized" in order for the two to match better.

Great book!!

Bruno Levy