On Friday night, I took the GoTrain. What makes the GoTrain so great? It’s a regional transit system that whips you from city to city in speeds faster than a car. In 20-minutes, I made it from Downtown Toronto to Mississauga. By car, it would’ve been 30-minutes and by public transit, it would’ve been an hour.
As I sat back to enjoy the ride, I had the pleasure of being an observer in other people’s conversations. Word of mouth marketing was at work on the train and although some say it’s hard to measure, it’s still very powerful.
Take for instance this conversation between 2 teens that I overheard. One was reading the paper and stumbled upon an ad for a Holloween event called Screemers. He showed the ad to his friend and this is how their conversation went:
“Did you go?” Teen A asked.
“Yeah,” said Teen B.
“How was it?”
“It was okay.”
“Should I go?”
“Nah.”
“Cool,” said Teen A as he returned his gaze back to the newspaper.
Screemers just lost a customer that night. I wonder how many they lose through word of mouth marketing? And how can Screemers combat this? By using the very tools that consumers are using to recommend products and services to each other. These tools are blogs, podcasts, discussion forums, and other user-generated media.
Screemers could launch a page on MySpace, find a few friends, post a few audio endorsements and be in control of the conversation.
That’s one idea. Do you have any others?
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I love that analogy, Jules. If you’re not part of the conversation, it’s like people are talking behind your back. Reminds me of high school.
while ‘be[ing] in control of the conversation’ is probably not possible, being able to push it in a certain direction through participation is. if you’re not there, people have no problem talking behind your back, you know?