Word of mouth marketing is the least understood and most coveted promotional technique perhaps since the dawn of mankind. It's free, it's fast, it's powerful, but--alas--it is as mysterious to us as the nature of human consciousness and the evolution of the platypus.
According to the recent Word of Mouth Marketing Conference in NYC, the average person has about 11 intimate contacts, 150 social contacts, and 500 to 1,500 "weak ties." That's a lot of potential people your message could reach in less time than it takes you to say, "viral, viral, viral."
As student leaders, we should be trying to leverage the power of word of mouth, though I can't tell you how. The huge pillow fight last weekend (see above) was entirely word of mouth and apparently awesome. So for this post, I'm just going to use the pillow fight as a case study and thought experiment to try to figure out what it takes for a message to travel and stick.
Pillow Talk (hehe):
My thinking is that news of the fight spread like goose feathers on a windy day because:
a. It's weird. People are likely to look up and pay attention because it's not an everyday phenomenon.
b. It's a little mysterious. What will happen? Who will come? What kind of pillow should I bring?
c. It gives people something fun to do together.
d. It's inclusive (pretty much anyone can enjoy it and be a useful contributor).
e. And lastly, people are scared to go alone because they don't want to look stupid. So they enlist as many acquaintances as possible in case no one else shows up.
Again, this is not my field of expertise (or even experience), but I'm pretty darn sure that creating a viral messages requires a certain degree of risk taking and outside the box thinking. First and foremost, that's what gets people's attention and fills the streets with feathers. If anyone has other ideas, I'm very much up for hearing them (and, hey, maybe even spreading them out).
Comments