Tag: Word of Mouth

The Truth about Bad WOM

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

There’s a dark side to Word of Mouth, too. Negative reviews are inevitable. So what should dislike thumb downyou do in response?

Develop serenity to accept the things you can’t change: You WILL get negative reviews. Expect them. You can make some of the people happy some of the time, but there’s always that one guy who just wants to complain.

Realize what’s actually going on: People who are taking the time to complain share another trait – they actually CARE enough to share their feedback. That doesn’t mean that you have to slavishly follow every single suggestion that comes in (which would be impossible anyway, since at least some of them will be directly contradictory), but it does mean you should think about whether there is a nugget of truth and, if so, how you might be able to incorporate that into improving your program or service.

Remember: “most companies don’t have a negative word of mouth problem – they have a lack of positive word of mouth problem.”

Image credit: Lawyer Coach

Getting Good WOM

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Want to increase your sales, market impact, and online search? According to MarketShare/Keller Fay, word of mouth has a significant, measurable impact on your peopel sharing a secretmarketing. A 10% lift in WOM leads directly to a 1.5% increase in sales and up to a 54% increase in marketing impact. That’s big.

But what makes a great Word of Mouth topic?

  1. It’s emotional – it connects with people
  2. It’s portable – they can share it easily
  3. It’s repeatable – the message is not too complicated

Want to find out more about WOM? Check out Andy Sernovitz’s blog or sign up for his GasPedal e-newsletter (at the blog). A lot of the examples he uses are corporate/consumer, so may not suit the association industry directly, but they’re always inspiring.

Image credit: YHP

She Tells Two Friends…And They Tell Two Friends…

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Remember that old Faberge shampoo commercial, where the hook was that the shampoo was SO amazing that a woman told two friends about it, and then they each told two friends, etc., until the screen was covered with little boxes containing pictures of female heads with awesomely feathered hair?

Witness word of mouth at work.

The exact number offered differs, but we’ve all heard the old trope that someone who has a good experience tells a small number of other people, while someone who has a bad experience tells a MUCH LARGER number of other people.

For associations, the customer service we offer our members is a huge source of word of mouth, positive and negative.

So how can you make sure your customer service is in tip-top shape?

First of all, even if you’re “senior,” don’t take yourself out of the loop. It’s easy to say: “Let the call center/junior staff handle it. I’m too busy/important/expensive.” Wrong. The day-to-day treatment your members receive IS your organization to them. No matter what super-important, high-level project you’re working on, if your members have a lousy experience every time they call, email, or otherwise ask for help, they aren’t going to care.

Second, empower your staff. Tell all your front-line staff that they have the authority to do whatever seems fair to them to resolve a member’s problem without fear of punishment. And back that up. Yeah, they’re going to make mistakes. And you’ll want to make sure that post-game analysis is part of your process, so you can talk through what your staff chose and whether there might be an even better way to respond the next time. But seriously, your word on “no punishment” has to be IRON CLAD. If it is, I guarantee that beautiful things will happen between your staff and members.

Third, secret shop, or better yet, ask trusted members to do so for you and report back.

Fourth, ask your members. We all survey, actually probably over-survey, our members about EVERYTHING. And we love those Likert scales, because we can make all sorts of pretty charts and graphs from them. But ranking your conference location or the quality of a webinar speaker or the ease of your renewal process on a 1-5 scale is way less important than this one question, that should be on every survey you ever send:

“If there was ONE THING we could do to make your experience withbetter, what would it be?”

Yep, that’s an open-ended comment box type question, which means you won’t be able to make a nice graph out of it that you can show to your boss or your board and compare across time. And 90+% of the time, it will be empty when your survey is submitted. But 10% of the time, you are going to get fantastic intel about what your association could be doing that would make a real difference for your members and other audiences. And isn’t that why you exist in the first place?

WOM meme: Consulting

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

I’ve recently been tagged by the geniuses behind SocialFish to participate the Word of Mouth meme on the topic of consulting.

So here’s the meme: Please do a short blog post with an example of how you’ve seen WOM used in your work. Then tag a couple of [association/non-profit] people to do the same.

To quote one of my colleagues at Beaconfire: “If it’s memorable, people will pass it on.”

Consulting – or anything you want to market in the association space for that matter – is all about WOM.

This is coming at a particularly interesting time, because Beaconfire is in the midst of re-examining our strategy for engagement with associations. We’ve always been happy to work with associations, when they’ve come to us. But we recruit staff based on: “Work for a company that’s helping organizations that save the cute, furry animals!” No offense (I worked there for years and loved it), but saving the political scientists? Not as exciting.

But a funny thing happened on the way to saving the cute, furry animals. We realized that, in some ways, associations are much lower drama clients to work with. And while we still want – and need – to do a certain amount of cute, furry animal saving, we’d also like to work with more no drama clients to keep everyone out of the Betty Ford clinic.

So, how does a consulting firm increase the work it does with associations?

You already know the answer: word of mouth.

Getting association business is ALL about relationship and reputation. Those things are built by being in the community, being known to the community, and doing such a fantastic job for members of the community that, when their friends call them up to ask, “Hey, we’re trying to get more strategic about our website and how we use the Internet to reach our members and other constituents. You know anyone good who can help us?” your company’s name is the first thing that pops into their heads.

The tough thing about charitable organizations is that they’re all after the same audience – people who are willing and able to give money to causes – and the same dollars. Because of that, not a whole lot of working together and information sharing. But in the association world, the market for the Association of Accountants does not overlap with the market for the Association of Podiatrists. Hence, collaboration. Information sharing. Community. Word of mouth.

Edited Wednesday, Feb 18 to add: JNott reminds me that I’m also supposed to talk about how consulting is:

Easy: as Vinay reminded me at lunch today, consultants need a niche. Consultants who are successful do something that can be easily summed up in a few words. Consultants who try to be generalists? Generally not so successful.

Sharable: establishing the reputation I talked about above involves sharing your expertise with the association community so that people come to view you as a trusted adviser (thanks for the term, George) rather than “just another vendor trying to sell me something.”

Interesting: well, hell, if you’re not doing good work that produces good results, no one will think what you’re doing is interesting enough to pass your name along when one of their friends calls them up to ask, “Do you know anybody who can do…?”