Book Review: The Word of Mouth Manual, Volume II
William Grosso @ July 1, 2008
Recently, while reading the 37 Signals blog, I ran across a brief description of the Word of Mouth Manual, Volume II1.
The 37 signals description is admirably concise:
Dave Balter, from the clever word of mouth marketing agency BzzAgent, has a special treat for our Signal vs. Noise readers. His new book, The Word Of Mouth Manual, Volume II, which costs $45 at Amazon, can be downloaded for free in PDF format.
It’s a good idea because: 1. Dave put everything he knows about the power of word of mouth onto the pages (and he knows a lot), 2. Dave is self publishing the book (you know we love that), and 3. Dave is walking the walk by initially promoting the book solely by word of mouth.
To which I would add:
- It’s short (119 pages, about half can easily be skipped without losing any information)
- It’s an easy read2.
- It sometimes rambles (was there a real point embedded in the discussion of top 40 lists, other than “people focus on a very few things and, even among those things, there’s an 80/20 rule”)
- It has some very good bulleted lists.
About this last point. One of the things I’ve grown more fond of over the years is the way certain authors summarize the key points (of the essay, article, chapter, whatever) in a few, well chosen bullets. Jakob Nielsn has talked about writing for the web at length, and how information should be organized on web pages, but very few people stand up and admit that the web has impacted the way they read.
Here’s my admission: if you don’t include bulleted lists in your book, I’m much less likely to pay attention.
Back to the word of mouth manual. The best bulleted list occurs on page 32, in a discussion of why the best word of mouth marketing occurs right after purchase. Here’s the three bullet points.
- Post-purchase is the best time to share ….
- Third person accounts become first-person narratives …
- Most important, we seek validation from others …
Lovely. Three reasons, called out and highlighted. The reasons themselves are probably old hat to people experienced in marketing but for an ex-engineer like me, this is a perfect encapsulation of a consumer behavior pattern I didn’t consciously know about.
Other good stuff:
- The reference to Effort of Payment. Effort of Payment is an exploration of a simple hypothesis: that monetary markets are highly sensitive to the magnitude of compensation, whereas social markets are not. While this book brings in EOP to substantiate the value of word of mouth marketing, and that it actually works better if you don’t pay people, the ideas in the EOP paper are valid and valuable in a much wider context.
- 90 Days of BzzAgent. This was an interesting experiment– they hired an author to come in to their offices for 90 days and blog about anything he found interesting. It’s a great idea from a publicity / marketing perspective. But it also points out an interesting design decision in weblog software. Namely, when you go to the 90 Days site, you start at day 91– blogs are designed to be read “from the most recent post backwards in time.” In the case of 90 Days, wouldn’t it be interesting to “run the tape forward” instead and read the postings in order? And wouldn’t it be easy to add a switch to wordpress to do just that?
Short version of review: insightful and highly recommended. Especially if you’re completely new to word of mouth marketing.
- I have yet to find Volume I. Apparently it has been superceded by Volume II↩
- Often a little too easy of a read. I would have been happier with a bit more data and a few more references sprinkled throughout↩
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