Word of Mouse Marketing | Home Business Marketing Blog

It is a fact over the years that word of mouth marketing is one of the most powerful ways of attracting more clients and profits to your business. Today the Internet has built on that. Instead of the traditional word of mouth we now have “word of mouse marketing” where businesses online allow their fans and customers to spread news of their product or service utilizing the efficiency of online bookmarking tools.

Word of mouse marketing has proven so effective that you don’t have to be a technical whiz or have a huge marketing budget to successfully grow your share of the market.

As the internet continues to evolve new and not-too-new strategies are being employed by the day. Most of these were a carry over from traditional off-line marketing and advertising strategies. Already, the internet has produced three proven advertising categories in the past decade. First it was “display” or “banner” ads which are the equivalent of billboards in off-line advertising. Next are classified ads which are nothing but the equivalent of newspaper classifieds. The third and of course the largest category now is search engine advertising made popular by Google, the biggest search engine.

When Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook, a popular social-networking website, stood in front of about 250 mostly middle-aged advertising executives and announced that Facebook was offering them a new deal it was certain that the internet was to experience a new turn in online advertising. “For the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people,” he said, “but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation.”

His argument was that since “people influence people” advertisers will be able to piggyback on the “social actions” of Facebook users. If the words of Mark Zuckerberg is any thing to go by then web advertising is definitely entering its fourth phase and any wise marketer will do well to utilize this new advertising platform.

Since making that statement word of mouse marketing (aka “viral marketing”, “grassroots marketing”, “word of mouth marketing”) is quickly becoming the new thing in the world of online marketing. Blogs, RSS, Podcasting, viral microsites, short video clips, and advergames are just a few of the tools and technologies that are making this a dynamic medium and industry.

How Word Of Mouse Marketing Works

Word of mouse marketing is about creating a buzz about your product or service and allowing your visitors to pass it on in order that others visit your site. It’s simply the digital equivalent of word of mouth advertising. It involves companies or marketers creating messages so funny and interesting that consumers feel compelled to forward them to their friends and family.

It is its ability to spread like a virus that some marketers call it viral marketing. Imagine creating a marketing infection, a promotional seed that is planted into your web site which a visitor likes and chooses to pass on in order that others visit your site and they also choose to pass it on, thus multiplying the numbers of visitors to your site. As visitors pass it on you receive more new hits and those new hits duplicate the previous thereby increasing your sales overnight!

This new consumer phenomenon has also been called “tagging” or “folksonomies” (short for folks and taxonomy). This not only enable people to file away content under tags, but, even better, share it with others by filing it under a global taxonomy that they created.

Here’s how tagging works. Using sites such as del.icio.us - a bookmark sharing site – and Flickr - a photo sharing site – Facebook, StumbleUpon etc. consumers are collaborating on categorizing online content under certain keywords, or tags.

For instance, an individual can post photographs of their iPod on Flickr and file it under the tag “iPod.” These images are now not only visible under the individual user’s iPod tag but also under the community iPod tag that displays all images consumers are generating and filing under the keyword.

Tagging is catching on because it is a natural complement to search. Type the word “blogs” into Google and it can’t tell if you are searching for information about how to launch a blog, how to read blogs, or just what. Large and small sites alike are already getting on to the folksonomy train. They are rolling out tag-like structures to help users more easily locate content that’s relevant to them.

Although tags are far from perfect but as a wise marketer who wants to benefit with word of mouse marketing you should, nevertheless, be using them to keep a finger on the pulse of the online public. Start subscribing to RSS feeds to monitor how consumers are tagging information related to your product, service, company or space. These are living focus groups that are available for free, 24/7.

It’s important to learn about the different social media platforms from blogging to podcasting, viral marketing, video and social networking sites so that you can choose the right strategy for your word of mouse marketing. Viral marketing or word of mouse marketing will not replace search engine positioning, but will certainly promote your web site in ways that you would never imagine.