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Sometimes the most recent and powerful innovations in marketing turn out to be new handles for things that have been going on forever. Social media is a great example because in an important sense, social media is no more (and no less) than people talking. Social media is what happens when a delicatessen makes a giant delicious corned beef sandwich. Every bit of effort put into making that perfectly immense sandwich inspires people to talk about the brand. Because most people like to share cool things, talk about a great sandwich leads to lines at the deli counter.

Word of Mouth Marketing for Mid-Size Business

So is what’s good for the lunch business good for your own business? When it comes to the elemental force of people talking, the answer is a resounding yes. We’re big fans of Andy Sernovitz, who wrote the THE book on Word of Mouth Marketing and what he teaches applies equally to B2B and B2C businesses. His “Five Ts of Word Of Mouth Marketing” are applicable to just about every business under the sun:

Talkers: Find People Who Talk

From our lunch counter to the most obscure and specialized niche in, say, industrial chemical sales, people talk about the matter at hand. The project of finding who they are can be difficult, or it can be obvious (especially on social networks). But business is always at some level communication between people. They’re there; they need to be located.

Topics: Give People a Reason to Talk

A product innovation, a contest, an industry development, something you’re in front of, something you’re behind, something that happened or didn’t happen today. Topics must be interesting, memorable and portable (easy to pass on).  Having a handle on what these are is essential to stay on top of your market, and creating news and developments is the stock in trade of word of mouth marketing.

Tools: Help the Message Spread

The speed, power and reach of Twitter and other social media are the lubricant that allow large groups of interested people to intensify their interest and raise the amount of time spent discussing your operation. Without this plumbing, the chatter moves at the slow-motion speed of a trade publication or a trade show schedule.

Taking Part: Join The Conversation

It’s one thing to be in business, it’s something else to gain objectivity about your business, your market, your customers and your competition. This is frankly one of the biggest conceptual stumbling blocks for businesses accustomed to traditional marketing when evaluating social media’s payoffs. Traditional marketing is a one-way discussion, social media is more about peering, which leads to…

Tracking: Measure and Listen

Social media’s unique word-of-mouth marketing advantage is that it easy to measure. Being active in social media not only gives you the essential opportunity (we’d say obligation) to represent yourself in the discussion, listening means you have a rich source of data concerning the health of your business’s image.

People talk. Be heard!