Let’s be real with each other. The only reason you write a book is so that other people read it. Sure, there are a handful of people in the world who dream of writing a book so it can collect dust on some bookshelf. Those folks are few and far between.
The vast majority of all of us want to write a book that actually becomes noteworthy within our niche.
How well is your word-of-mouth strategy doing these days? How many new customers, unique visitors, retweets, likes, or comments did you get last week as a result of a conversation between two or more people? Did you get more word-of-mouth referrals this month or last month? Will you be able to meet your revenue growth goals using word-of-mouth advertising alone?
Let me take a guess, you have no clue.
Since Klout was introduced to the world back in the ancient times of social media in 2008, it has been surrounded with controversy. Klout is not controversial in a scammy, sleezy way. It is controversial because it exposes something about you that you would probably prefer to keep private: your popularity.
So you think word-of-mouth is free? So did I until yesterday. That’s when I came across a tweet that got my brain juices flowing.
The tweet was on the topic of what marketing professionals call earned media. Earned media is more or less pitted as the antithesis to paid media, thus it is often used synonymously with free media.
For those not familiar with this marketing jargon, types of earned media include press coverage and word-of-mouth. Earned media also represents the idea of something going viral. The term paid media typically just means advertising.
As an entrepreneur bootstrapping your business with a small or no advertising budget, you are left with no choice but to depend on word-of-mouth advertising to grow your customer base. For some types of businesses, such as clothing companies and tech gadgets, this serves as an opportunity for them to do something remarkable with their design and/or packaging. For other types of businesses, such as service providers and digital sellers, generating word-of-mouth buzz is a more complex problem to solve.
Alert: This is a post from my Daddy blog series
This weekend was a typical weekend for the Mance family. My boys waking me up at the crack dawn requesting cereal, an hour of Phineas and Ferb on Disney, finger painting at the arts center, then a ride on the birthday party bus. And just like the wheels on the bus, the list of parties to attend goes round and round predictably year after year. What’s not so predictable is what’s going to happen at the establishment that host the 10 to 20 little boys and girls as they devour pizza and cake.
When I woke up this morning, I noticed a really good comment on one of our blog post. It was so good that it inspired me to write this post today. The comment was from intercultural executive coach, Anne Egros. Anne blogs over at zestnzen.wordpress.com. She made a thoughtful comment suggesting that going viral is about connecting emotionally with an audience on our post 10 things entrepreneurs should do everyday to help word-of-mouth go viral.
As an entrepreneur bootstrapping your business, you know the easiest way to get to the promise land is by having your business go viral through word-of-mouth advertising. The problem is that most entrepreneurs believe that the chances of this happening amounts to winning the lottery. While this is true to a certain extent, the lottery ticket aspect of going viral is only one side of the coin.
The ability to make something go viral is both an art and a science. On the one hand, the art of going viral is synonymous with luck. While on the other hand, the science of going viral is typically attributed to skill.
When you are bootstrapping your business, you just don’t have the luxury to spend money on advertising that requires luck for success. This is why the vast majority of bootstrapping entrepreneurs default to word-of-mouth advertising as their only strategy to grow virally.
The first thing you learn when studying the techniques of storytelling is that triggering the right emotions in your audience is critical. In addition, when you study the traits that make something go viral, you also find that triggering the right emotions is the first thing that matters. So it follows that when you start planning a viral advertising campaign that uses storytelling as the base ingredient, defining the emotions of the campaign is the first thing you must do.
