A real life example.
Today I signed up a client to Jobthread , an easy to use jobs board service. I heard about Jobthread from the wonderful Society for Word of Mouth , (SWOM) which I in turn found out about from Michele Miller of Wonder Branding and co-author of "The Soccer Mom Myth ".
I found out about Michele from Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg at Future Now who I was fortunate enough to have worked with many years ago.
This is a very definite path, and one I can personally recognise.
Can This Be Measured?
Now the thing is, Jobthread will never really know how they got my client’s business. Sure they can measure the click from The Society for Word of Mouth, but prior to that they won’t know (unless of course they read this blog post).
Which leads me to my current musings: "How do we ever really know why we got a sale? How can we truly measure the effect of not only marketing, but especially word of mouth marketing? How can we influence word of mouth?"
The original relationship I had with Future Now was established years before Jobthread existed, so it would seem almost impossible for Jobthread to have foreseen that and influenced it.
Lessons Learned – What You Can Do
If there are lessons for new products and services such as Jobthread to be gained from this experience, I see them as follows:
Associate and link up with people and organisations that have great reputations.
Organisations such as SWOM and FutureNow are progressive and tend to be at the front of the marketing bell curve with other innovators and early adopters.
The branding and reputation of who you associate with, may just rub off on you.
Have a great, easy to use product.
Prior to signing up with Jobthread I had been looking at similar services as well as jobs board software. While all were ok, most weren’t easy to set up, or lacked certain features that were desirable. In fact I was almost at the point of choosing one of them, when I noticed the ad on SWOM.
Being the curious type, I thought: "Well if Ben and Jackie from SWOM are using it. I should check it out. After all, it was through them that I discovered Ning, another great service."
Jobthread turned out to be ridiculously easy to set up and had all of the features I was looking for. It was a classic example of what George Silverman keeps saying about Decision Simplicity: Make a great product that’s very easy to use, and people will beat a path to your door.
Was this whole experience just chance, serendipity?
Your Thoughts?
So, can we ever truly measure the source of word of mouth marketing sales? Let me know your thoughts and real life examples.
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