Word of Mouth Mathematics
Thursday, July 20th, 2006 at 5:43 pm by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine
Don’t panic! There are no equations in this series of posts — only common sense ideas you can apply to boost your business.
First, a pop quiz. What’s the most effective form of marketing?
Time’s up. Wrong, close, and sort of. Well, some of you were right, I’m sure, because some must have thought “word of mouth”. (The title is a pretty big hint.)
People buy stuff they want in large part because someone they know and trust recommended it. You may not listen very much when your best friend touts a movie — tastes vary and you’ve been disappointed before. But lots of products or services are much less subjective than that.
And, in some cases, it isn’t even a question of quality. It may be simply information about a source for a good price, or availability, or rapid delivery. There are all sorts of reasons one product or merchant is preferred over another.
But before it can be preferred it has to be known. And knowledge comes — more so on the Internet than anywhere else in the modern world — from the high tech equivalent of low-tech: word of mouth.
Word of mouth can spread the literal, old-fashioned way — by words out of someone’s mouth. (Hence, the expression…) More often these days, it happens in the form of a viral email. Or, growing every day, it may be in the form of a blog post and the comments on it.
In short order, the most common form will be social or business networking, ala MySpace and others. (If it isn’t already. Current studies contradict one another.)
But whatever form it takes, it all comes down to the same simple idea: referrals in a good word of mouth campaign grow exponentially.
Remember the old fable about King Shiram of India. Pleased with his counselor’s advice, he granted a wish to double the amount of wheat on each square of a chessboard. One grain on the first, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth, etc. This very quickly becomes an impossibly large number.
(For those who enjoy math, this set grows as 2^N where N is the number of squares. For an eight by eight chess board this is 2^64, more than 18 quintillion — 18 followed by 18 zeros, a number larger than the number of grains of sand in the universe.)
You may have heard that geometric progressions get very large, very fast. As the number of referrers in your network grow, the word spreads very fast. Even though there will be dead ends where the word doesn’t go any further, if there are enough ‘tentacles’ reaching out, the word still gets to a very healthy-sized crowd.
But, and it’s a big but, keep in mind that negative word of mouth can grow just as quickly. Often quicker, in fact, since people sometimes seem more inclined to express a complaint than to enthuse when they’re pleased.
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Hi,
My Name is Jeannie and this is my first time commenting on a site. I am new and trying to understand some very basic things about affiliate marketing and I am such an infant. On the word of mouth topic, I cant agree more. Its one thing to read instruction from a system or program in an ebook… but things really start to sink in when I read what people are doing and they make the same suggestion over-and-over… like articles, articles, articles. Write them, submit them and do it again. Thanks for being helpful…from a brand-newbie