Reach more customers and grow your business with today’s most powerful marketing tool: Word-of-Mouth Highly Recommended shows the impact of customer recommendations on businesses--transforming how people buy, how you reach customers, how you improve products, and ultimately how you can grow your company by leveraging the power of recommendations. It explains why word-of-mouth recommendations are marketing’s “holy grail,” how to get people talking, who gives recommendations, where recommendations occur, what it takes to build a recommendable brand, and how to instill WOM into every aspect of a business and at the center of any marketing mix. Paul M. Rand is the founder, President and CEO of Zócalo Group, one of the world’s leading word of mouth and social media marketing agencies and one of the fastest growing companies inside Omnicom Group, the 2nd largest global advertising and marketing holding company. He also serves at the Chief Digital Officer for Ketchum, a leading global communications firm.

This collection examines a key new development in the contemporary marketing landscape, the relationship between the informal exchange of information and advice among consumers – known as word of mouth (WOM) – and emerging social media. Whereas WOM has been around since as long as people have engaged in conversations, its transmission is no longer limited to face-to-face interactions over the clothesline and across backyard fences. Today, the dissemination of WOM through online channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube channels, blogs, and consumer forums has significantly altered the alacrity by which product and service messages are spread across a dramatically expanded consumer audience. As marketing practitioners have come to recognize the power of online WOM in terms of its impact on consumer beliefs, attitudes, and purchasing behavior, effective strategies for leveraging the consumer conversation require greater insight and understanding of WOM and social media. Towards that end, this book offers ground-breaking research from an impressive array of internationally renowned marketing researchers on the nature and dynamics of WOM transmitted through social media channels, advancing our understanding of consumer influence, which to date has largely focused on offline WOM. Among the topical issues covered are best practices for marketing practitioners, the conversational nature of online WOM, the dynamic interplay between online and offline WOM, WOM measurement and monitoring, and cross-cultural influences on WOM. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Marketing Communications.

Ines Nee makes important key contributions to service recovery research by analyzing the effect of management response content towards negative online customer reviews on the observer’s purchase intention. This study is the first to provide a conceptual basis of observers’ behavioral reactions towards organizational complaint handling in the context of social media and to empirically test the effect of the two most resource-intensive response options of compensation and explanation. With the help of a profound experimental design, the author detects strategies on how hotel companies should respond towards negative online customer reviews in order to increase the observer’s purchase intention and the hotel company’s return on complaint management.

"With straightforward advice and humor, marketing expert Andy Sernovitz will show you how the world's most respected and profitable companies get their best customers for free through the power of word of mouth.

Talk Triggers is the definitive, practical guide on how to use bold operational differentiators to create customer conversations, written by best-selling authors and marketing experts Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin. Word of mouth is directly responsible for 19% of all purchases, and influences as much as 90%. Every human on earth relies on word of mouth to make buying decisions. Yet even today, fewer than 1% of companies have an actual strategy for generating these crucial customer conversations. Talk Triggers provides that strategy in a compelling, relevant, timely book that can be put into practice immediately, by any business. The key to activating customer chatter is the realization that same is lame. Nobody says "let me tell you about this perfectly adequate experience I had last night." The strategic, operational differentiator is what gives customers something to tell a story about. Companies (including the 30+ profiled in Talk Triggers) must dare to be different and exceed expectations in one or more palpable ways. That's when word of mouth becomes involuntary: the customers of these businesses simply MUST tell someone else. Talk Triggers contains: Proprietary research into why and how customers talk More than 30 detailed case studies of extraordinary results from Doubletree Hotels by Hilton and their warm cookie upon arrival, The Cheesecake Factory and their giant menu, Five Guys Burgers and their extra fries in the bag, Penn & Teller and their nightly meet and greet sessions, and a host of delightful small businesses The 4-5-6 learning system (the 4 requirements for a differentiator to be a talk trigger; the 5 types of talk triggers; and the 6-step process for creating talk triggers) Surprises in the text that are (of course) word of mouth propellants Consumers are wired to discuss what is different, and ignore what is average. Talk Triggers not only dares the reader to differentiate, it includes the precise formula for doing it. Combining compelling stories, inspirational examples, and practical how-to, Talk Triggers is the first indispensable book about word of mouth. It's a book that will create conversation about the power of conversation.

In the widely well-received first edition of The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing, author George Silverman provided readers step-by-step guidance with his innovative Decision Matrix for constructing a word-of-mouth marketing campaign that exponentially increases revenue. Now, extensively revised to reflect the profound changes in the marketplace--from new attitudes and communication methods, to new ways of relating to increasingly wary web and social media users--the second edition of this groundbreaking book shows readers how they can move beyond traditional approaches to identify potential buyers and compose the kind of message that inspires customers to spread the word about products and services. Featuring enlightening case studies and examples, The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing simplifies the process of choosing your delivery method, harnessing the power of influencers, and measuring results. Whether you’re wondering how to navigate the latest digital media or interested in learning what Malcolm Gladwell got wrong, this helpful tool is still the ultimate word on word of mouth.

This book investigates how marketing communications in social networks influence electronic word of mouth, including an examination of brand type and geographic market. It focuses on motivations and reveals why people exchange opinions about brands, products and services in the digital environment. It is written for scholars and researchers within the fields of marketing and communication.