But blogging is so five years ago right? It’s all about microblogging and status updates now isn’t it? If you think that’s the case, think again, because blogs can still drive big-time traffic to websites. An example of this has been illustrated by the launch of e-commerce site Alice.com.

How much traffic are you getting from blogs? Let us know.

If you are not familiar with Alice.com, it is a site where consumers can buy everyday household items like toothpaste, toilet paper, laundry detergent, diapers, etc., right from the manufacturers, rather than through middleman retailers. It launched in June, and by July it had doubled its traffic to 387,000 unique visitors, according to Compete.

Guess where the majority of that traffic came from. According to Compete, it came from word-of-mouth from blogs. In fact, its number one traffic source was Blogger.com. Not Twitter. Not Facebook. Not search. Although each of these no doubt played valuable roles as well., Blogger.com has been the biggest factor in driving traffic for this site, and from the looks of things, that traffic is showing no signs of slowing down.

Blogger accounted for 18% of Alice.com’s referral traffic in July, and obviously there are plenty of blogs out there that aren’t hosted at Blogger.com. On top of that, Compete says Alice’s conversion rate jumped to 3.5%  in July as well.

Of course, you have to give bloggers something to talk about to get valuable blog traffic. It’s no different than getting people to talk about you on social networks or through any other form of word-of-mouth marketing. It starts with your product. Clearly Alice.com, has something that many people find worth talking about.

"Anyone who has previously shopped online for household products knows that prices are generally higher (sometimes considerably) than those found in stores," Compete’s Matt Pace says of Alice.com.  "By selling directly to consumers, manufacturers are able to price their products below those found on most online retailers and more competitively to those found in stores."

Clearly this is a void in the lives of consumers that Alice is attempting to fill. It’s still early to tell if this site will remain a success. As long as it keeps the bloggers (consumers) happy, it could enjoy a long life. Because one thing to remember about word-of-mouth is that it works both ways. Reputations can quickly move in different directions online. So can traffic.

Do you see more traffic from blogs or from social networks? Comment here.

“There is only one thing worse than being talked about, that is not being talked about”
-Oscar Wilde

Yesterday I heard Andy Sernovitz speak about word of mouth marketing – one of the most imaginative ways to attract customers. Just like we want to be friends with and around people we like, we buy from companies we like.

How do you practice Word of Mouth Marketing? Give people a reason to talk about you and make it easy for them to talk about you. After all, good marketing is starting and continuing a conversation.

How many blogs does Google maintain about their products? Over 90! They keep pinging us with messages about updates, features, innovative ways to use their products, new products, and partnerships. The media and bloggers keep writing about them, even small things that would otherwise be boring – like that one more city has been added to Street View.

Many times the companies I provide blogging services for want to stop at some point. When things are going well they wonder why they are spending the money. That’s like saying to someone, our relationship is going so well I don’t think we need to continue talking. If you stop talking you effectively end the relationship. Andy referred to your company blog as “your private pipeline to your best fans.”

Here are some other points to help your Word of Mouth Marketing efforts:

Boring Costs More
My favorite message is that you pay more if you’re boring. You pay for advertising; you pay people to write about you. If you’re interesting and/or unique people will sell your product for you. They will talk if you make it easier for them to share information about you (blogs and email are made to share).

I read some more advice about this from the 37 Signals blog (via Seth Godin): “Provide something of value. The first step is recognizing that marketing is asking for someone else’s time and attention. You need to provide something worthy…when you educate or entertain other people, they’ll pay attention. If you bore them, they won’t.

How to Come up with Good Ideas – Ask
I asked Andy after the presentation how you get the best ideas on Word of Mouth Marketing and he said – just ask. That means asking your customers: on blogs, suggestion boards, by email, on forums, etc. Ask what you can do to help them feel appreciated.

Accuquote asked their life insurance customers what they could do to keep them happy. Customers responded saying they wanted a phone call once a year to review their coverage. They felt like they were forgotten about and that they were paying for something that seemed like a black hole. The company assumed people wouldn’t want to be contacted but they did. When the company responded they got another bonus – people often wanted to upgrade their policies. That’s what they learned by asking.

Assign a Web Ambassador

To keep the conversation going you need to join in and participate. He suggested assigning someone in your company to be an ambassador. Have them search the web and respond to questions, introduce themselves, thank people for their comments, and address issues.

Bloggers especially love to write about a company and get a response from them (I still remember my Fat Wallet post and their immediate response and care. I followed up my criticism with a post about the goodwill Fatwallet created with me by responding). Since blogs show the most recent posts first the positive post will show up higher in the search engines and on the blog itself.

Hope to get your feedback on how you have benefited from Word of Mouth Marketing in your business. What are you talking about lately? What companies stand out to you?

Comments

The first paper, to be published in the December 2007 issue of the Journal of Advertising Research, suggests that advertisers should focus on "old fashioned" word of mouth tactics, where the collective spreads the message, rather than a "few elite and highly connected believed to have the most persuasive power." 

The findings contradict traditional advertising practices, where celebrity endorsements are standard practice. But people are not only more likely to trust an endorsement coming from a friend, but are also eager to pass the message along.

The study was co-authored by James Coyle, assistant professor of marketing in Miami’s Farmer School of Business and of interactive media studies, Elizabeth Lightfoot of CNET Networks, and Ted Smith and Amy Scott of MedTrackAlert.

“We find that trying to track down key influencers, people who have extremely large social networks, is typically unnecessary and, more importantly, can actually limit a campaign or advertisement’s viral potential,” said Coyle, in a statement.

“Instead, marketers need to realize that the majority of their audience, not just the well-connected few, is eager and willing to pass along well-designed and relevant messages.”

News of the study comes just a day after another bit of research, conducted by Saint Joseph’s University’s Dr. Natalie Wood and published by the Journal of Political Marketing, found that celebrity endorsement of political candidates can actually drive voters the other direction.

“In terms of voting behavior, family and significant others are more influential than celebrities in engaging support for a political candidate,” said Wood. "At first glance, it would appear that the money and time invested in celebrity support is wasteful.”

Wood also says that young voters sometimes rebel against political endorsements, and that it may be better if celebrities encouraged voters, rather than whom to vote for.

Hat tip to Guy Kawasaki

Making Link Bait Work For You

In marketing, you have one central task: Get attention that drives results. Pretty simple really, at least in theory. Online, the lion’s share of this process is generating links to your website or blog, which helps to gain ranking in the search engines and to generate brand awareness.

Do not underestimate that second element. The more brand awareness you generate, the more people search for you, the more it affects sales and/or leads.

Link baiting has been described as a kind of art form because, like art, what resonates with a group of people isn’t always predictable and certainly not controllable; only the after-effect – like book or box office sales – is measurable. But also like any creative endeavor, there are both guidelines to creation and case studies of what has worked in the past.

Wikipedia defines link bait this way: Link bait is any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. You might be right to equate it to viral or word-of-mouth marketing, which is attracting more and more of the overall advertising spend each year.

I hereby claim that content can be both white-hat and yet still be wonderful “bait” for links. Personally, I’d lean toward producing interesting data or having a creative idea rather than spouting really controversial ideas 100% of the time. If everything you ever say is controversial, it can be entertaining, but it’s harder to maintain credibility over the long haul.

Indeed, we should approach it positively. Controversy works, and is often called the Contrary/Attack/Evil "hook." It works like the villain in professional wrestling, or tension in great storytelling. People love a good fight, but if you’re seen as always the one picking the fight, they could sour on you rather quickly. 

Fear also works – writing or creating content with the intent of scaring people to death. People will sign up just to warn others, and you get not only the link-love, but a healthy dose of fear associated with your product or service, which may or may not be what you want.

Perhaps the most famous example that didn’t go negative – well, that could depend on your point of view – is Burger King’s Subservient Chicken. Most agree that whether or not it sold more chicken is moot. The special website was a smash success and Burger King generated a lot of attention for itself.

But my favorite (and more practical) example of a business using link bait to its advantage is the "Will It Blend" series of short videos from Blendtec, which can be viewed at YouTube, or at their homepage. The one where they drop an iPod into their blender has been viewed over 4.5 million times, favorited over 9,000 times, and has attracted over 7,700 comments.

These were two wildly successful examples, but we’ll leave you with the tried-and-true approaches developed by the link-bait experts out there, sans the negative ones. All of them are excellent ways to become part of the 3.5 billion daily conversations happening on the Web, at Digg, Reddit, YouTube, wherever.

The Resource Approach (Becoming the Expert In Your Field/Niche)

–    Create expert articles/lists/data sheets 
–    Create practical or fun tools
–    Write How-To articles
–    Create a comprehensive blog roll (give link love, get link love)
–    Compile informative news stories and articles

The News Approach

–    Get the scoop. Be first with industry news
–    Interview prominent people in your field
–    Investigate a hot topic
–    Do an exposé

The Humor/Novelty Approach

–    Post funny/interesting/amazing photos related to your industry
–    Create humorous/unique videos (Use Blendtec for inspiration)
–    Create lists; people love lists – Top 10 Ways to…; 10 Signs You’re…

But whatever you create as link bait, don’t just post and forget it. Send out emails to industry people, drop a link into Digg, post at YouTube. In short, take advantage of every medium at your disposal.

Small Biz Has An Attitude About Search

Those who follow the search industry and actively market their Internet presence in a variety of ways may be surprised to learn that a lot of their fellow entrepreneurs don’t do so.

That’s the determination Greg Sterling at Opus Research found in his study of current marketing trends among the SMB market. Of those respondents to the study’s survey, 59 percent do not do online marketing.

Roughly the same percentage of respondents claim over half their business comes from word of mouth or from referrals by other customers. Though businesses rate websites as importantly as they do local newspaper advertising, many aren’t making the same connection about online ads.

SMB spending has made the niche a highly desirable one for advertising companies. Sterling said the SMB market conservatively puts $30 billion in play for marketing and advertising services annually. They may want to consider more on the paid search and Internet advertising side.

“As a practical matter, Web sites without some other marketing element (e.g., SEM/SEO) aren

Some companies ignore bloggers and regret it. Other companies seem to overreact to their demands, er, requests. Some rants about a company/product/service read more like ransom notes or soap opera scripts. Perhaps I’m reading too much into them.

However, something clicked when I read Oliver Blanchard’s amazing experience with Sticky Fingers (mmm, ribs).

Instead of "making it right," smart companies responding to customer complaints are making it even better and exceeding customer expectations.

Paraphrasing Blanchard’s post at The Brand Builder Blog, reversing the cycle of negative word of mouth (online or offline) requires a few key elements.

1. Never blow off the complaint.

2. Do not make excuses.

3. Offer to address the issue – immediately.

4. Do not make a token gesture. Overdeliver.

6. Aim to earn back the customers trust, and their business.

7. Make the customer a hero. Over-delivering to them gives them the opportunity to spread the wealth and turn more people into excited, happy customers.

It may read unrealistic and it’s certainly not universally applicable. But you’ve already identified the customer as vocal. Why not use it to your advantage and give them something great to talk about?

Smart companies like Sticky Fingers aren’t overreacting or being excessive. They’re turning negative word of mouth into a strategic opportunity. Oversimply put, think bonus instead of band-aid when handling customer complaints.

Amber: Waffle House Waitress uploaded by shundaroni (mmm, waffles)

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Using Word-Of-Mouth To Your Advantage

In fact, as a new study reveals, consumers are not really loyal to any one form of media, often using several types in conjunction with each other, leaving WOM the purest, most resonating voice there is.

But we all know that already, right? The problem is implementation and predictability. Who would have known that the so-called “Star Wars Kid” would have reached the eyeballs of nearly A BILLION people in 2006? Nobody could have known that, and so, we are speaking of the most powerful, yet least measurable – read: intuitive – approach on the marketing planet with little available except after-the-fact quantifiable proof.

Sounds a lot like quantum mechanics all of the sudden, doesn’t it?

Particles, or wave-like stringy things, move from here to there in some type of pattern, either linearly, zig-zag, in a parabola, or an infinite number of paths, none of them measurable, all of them possible and likely and maybe even all paths at once or none of them at all, only notable after they have actually occurred, and then you’re head explodes into a million tiny bits because this is exactly how DVD players are invented, quantifiable proof of their efficacy, without any true understanding of why they work, just that they do, in fact, work.

Welcome to the world of viral marketing.

BIGresearch’s study, as presented by eMarketer, has the numbers, if not the how-to guide, on word-of-mouth viral marketing as compared with print, TV, ad inserts, in-store promos, Internet, and radio.

The poll of 15,000 consumers found that most simultaneously consume different types of media. Almost 71 percent surf the Web while watching TV or listening to the radio, or whatever media is around; 69 percent read newspapers while using other media; 68 percent watch TV; and 56.4 percent listen to the radio, much lower because its done most while driving.

The multimedia approach of most consumers shows willingness to listen to all to sources of information, plunging headlong indeed into a ravenous appetite for it. But none of these media by themselves have the power of word-of-mouth.

“New digital options make it easier to give and receive options on products and services and it’s no longer confined to one-to-one conversations,” said Joe Pilotta of BIGresearch.

“Online search, blogging, email, texting, video, streaming and social networks such as MySpace and YouTube have expanded the word-of-mouth universe and made traditional advertising less relevant for many.”

In both electronics and vehicle purchasing, consumers trusted word-of-mouth far more than other media, with print articles and TV broadcasts holding distant second and third place positions.

But the most impacting numbers are:

94% of consumers regularly or occasionally give advice about products and services they purchased

91% regularly or occasionally seek advice about products and services before making a purchase

And the Internet only magnifies that.

“The Web has taken Word of Mouth, which used to be restricted by geographic realities, and exploded it outwards in all directions,” writes Enquiro head Gord Hotchkiss. “For word of mouth to be truly powerful, it has to live close to the ground, come from real people, and not have the faintest whiff of commercialism about it.”

When News Corp. bought MySpace and when Google swallowed up YouTube, many questioned things like measurable returns, profitability, and business models. But those critics missed the boat: it’s not about money, it’s about influence and reach, both of which turn into money later.

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The Word-Of-Mouth Marketing Association says there is a difference between buzz and stealth marketing. While buzz marketing ultimately can be identified by a consumer, stealth marketing cannot.

That’s why WOMMA has concurred with a Federal Trade Commission opinion that stealth marketers must disclose their relationships with the business supporting the promotion.

The Washington Post noted how the FTC response to an October 2005 report reiterated that marketing relationships need to be transparent.

FTC declined to fully endorse a petition from a watchdog group in Oregon called Commercial Alert, which would have required FTC to take action against word-of-mouth marketers and compose guidelines for that type of marketing.

A number of opinions about the FTC opinion have circulated through the blogosphere today as others offer their thoughts on the topic. Publishing 2.0 blogger Scott Karp opined about its impact:

Another blogger, Tony Hung writing at Deep Jive Interests, perceived an impact on an entrenched form of online marketing – the affiliate:

Stealth marketing or clever adaptation to the realities of the online world? Maybe that depends on whether or not the individual traversing the link derives a benefit at the destination, in this case Amazon.

Perception probably plays a greater role in this than one might realize. Lists as a story concept provides a good example. On popular sharing sites like Digg or Delicious, lists frequently gain a lot of notice from users of those sites.

People may be more or less organized than other folks, but all but the most chaotic crave a little bit of order. That’s my rationale for the appeal of the list. A recent story about a blogger deconstructing a site that submitted a list of weight loss tips to several sharing sites received near-universal acclaim for revealing the site to be host to a variety of affiliate links.

There just seemed to be one problem with the much-lauded accusations. The list of tips provided, while nothing earth-shattering, wasn’t useless either. Despite the list’s presence on a site focused on dental issues, it got a lot of attention and probably earned a few affiliate click-throughs.

Was it stealth marketing? By virtue of non-obvious disclosure of the affiliate relationships, possibly. Was the list junk? Judging by its content, no.

If the FTC makes an example of such affiliate-driven sites by attempting to fine them, a lot of other questions will be raised. Is this a stifling of free speech? If the customer derives a benefit from an affiliation and is not defrauded, has an offense taken place?

Somewhere at some point this will be tested by the FTC, and rebutted by someone’s lawyers. Being forthright and transparent with promotional plans will be a better course of action, though.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.