How to get CEOs to buy into WOM

Extract from Lois Kelly.

#1. Make meaning, not buzz
"Talk" marketing isn't about superficial buzz that sizzles fast and fades fast. The goal is to help people make sense of information through conversations. The more meaningful the conversations, the faster people are able to connect to your organization, product, or service. This shortens sales cycles and helps employees buy into change more quickly. For companies selling a considered product or service -- which includes most business-to-business companies, professional service firms, and pharmaceutical, health care, and educational organizations -- the goal is making meaning, not making buzz.

#2. Listening leads to innovation
Conversations are at least 50% listening -- and perhaps much more. Marketing's purpose today isn't just pushing out information and producing things; it's listening and bringing ideas back into a company. Ideas that can spark innovation, influence product development, and pinpoint ways to get access to and attention from decision makers. Listening is a new strategy, and it happens through conversations, whether those conversations are face-to-face or in online communities and social networks.

#3. Points of view are more interesting than your products
Unless you're Steve Jobs talking about the iPhone, people don't want to talk about your products or capabilities; they can look that up on the web. What they do want to talk about are your points of view about the industry or category. What common mistakes do you see? What are one or two emerging trends you believe may upset business as usual? In what area are most people wasting money and don't even realize it? What "best practice" do you think is a waste of time? Points of view jumpstart meaningful conversations and distinguish your organization on more than products. And every CEO has those points of view to share with their organization, with customers, with media, and with employees. So share those interesting views. They'll get talked about.

#4. Nothing to talk about is why people don't talk
The reason everyone in a company is often telling a different story -- or not saying much at all -- is that they don't have anything interesting to talk about. Elevator statements, product messages, and mission statements are -- let's face it -- pretty boring and not something that makes you want to get together with a prospect or an analyst. Nor are they something employees want to talk about when they get together with company partners and agencies. Take your points of view and set them free. Share them with everyone in the company and encourage everyone to talk about the ideas, as well as what they hear from the resulting conversations. People will remember and will talk about fresh point of views that get people to say, "Gee, that's interesting. Tell me more." But they're not going to talk about messages and value propositions.

#5. Measure involvement vs. awareness
The new measure of marketing effectiveness is involvement. The more involved people become with your ideas or your sales reps, the more vested they become in those ideas and people. More importantly, involvement is the prerequisite to action, whether that action is changing your mind, asking for an RFP, or making a decision to buy. The objective is to engage people in conversations that get them involved with you and you with them.

One last point that resonated at that skeptical CEO meeting: I played the new Paul McCartney song,"Fine Line," which includes the lyrics, "There's a fine line between recklessness and courage." Not embracing conversational marketing and letting go of some control is reckless because it puts a barrier up between you and your customers, I reminded the execs. Change that makes a big difference, however, requires just a small bit of courage.
And what CEO wants to be seen as lacking courage?
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Lois Kelly is author of "Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing" and a partner in WOMMA member company Foghound. She also blogs at http://blog.foghound.com/.