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Tim Lorang Blog

Word-of-Mouth and Online Social Media

Posted by Timothy Lorang on Mon, May 09, 2011 @ 11:00 AM

Word of Mouth Social Networking resized 600On Tuesday nights I play trivia at Cooper’s Ale House in Seattle. Because of the nature of trivia games we cover a lot of subjects in a night and last week, for some reason, Andrew, one of my team mates started talking about Edward Bernays, the founder of modern Public Relations and author of the 1928 book: Propaganda This of course was familiar ground for me having studied Mass Communications, Persuasion and Rhetoric in college thirty-five years ago. Using the theories and techniques developed by his Uncle Sigmund Freud, Bernays first helped President Woodrow Wilson, through the Committee on Public Information, persuade the American public to “make the world safe for democracy” and enter the Great War against Germany in 1917. Among his many accomplishments Bernays convinced Americans that Ivory soap was “99.9% pure,” overcame the taboo of women smoking in public in 1929 by calling cigarettes “Torches of Freedom,” and successfully promoted the NAACP. His ideas were hugely influential in the areas of mass communications, public relations and advertising. The dark side, of course, is the perfection of Bernays’ ideas by Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler.

These techniques of mass persuasion and mass advertisements became necessary with the rise of mass production in the mid-19th century. Mass advertising was the most efficient way to tell large numbers of people about the large number of newly available products and services. Before the Industrial Revolution, people found out about services and products by word-of-mouth. This is not to say that word-of-mouth was not important in the 20th Century. It was important for small business and services. For example a dentist built his practice by satisfied customers telling their friends or a small town hardware store maintaining customers by great customer service and sponsoring a little league team. Of course the hardware store was doomed as soon as Wal-Mart opened up nearby. The small business person knew that there was no way to compete against a national advertising campaign and a New York Public Relations firm. Word-of-mouth, friends telling friends about a great product or their favorite hardware store seemed to be no longer relevant. Outbound marketing, the technique of broadcasting to the world seems to be the predominate way to tell people about your business.

Word of Mouth Marketing

I thought all about this the next day as I started to put together a strategy for a fund raising event for Country Doctor, a non-profit health clinic here in Seattle. My main tools are Facebook and Twitter and the clinic’s connection of businesses and people on these platforms. What I am able to do is thank, in a very public way, those businesses who support the clinic. I am also able to tell supporters of the clinic that they should also support these businesses and I am encouraging them to tell their friends. By using online social media we are able to support these businesses and the nonprofit clinic through word-of-mouth.

This aspect of using online social media to promote an idea or cause by word of mouth is essentially how Wael Ghonim and the Egyptian revolutionaries used Facebook and Twitter to bypass the official Egyptian government propaganda outlets to promote and organize their protests. I am not saying that Twitter is ushering in a Utopian world of peace and democracy. What I am saying is that average people, nonprofits, causes and yes, small business, now have a way to use word-of-mouth to promote themselves. It doesn’t have to be mass communications, it doesn’t have to be large and it doesn’t have to be in the millions. It does have to be authentic, real and personal so people can feel good about promoting it by word-of-mouth, by tweets and by Facebook likes.

One of the things Image Media Partners does is to help small businesses and nonprofits find the best ways of using online media to help promote their business or cause. Please contact us for a free analysis of your business or nonprofits webpage.

Photo Credit: Paul Young: flickr Creative Commons

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Topics: Social Media, Online Marketing