What is the modern day equivalent of 'Word of Mouth'?

We live in a world with an abundance of stuff & noise – We live in a world of ‘attention scarcity’.

How can we make a difference with our marketing in this crazy, noisy world?

In the past, your marketing was all about ‘interrupting other people’s data’. It was known as Disruptive marketing or interruption marketing – you took an advert on the TV or in magazines to get to their circulation or viewers, you were disrupting or interrupting their circulation/audience with your message.

Now we all have our own channels – there are so many – we all use Facebook, Linkedin, Xing, Twitter? As well as having your company website. We are all pushing out information to our own communities, all the time.

Therefore, marketing is now about ‘content sharing’, grabbing and owning mindshare and more importantly social proof!

What do I mean?

Well in the old days - What is the best form of marketing you know? Probably Word of Mouth

Well now, Social media gives you this. It gives you access to this and does what Word of Mouth used to do.

Last week, I posted a short article on www.industrialprintblog.com . It received 141 views, 23 likes and more importantly 12 shares. Can an advert in a trade mag do that for you?

So building brand and more specifically ‘community’ is more important than ever before!

We place greater emphasis on building our InPrint Community through sharing articles and case studies on Industrial Print , through webinars, speaking at conferences, sharing research, even more than talking about our once a year exhibition. Having people sharing information about the ‘Industrial print’ world via all the major media channels works for us.

We have over 5000 people registered for our blogs, from 110 different countries, that is a 1000 more people than attended the exhibition. And the list keeps growing everyday! So building community is now the key part of the new world of brand marketing.

Finally, I will finish with a clever tip for how to maximise the sharing value of your content and therefore your ownership of mindshare –

Stand on the ‘shoulders of Giants’.

Every time someone from your industry shares a story you wrote, about what you are doing, about your community, then you are standing on someone else’s shoulders – back to ‘Word of mouth’.

I heard a great example last week at a conference of how this might work. Let’s say you have a new book about coaching successful football teams – and you are lucky enough to have Alex Ferguson or Pep Guardiola endorse it as the best coaching booking they had read – how powerful would that be ? Think about the equivalent in your industry sharing or liking your blog …You would be truly ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’

So go on share this article and hopefully it will help to build a more engaged and informed business community!