Day one blog post

When I first noticed this course, I was caught by the title really. I am interested in the field of entrepreneurship and word of mouth is clearly a more effective and less costly way of marketing, which would work perfectly for small to medium sized businesses. So I thought it would be really useful in the future to have this skill of getting people to talk about your business. However, I never really liked the idea of evening classes and my previous experiences were not really good either. So honestly I finally signed up for this course because it was the only one available.

The first day of class I feel like my mood was set right by the Socialnomics video, which I think might convinced some other classmates too that we are sitting on the class not just because it is the only one open. For those of you who did not see it, it basically tells us about the facts of word of mouth and how the magnitude of social media has the potential to revolutionize marketing. A handful of other interesting videos were shown during the class. The professor also mentioned that our learning throughout the course would be more practical rather than theoretical, which I interpreted as more videos coming. So after this first day my thought was, “How bad could this be?”

Having read the first five chapters of Andy's book, I feel like it all comes back to one of the most essential concept, treat people right and they will do you right too. Countless companies have long started utilizing the social media revolution to aid in their marketing campaigns. However, only a small number of them have successfully generated positive word of mouth among the customers. Most of them went pass and some even generate negative word of mouth. I believe this happened because they are practicing one-way communications through the social media, treating all customers the same genericly. Andy referred to this in his book as amplified word of mouth, as opposed to the organic one which he believes to generate positive word of mouth among customers. To run this campaign of organic word of mouth, I think we need passion in the first place. And the talkers would be the people that share the same passion with the business. Another thing I found interesting is that the talkers are not necessarily your biggest buyer or most loyal customers. People will tend to spread the word if they have a memorable first impression.