Word-of-Mouth Goes Virtual

Posted by Edan Shertzer on Feb 24, 2009

A few days ago we wrote about some of the advantages of adopting a social media outlet that is oriented toward building business contacts. (LinkedIn was our example back then.) This week, we’d like to reexamine social media in its natural mode — as a top purveyor of viral marketing.

Remember playing “Broken Telephone” when you were a kid? (Maybe you called it something different, like “Operator” or “Pass it Down”, but please indulge us for just a couple more sentences….) Well, online social media can be understood more or less as a giant, worldwide game of “Broken Telephone”, except that each player can whisper in multiple directions simultaneously, and the telephone isn’t really all that broken since the smartest phone technicians in the neighborhood are constantly doing maintenance on it.

So…. Come to think of it, maybe that analogy falls a little bit flat, but don’t stop indulging us quite yet. The modern social networking website — Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live Spaces — is undeniably the fastest and, by now, the most far-reaching tool for transmitting word-of-mouth buzz. If you want to spread the news about yourself and your company quickly, your best bet is to complement a traditional business marketing campaign with a healthy dose of social media outreach. Actually, sending out mass e-mails through personal information managers like Outlook or through POP3/IMAP webmail services such as Gmail can leave you wallowing in the spammer boxes of most of your contacts without even realizing it. Besides, these e-mail applications all present rather severe restrictions on how many contacts you can send your message to in the first place. There are no such restrictions in most social networking sites, and when restrictions do exist, they are much more lax and forgiving than your typical e-mail application’s. (So choose your online friends carefully! They will be able to message you at will.)

For the second week in a row, our own Raphi Salem can serve as an exemplar of the savvy social media user. With close to 700 friends on Facebook, all gradually amassed through personal and business connections, Raphi is much better off sending one general Facebook message that will reach all his friends rather than making targeted phone calls or winnowing down select e-mail addresses for a mass message. Social networking is instantaneous and direct, and better yet, since participation in social media is consensual on the part of both sender and receiver, it’s an unobtrusive way of getting the word across.