Holy word-of-mouth, Batman!

Posted on | August 27, 2008 |

I’ve been having some conversations lately with some folks who really don’t understand how microbusiness owners buy but they want to. Or at least, they say they want to.

But they don’t understand how we buy because we don’t make purchase decisions the same way they do, even though all the entities involved can be loosely grouped together under the very broad name of “businesses.”

At the same time, we’re not quite like consumers; since we run businesses, we know about marketing and advertising. Sometimes, we even do those things ourselves. So we recognize what you’re doing and that means our responses to it are not always what you might have anticipated.

One thing about us that is universally understood (by us, if not by them) is the importance of our relationships to our purchases, and the value we place on word-of-mouth from trusted sources.

The thing about word-of-mouth from trusted sources is that “trusted sources” is not the sort of thing that lends itself to being controlled or manipulated. As soon as you start doing that, you only succeed in making those sources less trusted — which sort of defeats the purpose. And that, it seems to me, is the sort of thing that a lot of Big Clueless Companies (to borrow Mary’s name for them) seem to have trouble grasping.

It’s a peculiar phenomenon. People have been making product recommendations to each other for almost as long as there have been products and people have been talking to each other. It has only been in recent years that those BCCs have come to the conclusion that they can somehow harness that power and use it.

Two cases in counterpoint: this post and this post, courtesy of The Idea Pool.

First, Mary reports (via Wired Magazine) that Facebook is launching a new advertiser service, where they will let marketers impersonate your friends to post bogus items to your news feed. Not only that, if you don’t opt out (and, to their credit, you do get that option), they can impersonate you and post bogus items to your friends’ news feeds.

It’s enough to make me want to leave Facebook altogether. I mean, not for nothing but … what the hell is wrong with those people??? Do they really think this sort of thing is going to endear either them or their advertisers to Facebook users? Do they think we won’t mind? Are they nuts?

Maybe they just think we’re all stupid.

They can talk all the marketing geek speak they want about “making ads more interesting for me and my friends” but most of us won’t call it that. Most of us will call it what it is: lying.

And if, Mr. Marketer, you have to lie on me to my friends to get a product recommendation from me then you need to go back to the drawing board.

Or learn a thing or two from that second post from Mary’s blog. Lengthy description of her experience with TLC Plumbing, along with the well-deserved panegyric that a company gets (unsolicited and unpaid for) when it does what it does well.

Speaking personally, I don’t get why this is so hard to understand — unless you are required to resign from humanity when you get that MBA, which I sort of doubt. If you want me to say/write good things about you and recommend your company to my friends, then (a) sell quality products and services, (b) be prepared to honor your commitments, whether its a money-back guarantee or an appointment you make to service my A/C, and (c) behave as if you actually want my business.

This isn’t rocket science, folks.

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