I'm in the final stretch of the 2nd Edition of Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing. I'll be publishing drafts of sections and chapters here. The final is due on July 31. Those of you who would like a preview can find it as it appears here  — just subscribe to this blog via newsletter or newsreader.

This is very difficult for me to do. I've been taught all my life to polish, then publish. Part of me is screaming that I have to polish for the next two months, get it as good as I can, then submit it, let the editors improve it, approve the edits, then wait until the Fall when the final masterpiece comes out, neatly bound and beautifully designed. That's what I did the first time. My publisher, AMACOM, wouldn't let me publish on a web site any significant parts of the book before, during or after publication. It was understandable then, before the Word-of-Mouth Revolution, before the soft coup that put the customer in charge. Really in charge, in ways outlined in the book. Who knew, then, that giving away free PDF files of a book would increase sales? OK, Seth Godin did, but no one else believed that it could happen again. And again. And again.

So, when AMACOM wanted a 2nd Edition, I asked my agent, Wendy Keller to set up a meeting with Hank Kennedy, President of AMACOM, and my editor, Ellen Kadin. I told Wendy that I wasn't interested in revising the book unless I could market it using Word-of-Mouth Marketing, not just the traditional marketing I was understandably forced into with first book, having no leverage as a first-time author. I'd rather change it completely and self-publish. Wendy was highly skeptical about our chances of getting a traditional publisher to give permission to do it the way I proposed. I had my doubts, but had nothing to lose, since in this case I was the customer and the customer is in charge. I now had alternatives. Anyway, I prepared my case and we assembled in Hank's office.

I wish I had a recording of that most extraordinary meeting. To the best of my recollection, here's what happened:

I got about 30 seconds into my pitch when Hank interrupted. He said, "OK, when can we have it?"

Taken aback, I blurted out, "Is that a 'Yes'?" He nodded. Even more dumbfounded, I said, "You mean you're not even going to give me a fight? You're going to deprive me of the pleasure of at least an intense discussion?"

I don't remember his exact words, but he pointed out that he wasn't exactly living in a cave, unaware of what is going on in publishing, media and the rest of the world. He pointed out the obvious, that he was president of a major publisher of business books, books that he actually reads and is proud of. He knew that the world had changed. That it was obvious him that what I was proposing was the ONLY way to bring this book out and that it would be hypocritical to do it any other way. I was so amazed that I don't remember anything else that happened.

I didn't put as much up on the web site as I had hoped. It was easier to write privately than to expose first drafts to criticism. While I kept telling clients to "put it out there," I was still reluctant to do it myself. I came to realize how my clients feel when they don't even want to get together informal groups of customers to serve as an advisory group. It's really scary to invite criticism. Our creations are precious little children that we want to protect from the harsh realities of the outside world. But they are also works in progress that are shaped and improved by the outside world much more often than they are trampled. I think I'm over it. I think that somewhere between the people who tweet every passing thought that occurs to them in the shower and waiting until things are "perfect" lies a vast middle ground that we can all be happy with, or at least tolerate, and maybe even come to love. I'm still uncomfortable. Old habits die hard.

There is a lot in life that is simple but not easy.

Welcome to the New Marketing.

Draft Table of Contents

Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Comments, questions, suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

What's missing, for you?

What's unclear?

What made you say, "I can't wait."?

Click here to see entire Table of Contents if you can't see it.

Don't you just love all the emails you get that say...

Please do not reply to this email. This e-mail has been sent to you automatically and is not capable of handling responses.

... without giving you a selection of addresses to reply to? Or, without actively asking for feedback, questions, any other way we can be of help?

It's another example of Knowledge Blindness, plus the lack of a customer mindset.

What's the big deal? After all, the one that sparked this was only an email confirming the sign-up of my iPad and my iPhone on Optimum Online's wonderful WiFi hotspot network, an amazing partnership with TimeWarner and others to bring free WiFi hotspots to their customers.

I'll bet you are doing the equivalent, in many other ways, in other media — missing opportunities to serve the customer, falling into unfriendly, perfunctory formality. I'm sure I am. I just haven't found them all — yet. But I keep looking. Are you? Take a look. If you can't find one a day for the next two weeks, you're either not looking, have a really bad case of Knowledge Blindness or I should be taking lessons from YOU.

• Where are you missing opportunities to:  
• • Ask for specific suggestions
  • Tell people how to reach you (without looking it up or even clicking)
  • Ask for feedback
  • Give them a tip
• Did you send out any communications without surprising the recipient with something unexpectedly, remarkably beneficial to THEM?
• Did you send out any mundane communications that contributed to their boredom?
• Did you think for a moment that you're contacting a friend, and while you're at it, it would be nice to...

Whoops, I almost missed an opportunity:

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions that you want to communicate privately, my private email is: grs at mnav dot com. Any other comments, let's hear them below.

The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing was published in 2001. I've been compiling a list of the new media that have emerged since then. There are about 20-30 new categories of media (depending upon how you slice and dice the categories , with several major players in each category — hundreds of choices! Totally overwhelming for the marketer. As I was researching the list I've become increasingly amazed by how many there are, and how widespread their use is.

But this one rocked me back and almost knocked me out of my chair. I was installing Sharaholic plug-in into my Firefox browser. As I was doing so, I came to the place where they asked me to indicate which Social Media Services I used, and I was confronted with the following set of choices, which was astounding in itself. But what rocked me back was how many of them I use (21!) — coupled with how many I don't even know much, if anything, about (I admit it: 48).

Now, I'm an expert in the new media and Word-of-Mouth Marketing. I stay pretty current. Yet, there were 48 I don't know very much about. And 21 that I use. But I don't use them smoothly. I have trouble managing them, and knowing which is best for what, when 2 or more can overlap in capabilities. I'd say I'm in the upper 1% in the 50+ crowd in this area, and I'm overloaded, confused, inefficient.

So, here's my point: Imagine how the rest of the world feels? There are enormous opportunities not only in new capabilities (where everyone's looking right now), but in simplifying, integrating, educating and making the whole area much easier and much more useful to people who aren't kids and have some real work to do.

Listening to Customers Isn't Enough

Note: This was written in 1990, so the remarks should be taken in the context of that year. It’s amazing how many of the predictions came true!

This article is more timely now than it was 20 years ago!

Companies are trying much harder to listen to their customers — but they're finding that it's not only difficult, it’s not enough. What people say has to be interpreted into what people really mean, then translated into customer-oriented marketing strategy and tactics. I call this process Strategic Listening.

Henry Ford once said, "If I'd have asked them what they wanted, whey would have said, 'Faster Horses.'" While I find that remark amusing, he was right and he was wrong. That's what they would have said, but I'm sure he was smart enough to have asked the "dumb" question, "What would 'Faster Horses' mean to you, specifically?" He would have heard things like, "more time with my family," "more time at work," "more sleep, and still getting to work on time," "less maintenance" etc., and dozens of other themes.

He should have probed the "obvious' and found out what they really wanted, instead of offering "any color, as long as it's black," in another quote questionably attributed to him. He sure let in a lot of competitors when he ignored the preferences and expectations of customers. 

However, meeting customer expectations is also not good enough anymore. You have to exceed expectations. It’s not enough for the customer to be satisfied — the customer has to be surprised, excited and delighted. If not, he is a sitting duck for your competitor.

Over the last couple of decades, we’ve seen a parade of fabulous products and companies commit dangerous — sometimes fatal — marketing blunders, often due to a failure to have the vision to go beyond customer satisfaction..

It’s worth reviewing some of them to remind ourselves how serious a problem this really is, and how disastrous the consequences can be. Here are some quick examples and thumbnail sketches. Please excuse what David Ogilvy once called “the dogmatism of brevity.”

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The above cryptic post has been up for a while. A word of explanation and a lesson to be learned:

I have been trying for a month to get this blog indexed by Technorati, the search engine that specializes in blogs. The procedure is pretty simple. When you give them your blog address — in this case http://mnav.com/blog — they give you a little piece of code that is 10 numbers and digits long, which you can see at the top of this post. You publish that on your website, which tells them that this is your site.

Well, that little piece of code has been sitting there for about a month. Technorati claims that it goes out and finds that code on your blog within about an hour. When I keep checking, I get various kinds of error messages which they ask you to report back to them. I've done that several times over the last month, receiving an automated response to my e-mail but never a reply or resolution.

So I went to their support forum. There are dozens upon dozens of complaints about the inability to claim blogs. Most of these are unresolved and unanswered. A wider Google search (what, do you think I'd use Technorati?) reveals widespread complaints about their unresponsiveness chronicled on dozens of websites.

Apparently, their unresponsiveness is both broad and deep, across many different issues, for a long period of time. These complaints stretch over the last couple of years. They are punctuated by occasional responses from Technorati claiming that they are rectifying one kind of technical problem or another, but never, apparently, resolving the issue.

Responsive, customer oriented companies actively monitor the web for these kinds of posts. They respond quickly to complaints, especially from authors and bloggers like me. Especially when the post might give voice to the many many other people out there who are also dissatisfied but not leaving complaints on their forum. let's see how long it takes them to spot this post and respond to me. Don't hold your breath.

I nominate them for Most Unresponsive Company of 2009.

Their slogan should be:

Technorati: Taking Web 2.0 to a new level of unresponsiveness

Oh, the lesson: You don't have to work hard at making people hopping mad. Just ignore them. It's easy.

Expert Blindness, and Knowledge Blindness, both refer to the things that people who are knowledgeable can’t see because they can’t experience what it’s like not to know: such as what words beginners don’t understand, distinctions that non-experts can’t discriminate and appreciate, and implications  that are dependent on advanced knowledge. Experts know everything except what it's like to know nothing.

An example of knowledge blindness is the person who gave a friend of mine driving directions. “Drive down to the corner where the bank used to be, and make a right.”

In marketers, this is extremely prevalent in product descriptions. People do not realize that new customers  do not understand even the most rudimentary terminology.

What are some of your favorite examples of Knowledge or Expert Blindness?

(9/12/09) There is a wonderful story, with the title Goodbye, Gobbledygook, in today’s NY Times. It’s a perfect example of the kind of Decision EZification that I’ve been talking about for years:

It seems that computer makers are abandoning the complex “fact tags” they have always attached to computers.

As the Times put it (with an assist from my boldface:

Once cherished, the fact tag has turned into an object of scorn as PC makers finally reach a realization that many other industries discovered ages ago: the consumer is truly king.

“We have been stuck in 1995,” said Leslie Sobon, the vice president of product marketing at the chip maker Advanced Micro Devices. “We are basically the laggards.”

Over the last couple of years, the industry has made a slow lurch away from its engineering roots toward a more shopper-friendly strategy that recognizes that if you make your product simpler to understand, more people will buy it.

They are switching instead to what Intel calls “use model marketing.” They are now beginning to label computers according to their intended uses such as web surfing, gaming and entertainment, instead of their technical specifications.

AMD has gone from presenting 220 combinations of chips to  See, Share, and Create Systems, and reduced its 40 page salesperson’s manual to two.

My comments:

Most ezification and simplification attempts are aimed at the product itself, usually called product “usability,” more broadly “the customer experience.” 

What this article shows is that more attention needs to be paid to the decision process itself. This case illustrates the importance of focusing on the initial information gathering stage of the decision process. Most customers do not understand “DDR2 RAM, 5400 r.p.m. hard drives, Turion benchmark scores and the robust L2 cache sizes of Core 2 Duos. ” The people at the manufacturing and retail levels think, “What’s not to understand? This is important information that differentiates the products.” “[[Expert blindness]]” strikes again. 

The store visit turns into an intimidating and humiliating experience. If you don’t make the information about your product easy to understand, your customer will be dead in the water. It won’t come up in market research unless it is specifically asked about because people are embarrassed.

When the customer goes, “Huh?” the young geek in the electronics store gets to feel superior. The customer is polite and scratches his/her head all the way to the Apple store, where they will be treated with respect. 

Here is an amazing story of good will, mutual admiration and good business sense.

It’s also on one of the best designed web sites I’ve ever seen. By “design,” I mean decision design, not decoration. Take a look at this page to see what I mean. It’s also for a product that I’ve been using from its inception -- one of the most elegant, simple, easy products I’ve ever seen: Things. A “Getting Things Done” (GTD) type To Do manager. I recommend it without reservation. You’ll get your life a lot more organized.

It’s only for the Mac. Another reason why there is almost no excuse to use Windows.

I wish them well.

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I’m in the process of moving my blog from TypePad to my home site, which is constructed with the Drupal Content Management system (CMS). It will allow considerably greater flexibility and aid in the creation of my “Live Books” concept. I’ll be able to post a blog post and have the post, or a longer version, automatically inserted into one of the books that are being written on this site. So, let’s say that I post something about a great word of mouth example. It will be displayed on the Blog page, inserted into the relevant chapter in the new edition of The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing book, and also appear with related postings, book pages, articles when its tag (for example “WOM example” is clicked.