Part 3 of 3 about word of mouth marketing for credit unions

Question #1: Is social media word of mouth marketing?

Question #2: Is word of mouth marketing social media?

Answers: Yes. And no. In that order.

You see, social media is a subset of word of mouth marketing. WOM is a bigger, broader topic, and social media is one of categories within WOM. That’s because word of mouth is about anything and everything that makes people want to talk, and makes it easier to talk. That could include everything from guerrilla marketing and handshake marketing to blogging to influencer marketing (check our word of mouth marketing glossary to learn all the key terms).

Talk to social media experts, and I’m confident they’ll tell you that simply having a blog does not does not equal a social media strategy. A blog is a drop in the social media bucket. Similarly, being active in social media does not necessarily mean you’ve mastered a complete word of mouth marketing strategy. It’s certainly a good start, but a well-rounded WOM diet would also consist of strong offline components that spark WOM, facilitate and track WOM.

The best part about social media as a WOM tool is that the Internet makes buzz-worthy stuff so easy to spread. To use the terms we discussed in the first post, social media like blogs and Twitter are great “Tools” because they facilitate the spread of a message really well. WOM spreads offline, as well of course, but not quite as quickly or exponentially. With one click of a “tell a friend” button, you can send some buzz to dozens of people at once.

Screenshot from: cnn.com

Thanks to all the focus on social media in the credit union space in the past couple years, credit unions have a great head start on developing a word of mouth marketing presence. CU’s had a jumpstart on banks in terms of interest in leveraging social media. So if credit unions can now turn that love of social media into expertise in the larger concept of word of mouth marketing, the CU movement is in for some serious success.

Click here to read part 2, ‘Why WOM for Credit Unions?’

Homework

1. Continue learning. Download the credit union word of mouth marketing white paper, ‘Bottling the Buzz,’ which includes good examples of WOM in financial institutions.
2. Join or attend an event or tele-seminar from WOMMA.
3. Develop a word of mouth marketing plan and adopt it for 2009!

---

Jeff Stephens is CEO of Creative Brand Communications (a multi-sensory marketing and experiential brand development agency), whose new division, PSST! is the world’s first word of mouth agency for financial institutions. Drop Jeff a line at jeff@psst-marketing.com.

Subscribe to PSST! Marketing’s RSS feed here.