- Talkers: Find people who will talk about you
- Topics: Give people a reason to talk
- Tools: Help the message spread faster and further
- Taking Part: Join the conversation
- Tracking: Measure and understand what people are saying
On August 15-18 the 47th anniversary of Woodstock will be celebrated, a watershed moment for we Baby Boomers in the 60s, when nearly half-a-million young people gathered on a farm in upstate New York for a festival of 'Peace and Music.'
Woodstock was also notable as one of the early examples of word-of-mouth marketing's power, long before there was internet, cell phones, social media or any other high-tech tools to propel a viral explosion.
With a modest marketing budget, and equally modest goals of attracting some 200,000 concert attendees to the planned three-day event, Woodstock greatly exceeded all expectations, drawing crowds so large that the New York State Thruway was nearly overwhelmed, though it was never "officially" closed as Arlo Guthrie famously said from the stage.
Today we have so many more resources available to spread the word about our businesses, to get people talking and draw them to our special customer experiences. Yet for many small businesses word-of-mouth marketing, while recognized as the most powerful way to market, remains poorly understood, ineffectively managed and sadly too often left up to chance. This got me thinking about the intersection of word-of-mouth marketing and rock 'n roll.
Andy Sernovitz, author, consultant and former CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, in his book Word of Mouth Marketing, one I highly recommend, teaches five basic principles of successfully implementing and managing a word-of-mouth marketing effort. He calls them the 'five Ts of word of mouth:'