A couple of weeks ago, I published an email interview with Lois Kelly, author of Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing. I promised to review the book, and so I have. Read on.
Book review: Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Lois Kelly
(2007, AMACOM Books)
Eight years ago, four guys who saw a future for the Internet in the midst of the dot-com bust wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto, a thin text that espoused the virtues of something called “conversational marketing” — the idea that marketers should forsake one-way messaging (talking at customers) and buzzword-laden obfuscation for two-way discussions with customers and plain speaking. According to the Cluetrain authors, the Internet’s open, interactive and disintermediated nature freed consumers from the tyranny of traditional advertising — they could now discuss brands openly on forums and in blogs — and was changing the rules of marketing forever.
Picking up where Cluetrain left off — and bringing conversational marketing into the offline world, too — is communications consultant Lois Kelly. Kelly’s book Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing (2007, AMACOM Books) offers a practical guide for communications and marketing practitioners who want to infuse their branding and marketing approach with a little more conversation.
Usually, I’m wary of books with terms like “beyond (insert buzzword — like buzz? — here), or “next generation of (enter current marketing trend here)” in the titles. Usually because such books fail to deliver on the titles’ promises. But Kelly’s book isn’t one of those. Beyond Buzz lives up to its promises with detailed, real-world examples of how how conversational marketing works in a variety of organizations (including higher education). In addition, she provides practical tips and techniques to get people in any organization talking like real people — and listening to their customers.
The author is the co-founder of Foghound, a strategic communications firm based in Marblehead, Massachusetts, where her list of clients includes Dunkin’ Donuts, SAP and Sun Microsystems. She also has a solid background in digital marketing, having led one high-tech marketing firm and hold the VP title with another, so she has the credentials to talk about conversational marketing in the online world.
Beyond Buzz advocates involving people at all levels of an organization — from the CEO to the sales rep and secretary — in conversational marketing. “One step,” she writes, “is to create conversational marketing approaches, such as salonlike meetings, online customers communities, more regular radio talk show-like conference calls, and more conversational sales meetings.” She rightly acknowledges that these tools should not replace traditional marketing approaches, but augment them.
But what good are these tools if organizations have nothing interesting to say? Kelly urges marketers, PR people, CEOs, sales reps and others to pull together to find the organization’s point of view and incorporate it into the marketing messages. “A good point of view gently (or not so gently) smacks people in the face and gets the response, ‘That’s interesting. Tell me more,'” Kelly writes. “It lures people into the conversation, sparking dialogue that helps us understand issues, products, and companies in mutlidimensional, rational, and emotional ways.”
Kelly guides the reader through techniques designed to help articulate an organization’s point of view, then offers ways to uncover “talk-worthy ideas” in your organization, as well as ideas for building a conversational mindset and “talk” culture. She’s even included checklists and templates in the back of the book to help readers incorporate the ideas in the workplace.
Most refreshing, from my perspective as a higher ed marketing, was discovering that Kelly is more attuned than your average marketing writer to the challenges and issues facing non-profit groups and universities. (Her involvement on the board of a non-profit probably gives her a broader perspective.) In one section about nine themes that get people talking, for example, she points out how former Harvard President Lawrence Summers created some conversation with his ideas about the gender gap in engineering and the sciences. “Sometimes,” she writes, “shaking things up offends people so much that any good intentions are obliterated.” That’s what happened to Summers, whose “style more than content” was the reason his speech offended so many. “Summer likes to provoke people to get them into the type of intellectual food fights that generate meaty discussions. He is a classic contrarian — arrogant, intense, challenging, and insightful.”
With Beyond Buzz, Kelly has given anyone in the marketing business a work that is also challenging and insightful. For some of us, it might even be contrarian. Let’s hope it gets more of us talking.
Andrew Careaga 