Great post on how email marketers can do word of mouth marketing. The interesting point to note is #7 - Design Tell-a-Friend emails well: When someone refers a friend, what does the friend get? Probably some generic text email. That message should be exciting–and it should convert almost 100% of recipients to click. (It was a personal recommendation from a friend … if that doesn’t get clicked, nothing will.)
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Social Influence Marketing and how those peer influences is dealt with in great detail on this excellent post by Shiv Singh. Influencers are not Brand Advocates and they play a role further down the purchasing funnel. They are the people who are solicited for advice while a consumer is in the consideration phase of a purchasing decision.

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All recent studies demonstrate that word-of-mouth (“WOM”) has more of an impact than any other traditional forms of communication. Having a word-of-mouth and social marketing strategy is therefore becoming essential and marketers will have to quickly learn how to effectively target consumer influencers. This blog post gives results on many such studies and very detailed analysis

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Nearly every blogger is looking for her or his readers to take some action.
This excellent piece by Darren Rowse discusses two main questions:

* What action or actions do you most want your readers to take? And…
* Are you making those actions as effortless as possible?

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Great posts from Andrew chen. This one talks of using tell-a-friend in the viral loop:
Register -> Tell friends -> Use Product -> Evaluate Product
In their case, it’s really irrelevant how good the product is - instead, the focus is just on getting that viral loop to be fewer than 2 pages, and increasing your “branching factor” by using addressbooks rather than asking users to recall their friends’ emails.
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Here’s a customer evangelism case study in the making: TOMS Shoes.

TOMS launched low-cost shoe with a fashion makeover and started giving away a pair of shoes to shoeless children in third-world countries for each pair he sold. Imagine the good will and the buzz that got generated!

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Wow! Simply an excellent piece.

Song by John Reuben
Video Directed by Chris Oatley
c 2006 :: Gotee Records

Watch of it on Youtube.

In this interview Dave Balter explains word-of-mouth marketing. Balter founded BzzAgent in 2002. He is also co-founder and current board member of The Word of Mouth Marketing Association. He recently published a book called The Word of Mouth Manual, Volume II. You can download a full (and free!) copy of the book here.

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Buzz about pharmaceuticals makes up one of the most consistent areas of online WOM (word of mouth) growth. A brand beats out the generics in WOM because the brand has a relationship with its consumers, the patients that have tried and come to trust the brand. Interesting to read how it works there.

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