It is clear that building word-of-mouth marketing is critical for the success of a product or company and often it can use a bit of help to get started. I am always interested about how companies do it. I found a few insights that I thought I would share here.

For well over a year, I have participated in SheSpeaks, a sampling network of women. They have sent me products to review. I loved the Sonicare toothbrush. The Nicole by OPI nail polish took a little getting used to, but is interesting (this one is new and I have some coupons, by the way). The salon hair care product that made me smell like almonds, but look like I hadn't showered in weeks was an emphatic "no!"

Today, I learned about another network like this called BzzAgent. I don't have much to report other than they reallly get the word-of-mouth thing and I have heard about the founder's latest ebook on no fewer than 3 blog posts this weekend from folks I follow and respect. I read the book tonight and it had some nuggets in it.

If you know of others, post the links in comments here.

I just finished John Sculley's book Odyssey that talks about his time transitioning from an executive at Pepsi to being the CEO at Apple (infamous for firing Steve Jobs). I know it is a bit retro, but it was recommended and I found it interesting to read the description of a technology company from someone who didn't grow up in the industry. My favorite line of the book is a comment John made that some criticized Apple for being "a vertically-integrated advertising agency." I laughed because I think that criticism is more true today than it was in the time that Sculley was there.


Now, I should say that I am an Apple fan. I wish them well. I don't own a Mac. I have an iPod, but would consider myself a late adopter of it and even now most of our iTunes library was ripped from CDs. I am not a fanatic, but appreciate some of their innovations (like in product packaging and the cool graphic style they use in their ads, for instance).


That said, I wonder if all companies shouldn't strive to be called vertically-integrated ad agencies. Ad agencies love selling what sells. They love promoting things that make it big and make them famous. They love talking about products that coincide with social trends, consumer sentiments, and are seen as differentiated. Who wouldn't love making a product or service that ad agencies "wish they thought of" themselves?

So, I wonder if we spend enough time as thinking about what products we'd want to sell, if we had them, instead of what we are going to do to sell the products, now that we have them?

As everyone knows, Google is taking over the world. They run the biggest search engine and are buying up companies and extending their brand further and further each week. That said, there is a combination that I'd love to see that I call "AdWords in the Real World." As people know, AdWords is Googles way to insert advertising onto search results pages, onto blogs, websites, and the like triggered by the content of the page. Advertisers pay per click. Presumably, people browsing websites get relevant content and ads delivered to them (that is better than non-relevant ads, if you have to have ads). These AdWords enable a whole economy where people's websites can make money (or at least get supplemented) and advertisers reach those truly interested in their products or services.

So, this leads to my idea. As I have written about in the past, the book publishing industry is becoming frictionless. Anyone can write and publish a book. (Now, that isn't to say that everyone SHOULD write a book, but that is another tangent for another day). But for those who want to write, there actually is some friction to it. It still isn't free to publish and there isn't any truly revenue-share models that are aren't at least a little front loaded. So, what if advertisers sponsored "AdWords" in digitally printed, self-published books, the same way they sponsor links on a website.

An author would write a book about a particular topic, let's say about the history of musical instruments. They would prepare the book using one of the online services like Xlibris, BookSurge, cafepress, or iUniverse. They would select the "AdWord" option and their book would be made available for sale for free. Then, each time the book was printed on demand, trigged by an actual order, a dynamic list of current AdWords advertisers would be listed on a special sponsors page (with easy to type URLs). In its actual implementation, there could be a page of AdWords for every so many actual pages (ie, either in the back like the sponsors section of a high school yearbook or in the chapter breaks allowing the sponsor list to be even more targeted to the content of every chapter).

As long as the price paid for the book at check out covers all hard printing costs and royalties and the online book set-up was easy and "frictionless," I see that this could be an interesting opportunity to extend the Google AdWords to the real world.

The first advertisers I would solicit for this service would be the booksellers and authors themselves ("Readers who purchased this book, also loved this one, and this one"). I am sure there are many aspiring authors that would rather put their money into advertising their book, than paying set-up fees.