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Word of mouth advertising has been around for a very long and is with out a doubt the best means of advertising any company could ask for. If you need to see the dentist, most people ask a relative, friend or co-worker who they go to and are comfortable with. This is a classic example of word of mouth advertising, and one that will never go away. In todays fast pace world, many people do not want to be bothered with having to call around or grab a phone book for services they may need. They simply pick up the phone and call someone they know or they may remember a conversation they had in the past with someone regarding what they now need.

No need to talk trash on my stick figure awesomeness, they have feelings to you know.

As you can see, word of mouth advertising can have a big impact on a company which can be either very good for them or very detrimental. A company has control to a certain extent as to the effect of word of mouth advertising. If the product or service they offer just sucks, well then you can imagine the public will be speaking poorly about you. Let’s take a look at a few things that makes word of mouth advertising really tick.

People Are In Control

When someone speaks on about your product or service, they are in control of what they say. If they had a great experience with you or enjoyed what you had to offer, they surely will say positive things about your business. As a business you can not control what people have to say about you, you can only help push them to say good things by offering a great product or service.

People Love To Talk

In today’s world people talk more now then they did 20 years ago. Cell phones, PDA’s, wireless internet and instant messaging services make it much easier for us to talk on a more frequent basis. On a lunch or even a smoke break, co-workers can talk about what they did the night before. If someone ate at a restaurant and loved it, they will more then likely talk about it the next day. A friend could be going on a date and asking for a nice place to go to, word of mouth will kick in and you will refer what you thought was a great restaurant. As long as people are talking, word of mouth advertising will never die.

Word Of Mouth On Nitrous Oxide

Now take the same situation shown above and push the nitrous button on your word of mouth campaign. Look at Facebook or Twitter as good examples, each have the ability to add friends to your list. You can then post messages for all of your friends to read as well as read what they have to say. If you have 2,000 followers on Twitter, you simply tweet out a message and they will all have the ability to see it right then and their in real time. The same with Facebook, you post something on your board and all of your friends have the ability to read it. This is what I call word of mouth advertising on nitrous and it can be one hell of a boost for you. Traditional word of mouth advertising can not give you that much exposure in such a short amount of time. It relies on single individuals to slowly speak about your product or service, one person at a time.

With a boost of nitrous, you can not only tell your 2,000 followers on Twitter, they in return can tell their 800 followers and some of their followers can tell their followers about your website or product launch. With all of those followers getting a tweet in real time, your word of mouth campaign has blown up well beyond the traditional means. Instead of Bob in Ochitaka, Montana talking about you to his friend’s one at a time, the internet world can talk to thousands and thousands of people with a few keystrokes and a click of a mouse button.

Many companies fail to realize the true power behind the new age of word of mouth advertising, and even worse, how to use it properly. Maybe the CEO’s or marketing manager’s of companies still think old school marketing techniques are the way to go since they have worked for the past 20 years. They are afraid to embrace social media as a way to advertise themselves online, with a little education, willingness to change and a shot of NOS, it can take them further then they ever dreamed. Word of mouth is not going anywhere, people just need to realize the internet is changing the way it operates and how fast the word can be spread.