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Synopsis

Word of mouth marketing is always working. It just may not be working in your favor.

Online networking makes it possible to stay more engaged and guide the conversation. Because of that, you have to participate.

Go to the search engines and set up alerts for your name, your company name, the title of your book or name of your products. That way you’ll know who’s talking about you and you can get in touch with them or respond on your own blog.

If you come across a complaint, a timely offer to fix the problem can turn it into an endorsement.

• Google Alerts
• Yahoo! Alerts

Brought to you by Networking Now.

Complete Transcription of BNI Podcast Episode 124 -

Priscilla:
Hello everyone, and welcome back to The Official BNI Podcast brought to you by NetworkingNow.com, which is the leading site on the Net for networking downloadables.

I’m Priscilla Rice, and I’m coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkley, California, and I am joined on the phone today by the founder and the chairman of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner.

Hello, Ivan. How are you?

Ivan:
I’m doing great, Priscilla. Thanks.

Priscilla:
What are you going to share with us today?

Ivan:
Today’s topic is People Are Talking About You; Are You in the Conversation? And it kind of stems from some material that I originally did in my book, Truth or Delusion?, and I bring up the point that word of mouth marketing is always working. Word of mouth marketing is always working. It must may not be working in your favor. And you may not be getting the kind of word of mouth you’re looking for; it may not be the kind you’re hoping, which is the good kind where people are talking positively about you.

The problem is the negative word of mouth really has legs, and the average dissatisfied customer tells ten times more people, and that’s based on studies that have been done. That was one out of the White House. Office of Consumer Affairs found that people are more likely to talk about you when they’re unhappy than when they’re happy, therefore, you have to get engaged in the process.

And with online opportunities, that’s even more important. It’s especially important to be engaged in conversation with online networking. There you have a little bit more, I don’t want to say control, because you really don’t control what is said, but you have an opportunity to engage more effectively with online networking opportunities. And we’ve talked about and had some guest speakers talking about online communications through blogs and bulletin boards. One of the things I think is really important, you have to stay engaged in that kind of conversation; you need to check out what’s going on and what’s being said about you.

And what made my really start to think about this was a number a years ago, we started getting more and more BNI groups going on LinkedIn and Ecademy, and so I had some directors who were saying, “I’m not going to participate in those.” And years ago, I said, “We’ve got to participate in those just to stay engaged in the conversation,” because if you’re not engaged in a conversation, you can’t help direct it or coach it in any way whatsoever. Sometimes the most vocal people are the people that are unhappy, and that engagement is really important.

A great example of what I’m talking about is a blog or an article that I recently saw by a good friend of mine, Dave Goetz. Dave is the publisher of SuccessNet, for our newsletter, BNISuccessNet.com. Dave is the publisher of that. He and his staff, Bernice, Bunny, do all of the heavy lifting to get SuccessNet done, and he writes articles a lot about branding and customer service. And he wrote a piece entitled, “Are They Laughing at You?” or something to that effect, which I think was really an interesting article, because he talked about a professor who was teaching a graduate level class at a university. Usually, graduate level classes are very interactive and the students get involved. When you start talking about Master’s level students, these are people who’ve – they’re out there in the workforce. They’ve got some expertise, and that’s one of the reasons why they’re much more seminal and interactive. But this particular professor just said, “Look, I’ve got content I need to go through. This is not a discussion class. I’m just going to lecture.”

Well, in this day and age, that doesn’t work; it doesn’t work in business, and it doesn’t work in the classroom. Because you know what these kids did, these young adults?

Priscilla:
What did they do?

Ivan:
They actually set up an instant messaging board, and while the professor was talking, they were all talking to each other online about what an idiot this guy is. And so, while he’s up there droning on and on and on, the very thing he said couldn’t happen was happening, and he didn’t know about it.

Priscilla:
Right.

Ivan:
And so that’s where the title of this podcast comes from, is People Are Talking About You; Are You in the Conversation?

Priscilla:
Right.

Ivan:
It’s really important to be in the conversation.

Now, to the credit of these students, finally one of them said, “Hey, look, we can sit here and bash the professor every week for the rest of this course, which is a lot of fun, but we’re really not accomplishing what we need to accomplish.”

And so what they ended up doing was literally dialoging with each other about the topics that the professor was talking about, and he wasn’t involved in the conversation at all.

Priscilla:
Yeah, that makes sense.

Ivan:
And so although it turned into a somewhat positive experience for these students, it was because of, really, their integrity that it stayed positive, or mostly positive, as opposed to really going south.

And so the question, if you’re in business, really is, “Are people talking about you?” And it’s hard to figure that out with the face-to-face networking, but with online networking, it’s not so hard to figure out. And one of the ways that I recommend that my listeners and BNI members getting engaged in conversation is to go to Google, go to Yahoo, go to any search engines, many of them have alerts, alerts, a Google alert and a Yahoo alert. And you go to those sites and you go to the alert section, and you say every time my name, and you type in your name, every time my name is mentioned online, send me an alert. And you can set it up where you get an alert every time it happens, I usually do a daily summary. So every day I get an alert from Google and an alert from Yahoo that mentions every time my name was mentioned anywhere. And it do it for my books. I do it not only for my name, I do it for my books, I do it for BNI. So I do it for my company names, my book names, my name, I do it for certain phrases that I’m wanting to stay on top of, like business networking and social capital, so that I stay engaged in the conversation.

It’s really a lot of fun when somebody writes an article or a blog and they mention me or they mention my book or they mention BNI. I don’t get to do this every single time, so if I don’t get back to you, I apologize, but many, many times, somebody will mention me or BNI or one of my books, and I’ll get this alert. And I’ll just drop the person a note. “Hey, thanks for mentioning me in your blog or in your column.” And they’re always just shocked that I knew about it.

I even had one where a nonmember blasted a local BNI chapter about the way they were invited, and the chapter really didn’t quite handle it right. And saw this and I posted on the blog. I said, “Hey, I’m really sorry that you were treated that way.” And I apologized, “That’s not the way it’s supposed to be done, and we’ll do a little redirecting, retraining with this chapter. And I just wanted to let you know that that’s not the way that we generally do things, and I apologize for your experience.”

Well, you should have seen the next blog this woman wrote. The next blog was, “This is the way a corporation should handle a complaint, and what a great job.”

And so this is what I mean where you need to be engaged in a conversation, because if you’re not engaged in a conversation, you don’t have an opportunity to put your version of what took place out there and to support your brand, even if it’s a small brand, to support your brand and your business throughout the marketplace.

So people are talking about you; are you in the conversation?

Priscilla:
That’s great. I just want to add that I had an experience last week that showed me about negative comments and what legs they have. This woman I talked to, I had never met her before, she launched into this passionate discourse about how she had taken her dog to get him groomed, and the woman had not listened to anything she said and destroyed this dog’s fur, essentially. And she was so passionate about it and was telling me never go there or don’t ever tell anybody to go there. And I was like wow!

Ivan:
That’s my point. I call it the WHAM factor; people are more likely to talk about your business when they’re mad at it than when they happy with it. Wouldn’t it be nice if the opposite were true, if people talked about your business, if they’re happy, they talk about it as much as those who are unhappy, but generally, that doesn’t happen. We see something slightly different in BNI because we are a very structured program to go out and talk positively. But as a rule, it doesn’t really work that way in the real world. BNI is sort of an artificial construct for developing word of mouth that is a little bit different.

Priscilla:
Yeah.

Ivan:
So you’re absolutely right.

Well, I know we’re almost out of time. Just to wrap up, I would say that whether you’re networking online or face to face, the dialog is going to happen with or without you. And if your don’t participate in the conversation, particularly online, you’re not in control whatsoever. I mean, you’re never in control, but you have no opportunity to guide and coach and to bring it along. But if you do participate publically and say who you are – one of the big no-no’s in buzz marketing is to act like you’re somebody else; I would never suggest that. You go in, say who you are. And I think it’s more powerful to say, “Hey, I’m so-and-so. I’m sorry you had a bad experience,” or “Let me give you a different perspective.” I think you can help to steer the conversation in a positive direction.

Priscilla:
Well, thank you, Dr. Misner. I think that’s a fantastic little tip to give the rest of us about Yahoo and Google. I’m going to definitely do that.

Ivan:
Great.

Priscilla:
Thanks so much.

Ivan:
Thank you.

Priscilla:
I just want to remind the listeners that this podcast has been brought to you by NetworkingNow.com, which is the leading site on the Net for networking downloadables. Thanks so much for listening. This is Priscilla Rice, and we hope you’ll join us next week for another exciting episode of The Official BNI Podcast.