Great businesses have thrived through word of mouth just as long as… well, as long as there have been great businesses.
Word of mouth is still the goal of every business today. When your customers are telling their friends about how great your food is, or how fun your bar is, then you’ve got it made. Your marketing may bring in the customers, but satisfaction brings them back, and
word of mouth leverages your investment in finding customers and making them happy. Who wouldn’t want more word of mouth promotion for their business? This is a big part of the appeal of social media – getting people sharing content about our business, and telling their friends.
Let’s think about how word of mouth works for a second. When you have a great experience, then it’s natural to want to tell your friends about it. So who do you tell? The closest person of course. That could mean your best friend that you tell everything to, but it can also literally mean the closest person. When are you most likely to tell a total stranger about something that happened to you? When they are the first person you see right after something amazing happens. They are the closest by distance and time to the event that just happened. Immediacy (here and now) is the key to getting people to share. We’re a lot less likely to start talking to a total stranger about something that happened three weeks ago. Unless, that is of course, we are suddenly reminded of it again by a new event happening now.
So that’s what we want to do in our locations. Get people to share here and now. Otegaru Net is a way to make suggestions, reminders, ideas of something to share. Yes, people are already coming to your place and sharing about it. Yes, you are already giving the suggestions, ideas, reminders to share. But Otegaru Net helps you to do it better.
Consider these two scenarios.
Scenario 1) You walk into a bar. You notice “follow us on Twitter” written on a chalkboard (BTW, chalkboards came into common use around 1800, which makes them early 19th century media). You’ve already followed this Twitter account. You make a mental note to check this twitter timeline later, but unfortunately you forget.
Scenario 2) You walk into a bar. You notice a TV screen running Otegaru Net and displaying the last 5 tweets of the bar account. One tweet is about an upcoming event here. You share the tweet and tag a friend, saying “Let’s go to this.” Next you see a photo from an event last week. You laugh when you see yourself in the photo. You start talking to another regular who is also in the photo. You both share the photo and tag another friend who was there. That friend re-shares.
It should be easy to see the difference. Note how scenario two reminds you of things to share, makes it easy to share, and makes it easy to use the content on the screen to start a conversation both with people in the room and on your virtual network. That’s the magic of having push media work for you. “Push 3.0”. I’ll talk more about that in the next post.
