Francois Gossieaux over at Emergence Marketing says Word of Mouth is very valuable – as long as you do not pay for it and he’s absolutely right on target.
There is no question that customers who are acquired through word of mouth will be buzzing more and longer than those who are acquired through traditional marketing means. Some companies are actually able to quantify the value of a word of mouth referral. Unfortunatelly, the knee-jerk reaction of many marketers who quantify that referral value is to use it to calculate the financial incentive that they are willing to pay to stimulate word of mouth referrals.
That is where the system breaks down.
If you give me a pure financial incentive to make a referral, I will evaluate whether it’s worth spending some of my social capital for the amount of money that you are giving me (and chances are it won’t).
You can’t buy bloggers and you really can’t directly buy word of mouth. What you need is a team of people trained in getting the conversation into the hands of people who will talk about it. Failing that, you need to at the very least research the people who will be interested in talking about your product/brand/service and then directly reach out to them with information they can use to do what they already do. They are already writing and talking about your field, you just have to say hello.
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