Organic Evangelism?

by Ben Fowler

As relatively unknown speaker company who sells their wares on the internet, Aperion relies heavily on referrals. In other words, since we can’t do the face-to-face selling of our speakers, we rely solely on customers and reviewers or editors to help sell the product by their word of mouth. In the world of the web, this equates to user reviews (check out www.amazon.com), customer testimonials, forum threads and posts, and the occasional blog. Because of the ubiquity of the internet, one bad review can really hurt. So we try to make sure everything from our company – products and services – are well above the customer’s expectation. If we do that, then we prevent any nasty or negative product reviews, gain some kudos, and more importantly gain a customer for life.

So far, Aperion has incredible feedback from our customers, both at our website and abroad. Places like Cnet, Audioreview.com, avsforum.com, hometheaterforum.com all have great feedback from customers. Unfortunately for me, I want more. I envision Aperion being mentioned in all the AV forums. And I want to see more positive posts about our products than any of our competitor’s. Potential shoppers are often very interested in what the hottest product is, i.e. what is the most popular. If they see a lot of posts about Aperion then they’ll see the popularity of Aperion and go there to see what’s so hot. My intention isn’t one of greedy salesmanship here. I honestly believe we offer an incredible product, better service, and overall better value (hey, I work here, so I get to be biased).

To that end, I’d like to discover a way to generate “organic evangelism”. I’m not interested in suspicious guerilla marketing tactics that aren’t honest (some companies have been known to start threads on their own, or hire people to do it). I want it to be honest and real and inspired. I’m just curious if it’s possible to foster organically-grown evangelism. If we generate this kind of enthusiasm with every single person that we have contact with (could be a shopper or a buyer), then we’re onto something big. So the reason for bringing this topic to you is to see what you think about all this. Tell me how you think we ought to do it.

Comments

[Nick Lewis]

Good thoughts. I thought I'd throw this link your way. It doesn't have the answers, but it does ask a lot of the right questions, and establishes a good idea of "what we know".

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/files/whos_there.pdf