I’m always hunting for more about Word of Mouth marketing, and I’m continually disappointed.

A couple of years ago I even came across an Encyclopedia of Business, and when I went to the index for “Word of Mouth” there were only 2 entries. “Referrals” had 4 entries. In total the information was about half a page, on almost tissue-like paper in a tome of over 1000 pages that wouldn’t even fit onto my bookshelf.

That’s what most academics think of word of mouth marketing.

Worth about 0.05%.

Still, I keep picking up books in the hope that one day it will be worth my while because you never, never know.

…

I have young kids so I often spend time in my local library, and one of my distractions is to wander along the business books section. A few weeks ago a small paperback book caught my eye enough to pick it up.

It was called “The Winning Way in Business” and I wasn’t expecting much. After all the entire marketing section in the book is only 30 pages long.

But I was delightfully surprised.

17 of those 30 pages are about word of mouth, referrals, networking, and creating customer WOW! experiences!

This guy knows his stuff!

Then I read the details of the author Ronnie Kagan, and it turned out he “built up and ran 32 companies in 8 countries… was involved in listing 3 companies on the stock exchange and founded a property development company that did in excess of $1 billion turn over per annum.” Even better he has trained others in this too, in fact “over 100,000 people in seven countries.”

All this made me check out the rest of the book and truly it is a great collation on the real practice of business.

Sure you can find “The Winning Way in Business” book itself at Amazon (although currently it says ‘Temporarily out of stock’), but you can also sign up to take Ronnie’s ideas for a test-drive including his 7 step process to “Creating a “Golden Chain” of Referrals” here…

http://www.winningway.com.au/member.html

Even step 1 will challenge most people’s thinking about referrals.

-Martin Russell

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