Mutual value exchange & smart word of mouth campaigns

Flying around the web and the Twittersphere today has been a great example of the power of the people / word of mouth marketing.

Musician Jack Johnson has a new album out on the 27th October. He's started off a seemingly pretty effective word of mouth campaign via Twitter.

Smart thinking has gone into this too.  Word of mouth relies on people voluntarily passing on something that's interesting, fun or relevant. However, you can encourage word of mouth with incentive.  Like all good relationships it's about mutual value exchange:  Do this for me and I'll do this for you.

Which is exactly how, and quite probably why there have been so many people obligingly tweeting out to their own networks about the forthcoming album release. Why? Because by visiting his site & sending a pre-set tweet (but allowing for 20 characters of personalisation on the front, nice touch) in return you can get a free mp3 download of a track from said album. Everyone likes free stuff. Or sort-of free stuff 'cos you have to make a little bit of an effort to get it, but the value exchange stacks up enough to bother.

It would have been churlish of me not to oblige, so of course I did. Judging by the number of tweets I've seen personally on the subject today, so did many others and the whole campaign would appear to be working rather well, an opinion ratified by a quick Twitter search:

There's also a fair few people tweeting about articles they've blogged on the topic (like this one), so double whammy and well done to Mr. Johnson. He's successfully harnessed the power of the people (people being the best new media vehicle out), by creating OTT (opportunities to talk), and thereby propelling his sample & message (at very low cost, i.e bandwidth & releasing the track free, no media costs in a traditional sense) to audiences that might never otherwise have been reached by traditional advertising whether on or offline.

Good stuff.