Word of mouth marketing - the most effective form of marketing.

Industrious everyday people are spending their free time promoting the companies and brands they love - or knocking the ones they don’t. Their activities are influential and their opinions are being heard. They are otherwise known as Citizen Marketers.

Our featured guest in this episode, Author and word-of-mouth expert, Jackie Huba, will discuss how the outlaws of culture are using social media, do-it-yourself blogs, online videos, and social networking to become the new centers of influence.

Here’s a sampling from the episode:

• Citizen Marketers. Citizen marketers are tech savvy people that posses a desire to connect with others who share their passion in a particular brand or product and they use social media to do so.

• Why should companies care about Citizen Marketers? Eighty percent of consumers will research a product online before purchasing. Many blogs actually appear higher in Google ranks than static web pages. These Google results are now influencing a company’s appearance and appeal to others.

• Four categories of Citizen Marketers. Firecrackers create a big buzz. Filters blog about a brand or product without bias. Fanatics love the company and the products. Facilitators run online communities centered around a specific brand.

• What does this mean for SMB’s? Your strategy should be participation. Reaching out to these bloggers can increase visibility and challenges companies to provide the best products and services they can. (Consider sending free products and requesting that they blog about them.)

Today’s Trend: In addition to the above points, please stay tuned at the end of the program to the Today’s Trend segment: Small Business Owners Work Strange Hours. In this segment Anita examines how work time is encroaching into personal time for small business owners. Recent statistics show that 68% of small business owners work weekends and 66% work both days and nights. Anita provides 5 tips to regain your precious personal time, how to use technology to support this, and save your sanity.

Recorded: January 16, 2007

Duration: 53.29 minutes

About Jackie Huba

Since 2001, Jackie Huba has been researching the effects of word of mouth on customer loyalty. Forbes calls her work in this field “the word of mouth gospel.”

Huba is the co-author of the brand new book “Citizen Marketers: When People are the message.” The Wall Street Journal hailed the book as “a solid … insightful explanation of how the Internet has armed the consumer — which is to say, everyone — against the mindless blather of corporate messaging attempts…. drop everything and read this book.” She is also the co-author of the best-selling book “Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force,” and the Church of the Customer blog.

As a business advisor, Huba has worked with Microsoft, Ulta, Discovery Education, Yahoo and Verio as well as thousands of small and medium businesses at association conferences. She is a also a board member of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association.

Her work in researching passionate customer loyalty has been profiled by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Fortune, BusinessWeek, U.S. News & World Report, the Financial Times, Fast Company and several thousand blogs.

To learn more, visit Jackie’s website Church Of The Customer.

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