WOMM: JACK TROUT GETS IT RIGHT

Jack Trout fillets the "new" marketing crowd. This from his column in Forbes today:

First of all, world-of-mouth isn't new much less "the next big thing" that WOMMA declares. A third-party endorsement of your product has always been the Holy Grail. It's more believable. In prior days, we used to try and find the "early adapters" for a product. We figured they had big mouths and loved to tell their friends and neighbors about their new widget.

George Silverman the self-described "father of word of mouth marketing" goes ballistic on Jack. And the normally quite civil and rational John Moore is cheering George on. Our take on the whole open source marketing thing can be found here.

UPDATE: Several interesting posts on Jack Trout's WOMM comments: Steve Hall at AdRants has a balanced response here. Mary Schmidt offers more balance here. And Paul Holmes supports the WOMM party line here.

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Comments

[Errol Smith (of the Nanocasting Alliance)]

In response to all the chatter about Jack Trout's comments on word-of-mouth marketing, Jack Trout invited a group of "buzz evangelist" to face off with him on his radio program. Steve Rubel and Rick Murray of Edelman, Emanuel Rosen of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, Seth Godin, Joseph Jaffe and Errol Smith (me....producer of Trout Radio) sat down to deconstruct the buzz around word-of-mouth. I listened to all the arguments before sitting in on the roundtable discussion to end the series and concluded that rumors of Jack's "passing" are indeed greatly exaggerated... You can hear the interviews at the roundtable wrap up at:

http://www.jackstreet.com/jackstreet/WJCK-SteveRubelE.cfm

and the entire series at:

http://www.troutandpartners.com/radio/Strategy.asp