When you have a great meal, do you tell your friends about it? When you see a great movie, or hear a great CD, are you someone who recommends it to others?
Word of mouth is the most trusted recommendation factor around. We trust our friends, our families, our connections. We’d rather go with their advertising than some stranger that’s being paid to recommend something.
So how often do you use your word of mouth to highlight unsung heroes, or new connections, or new people?
We’re all connected in numerous ways – some purely online, some physically. Whatever way it is, the connection is there. It may have different levels of connection, but the one thing that’s constant is the trust factor.
Say someone I respect points me in someone’s direction, I’ll check that person out. Or if they say I should be reading a certain blog, I’ll take the time to have a look through it and either add it to my reader, recommend it to others, or move on. Even if I move on, if I know someone that would get a kick out of that particular blog, I’ll recommend it to them.
This is something we all can do.
There’s a huge amount of great information and people that go unnoticed, simply because they’re lost in the noise of our online conversations. So let’s be cause champions.
But let’s be slightly different cause champions.
If you recommend a blogger, make it one that isn’t from the norm. While the A-listers like Chris Brogan, Darren Rowse and Seth Godin all offer great information, I’m sure none of them would begrudge you recommending other bloggers over them. People like Gini Dietrich, Mark W. Schaefer and Jim Connolly are coming out with some amazing stuff – you really should check them out.
Same goes for Twitter and the #followfriday recommendations. We all know that the big guys are usually worth following. So how about the little guys? Recommend people outside your normal niche as well. If we all just recommended PR or marketing users, it’d get to be a pretty predictable Friday.
Or in your business or job – if you can’t handle a project, but know someone that could, recommend them for the job. The client or customer wins, because the work is still being done; your recommendation wins as they get extra recognition; and you win, because you’ve connected two needs to each another and made yourself look unselfish in the process.
There are some great people out there. We know that – don’t others deserve to know it too?
image: camil tulcan
