Geno Church: “People are killer app!”

Geno Church runs a great Word of Mouth Marketing agency in South Carolina, called Brains on Fire. His presentation at the Womma was really cool, though he first surprised me by praising the Kitchen Sisters—a talk on storytelling that I found boring.

But I was captivated by the following experience: social media campaigns yield the same results as our campaigns. If you want to succeed, 90% of the word of mouth work happens offline! In the last two campaigns that we did it was between 86% and 88%.

He started by explaining that tools of social media are only tools. “People are the killer app!”

In his approach to advertising, he recommends walking with the customers—not as a metaphor, but quite literally. Walk with them, see that they discover, what they feel, what they like or dislike.

My favorite quote of his was the one he took from John Moore: “Buzz does not create evangelists; evangelists create buzz.”

Take a look at his slideshare: