“Being slightly remarkable is a losing strategy.”

– Seth Godin

Many years ago, I read the following in a consumer report:

• If customers receive what they expect, they’ll tell no one
• If you exceed your customer’s expectations, they’ll tellthree people
• If they get less than they expect they’ll tell seven people

The basic principle hasn’t changed since that report: word of good and bad service spreads. What has shifted, though, is the multiplier. I’d suggest that we can increase the numbers above by a factor of a hundred or even a thousand.

Take, for example, this series of tweets about Delta airlines from Piers Morgan, whose Twitter feed boasts over 500,000 followers:

• We are ‘de-planing’ – everyone off. What an absolute bloody joke. Be ashamed Delta. This is shocking even by your standards.

• Nobody at Delta has a clue what’s happening, so that’s it. Enough. I’m out of here.

• And you can all relax at Delta now because the gates of Hades will freezeth over before I darken your pitifully incompetent doors again.

– Piers Morgan, host of Piers Morgan Tonight on CNN

A half a million people got those messages. And that was just the beginning. Many retweeted to spread them further. Obviously something different is going on here – telling seven friends about bad customer service is a statistic from the past.

Before Facebook, email, Twitter, blogs, websites, YouTube and more, word was harder to spread. If you were dissatisfied you’d tell your family and friends, if you were really upset you might send a note to your extended family, friends and business contacts. If you were really pissed you might take out an ad, picket in front of the business or file a law suit. Still, though, most of the communication took place one to one, or one to a few.

Not today. Communication is now one to many, and then many to many as news picks up steam in a connected world. Whether it’s celebrity gossip, Piers Morgan’s flight experience, or recent events in Egypt, the nature of word of mouth has changed:

Word used to spread mouth to mouth. Now it spreads mouse to mouse.

What the New Word of Mouth Paradigm Means

We now live in a world were everyone has a massive platform to spread the word about your work. The question then becomes: how do you get people to use their platform?

The answer lies in excellence. If you do extraordinary work, the rest of the world will tell the rest of the world.

And, of course, if the work you do is below standard, then the rest of the world will tell the rest of the word that, too.

The tools and infrastructure for getting the word out now belong to your customers, not the media. That makes delivering extraordinary work to the marketplace the best and most inexpensive marketing program today.

A great example of this was last week’s post about my personal trainer. That endorsement was read by tens of thousands of people. It’s permanently available to be share and be spread even further. That’s all built on the extraordinary level of service I receive from him, and my ability to share that experience.

This shift in the speed and reach of customer experiences means two things:

1. Those committed to excellence will be rewarded to an even greater degree.

2. Those committed to mediocrity will suffer more than ever.

If you are committed to extraordinary work, it’s a great time to be in business. If you aren’t, and are just trying to do what you have to do to get by, then you’ll never be rewarded by the new paradigm. And you’re probably in the wrong line of work, too.

How has the speed and reach of experience sharing affected your business – for better or worse? Let us know in the comments.

“The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.”

-Ferdinand Foch