A Culture of Buzz

In his new book The Referral Engine, John Jantsch writes:

Highly referred businesses are good enough to make people want to talk about them, but they amplify this natural desire by making word of mouth essential to the culture.  Companies create buzz with great follow-up, T-shirts and other promotional merchandise, free events, outrageous acts of kindness – anything that contributes t an overall culture of buzz.

My boss at MIP was Kent Hollrah.  He was a passionate believer in creating a great company culture.  As the vice president of marketing, I mentioned to him that I had read a section of From Worst to First by Gordon Bethune and one of the ways he monitored company morale was the purchase of Continental logo’d items by employees.  I thought it would be a great idea if we made MIP logo’d shirt available to employees.

If an employee was attending a conference or representing MIP at an event, the company would give them a shirt, otherwise the shirts were sold for 50 percent of what the company paid.  The shirts became so popular that soon we were processing shirt orders every 6 months.  First our polo line grew in the color selection.  Then we began to offer a variety of button-down shirts, women’s blouses, denim shirts and even Hawaiian shirts.  Our channel partners loved them too.

We also regularly made up T-Shirts for product launches, campaigns, volleyball and those were distributed without cost to the employees.

It got to the point that on any given work day, 70 percent of the employees were wearing MIP shirts.

Other alliance partners and businesses would ask me about our shirts.

We gave customers shirts and made them available as prized at customer conferences.

Those shirts were the beginning of many things we did as a company to generate a buzz.  And John Jantsch is right, referrals follow a buzz.  We got a ton of referrals.  We had a very robust integrated marketing plan that we executed as well.  Referrals were always in the top three sources attached to closed sales.

A few weeks ago I attended the MIP reunion/Char Davies retirement party.  The back yard was decorated with a variety of MIP shirts.  It was cool to hear the folks collected recall different milestones associated with a particular shirt.

It was wonderful to see that, years later, the MIP buzz was well remembered.