Word of Mouth Marketing Limitations

A company doesn't need to have a large advertising firm to "sell" a product to a specialized demographic of people. Software is used by people who use computers a lot. And people who use the computer a lot frequent areas of the internet that are essential for mass mouth marketing campaigns.

Webmasters or regulars in area were primarily responsible for the extravagant growth of programs used in the book. Firefox, ICQ and Skype , if you read into the history, were all valuable tools for webmasters thus motivating them to promote the product through their websites.

The book Naked Conversations talks about passion and motivation as a determining factor when promoting a word of mouth software. Webmasters who ran smaller enthusiast sites on the web were frustrated with the Microsoft browser because it hindered them from building their own sites without purchasing expensive Microsoft Software.

Because of this frustration, webmasters built their sites around the new browser firefox and promoted the software on their sites. Like this one.



Web regulars visited their favorite community sites and upgraded their browsers accordingly. But because Firefox only initially appealed to the webmaster demographic, the browser was adopted by a closed community of people.

Several years later, most students at this University did not hear of Firefox until their IT department encouraged them to make the upgrade. Cross community fertilization is this case, is the limiting factor to mass adoption of a product.