You're pushing all the right buttons and your customers are more than likely to recommend you to their friends, family, colleagues and even their parish priest? But between being willing to recommend and actually doing so, there's a gap that is not easily bridged.

After all, the payoff for generating positive word-of-mouth and recommendations for your business can be big. Word-of-mouth is validated as the largest influencer in B2B and B2C buying decisions. A recommendation from a peer is the strongest medium money can buy.

But to move from "likeliness to recommend" to "active recommendations", every business needs to do more than delight its customers. It needs to be worth talking about. The harsh truth is that - as a customer - no matter how much I like you, I will only talk about you if it makes *my* conversations more interesting. If it increases *my* prestige of being "in the know". If it makes *my* friends laugh, or smarter, or happier.

Achieving this takes planning. But having been involved in two Management Centre Europe projects which among other things looked at this challenge, I have learned that it can be done. One was the redefinition of the Lexus Customer Experience. The other, the introduction of storytelling at Gemalto.

Here is what I learned:

STEP 1. Look at all those who can talk, not just the customer

In our drive to get customers to become promoters, it is easy to forget that there are others out there who can also speak well of our brand or business. They are the "influencers". The faceless group of people who say good or bad things about your brand, regardless wether they ever used it. But they are not to be disregarded. Some research even suggests that non-users may be more active promoters or detractors than actual customers. So when setting up programmes to identify and activate promoters, don't just stop at the customer. Include "everyone" who is exposed to your brand or business.

STEP 2. Dig for the emotion

To get people to talk about your brand or business they need to be passionate. And passion is an emotion. But people don't always tell you what they feel, even when asking all the right (NPS) questions. For example, in automotive, half of the women entering a showroom feel intimidated about the prospect of having to negotiate with a male. But unless specifically asked in the right way, hardly any of them will volunteer this information. Still, whithout that deeper, emotional, level, there will be no passion, and hence no real conversation. That is why you need to complement your NPS research efforts, with insight research that digs beneath the surface and uncovers the true emotional triggers.

STEP 3. Script a "talkworthy moment" at every step of the customer journey

Customer journeys shouldn't be "too scripted", but it does pay to include "remarkable moments" at every step the customer takes. This is not necessarily the proverbial "moment of truth" which helps your customer deepen their engagement with your business. Is a typically a small moment which is remarkable enough that people actually think it is worth talking about. For example, at Lexus UK they once had a woman's favourite doughnuts waiting for her, 3 years after she last visited the dealership. While no doughnut ever sold a car, in this case it did make a great piece of conversation.

STEP 4. Bring in the Storytellers

Sometimes people need a hand. Not everyone is equally gifted in telling passionate and relevant stories, even if they are about events that happened to them. Also, unique moments sometimes need amplification to be heard by more than the people involved. So once you have something remarkable happening, capture it. Bring in storytellers to structure it in a narrative that is easily retold. Create compilations which can be circulated through the business. Make your business' stories spreadable. Lexus once did this by compiling a Book of Legends. At Gemalto we did a global story hunt. And of course the classics like FedEx, Ritz or Nordström need no further mention.

STEP 5. Don't forget your staff

Finally, there are the people that work in your business. If you are a large corporation, their recommendation impact, and that of their friends and families, can be massive. Running the numbers in past projects I've been involved in, we have seen staff WoM affect upto a million individuals. The final step (or is it the first one?) is therefore be to make sure that the people who work for your company actively promote your business everywhere they go. Not because you tell them, but becaus they are willing, skilled and able to do so.

Matthias Lüfkens of the World Economic Forum (aka. the people organizing the Davos summit) was kind enough to replace Nils Andres of the Brand Science Institute as a speaker in the track of “Getting Your Customers Talking”.

It made for an intriguing session on the opportunities offered by digital and social media, which in the end no company can ignore. For this, Matthias took the audience on a tour of the various initiatives undertaken by the World Economic Forum’s social media team (consisting of himself), imparting valuable nuggets of advice along the way.

The most important ones I retained from the session were:

• Website visitors have become irrelevant

In the past, there was always a fascination by the number of people that “visited” a website, but today, this number has become much less relevant. People surf, mish, mash and compile their world view from a large variety of sources. If you want to be part of their reality, this means you have to place your brand where they are, and not expect them to come to you.

• Store content everywhere

But a mere presence by “having an account of Facebook or Twitter” is not enough. You have to actively participate in these environments and store your content everywhere. As an example Matthias gave his decision to also publish most of the WEF photo library on Flickr, and even make it available under a Creative Commons License.

• Be prepared to lose control

Getting out there means that good, but also bad things can happen to your brand, and the content you share. This is also the case for the W.E.F. where those opposing the Davos Summit, defame the event and its participants online. In the view of Matthias, this is however something to “live with”, and by countering it with lot’s of positive information, you can “drown out” most of the negative comments.

• Create Communities

While you cannot control, you “can” influence. That is why as a final piece of advice, Matthias advised to actively reach out to online relationships and create special communities which received privileged information in return for an open dialogue (in this Davos created a special mini-community of journalists who receive information still under embargo.

For the rest Matthias shared some real gems online, of which my personal favourite was the effort by Queen Rania of Jordania, who actively reaches out to the country through her own blog and website. Also he showed examples of how the W.E.F. gave people on the internet the opportunity to directly ask questions to the speakers at the Davos event.

All in all, this was an inspiring session, which left many of those present with an appetite for more information and action in the areas of digital and social media.