A few months ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Jackie Huba at our Dell|SXSW social media event. Her expertise on social word of mouth marketing (SWOM) is invaluable and can be applied to numerous industries and organizations. Below we talk about word of mouth and how small and medium businesses can take advantage.

Amie- How can SMBs identify citizen marketers?

Jackie- Just to have a basic understanding of what people thought or said about you used to cost tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars in research. Many of those research costs have been democratized to free or nearly free by tools like Google Alerts, which alerts you via email anytime your company or brands are mentioned online. It, or a free service like Yahoo Pipes, now make it so easy to identify a brand's citizen marketers.

When they appear, pay them special attention. Post a thank-you reply or send them an email thanking them for the kind praise. Initiate a dialogue.

Amie- In an era of participatory customer engagement, how can SMBs join the social community?

Jackie- There are so many entry points now that it can be bewildering or intimidating knowing where to start. The most common entry points are tens of millions of blogs, millions of discussion forums, company and product review sites like Yelp and CitySearch, YouTube videos, and Twitter. But the most important issue for SMBs is a willingness to really listen to customers and take their feedback to heart. If the culture of a business isn't genuinely open to change based on customer feedback and interaction, social media may not be right for them. They don't even have to ask their doctor about that.

Amie- Can you give us an example of an SMB that successfully utilizes WOM? In your opinion, why have they been successful?

Jackie-Washington, D.C. t-shirt maker CustomInk.com showcases its real-time word of mouth prominently on its website. The company's composite customer satisfaction score and real-time, unedited comments, appear on CustomInk's front page. That's probably scary to most companies, but it's brilliant. It compels CustomInk to stay on its toes every day, every hour. Plus, all customer feedback entries are stored in a publicly searchable database.

Customer history is a timeline to authencity. All of this freely available customer feedback gives new customers a source of ongoing commentary to understand the company and its products. Knowing what others say lowers decision-making barriers for prospects. Keeping existing customers is the hard work of operations and marketing.

More About Jackie-

Jackie Huba is the co-author of two books on word of mouth, "Citizen Marketers" and "Creating Customer Evangelists." She writes at the award-winning "Church of the Customer" blog. She is also the co-founder of the Society of Word of Mouth.