I recently discovered a brilliant video by Seesmic founder Loic Lemeur, who shares some insightful tips on how to use a community to successfully launch a product, as well the importance of WOM.

The video is in French, but I’ve tried to highlight some of the key learnings here.

To kick things off, Loic mentions that the Web can be segmented into 3 distinctive periods:
- 1993-2000 were the years of the static web, i.e. the web was a reproduction of traditional offline media
- 2000-2008 were the years of the social web (web 2.0), with the rise of blogs, content sharing (Flickr, YouTube) and social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo etc)
- 2009 is fast shaping up to be the year of the real-time web. Micro-blogging service Twitter, and Facebook staus updates are changing the face of the social web with Internet users wanting to be permanently connected with their community.

WOM is fast becoming more important than marketing, advertising or PR. Consumers now want to know what their friends think about a certain product, which ultimately influences the decision-making process.

- According to Seth Godin, only 1000 of your friends can make a product take off; if 1000 consumers talk to another 1000 consumers (1000×1000=1M), then your product will be global. Seth Godin discusses in the below video the theory of Tribes.

- Launching your community: define your idea and make sure the space you’re entering is still niche (for e.g. Seesmic was the first video blogging service out there). You must try to be the best within your space and find a dedicated community that will support your product. Add value and help your community by sharing your ideas whether it’s blogging, twittering etc.

- Launch your Internet product as soon as you can: it doesn’t matter if your product not finished as your community will help you improve your product (for e.g. Twitter Search is great for finding information about what your users think).

- Let your community do the talking : negative comments are better than no comments at all as it shows consumers are interested and want to discuss the product – reponding to comments and desmonstrating that you are listening can turn negative WOM into positive WOM

New hot Twitter tool, Tweetboard is a perfect example of a product launching with he help of their community. Tweetboard have created a Digg style feedback forum where users can share how they’d like the product to evolve. Tweetboard are giving back to their community by letting them know using a simple colour-coding system which ideas and suggestions they are planning on implementing.

My final piece of advice for PRs/Community Managers, is get to know your community.

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By personnalising their DM (as opposed to an awful automated ‘thanks for the follow’), the blogpaper immediatly caught my attention, and I am generating positive WOM as a result. :)