Word of Mouth Partners With Newspapers

Posted on October 23, 2000

Word of Mouth, a network of local consumer opinion websites, has entered into agreements with the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune and Denver Post to become Word of Mouth's first distribution partners. By creating co-branded Word of Mouth websites, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune and Denver Post will offer consumers a forum for exchanging opinions about local merchants and services. The newspapers also hope to add new revenue streams by offering marketing tools created by Word of Mouth that enable local businesses to better communicate with current customers and reach out to new customers.

The Star Tribune and Denver Post sites will offer multiple ways for visitors to use Word of Mouth to find and evaluate their local service providers. Users also will be able to post a question on the site and let the community deliver the answer. Email alerts will also be available to keep visitors up to date with the latest reviews on subjects that they choose, such as hair salons and plumbers. The co-branded content also will be integrated into subject-related sections of the online newspapers. For example, clothing store reviews could be highlighted on the shopping section of the newspaper's website. Or visitors could offer their own opinions about a restaurant reviewed by the paper's food critic.

``The Internet has offered people a public forum to voice their opinions -- about anything and everything,'' said Rick Levine, Word of Mouth's president and co-founder. ``Our philosophy is to allow businesses to join the conversations that their customers are already having about the services and merchants they trust. Our new partnerships with the Denver Post and Star Tribune not only make their online sites more useful and interactive, they also will help them earn more money.''

``All businesses say they want to be customer focused. But it isn't all that easy. The Word of Mouth service will open up a new and efficient channel for local businesses to listen to their customers and interact with them,'' said Nick Rogosienski, vice-president interactive media, Star Tribune.

``The Denver Post's partnership with Word of Mouth will bring added value to the online readers' experience, as well as to Denver-area businesses,'' added Eric Grilly, vice-president interactive media at The Denver Post. ``We are thrilled to bring this Internet resource to our community. It is a real enhancement in the development of the Denver Post's online brand.''

Word of Mouth, an online network of local consumer opinion websites, was co-founded by Rick Levine, Paul English and David Weinberger. Levine and Weinberger are two of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a book about the new economy, which asserts that the Internet has made it easier than ever for businesses to talk to their customers. Word of Mouth is establishing partnerships with local media businesses to create co-branded local sites. English, a Web pioneer and VP of Technology for Intuit, is a director of the Boulder, CO-based company.