Word of Mouth, is 93% offline! Basically, word of mouth (WOM) is one of the most effective, credible methods to spread a message about your brand. Word of mouth is very strong and especially since it comes from a influential figure, like Oprah her self. Whatever Oprah says, it must be true right? Oprah had a show-out show in Vancouver this following Friday and Vancouver Sun reported that Oprah praised Vancouver for their cleanliness.

“I’m really, really impressed, she said. “You guys are already living your best life”.

Even though, not publicly stated but Vancouver just received very strong , and free advertising from Oprah.

““It’s nice when somebody as popular, famous and influential as Oprah says that because it affirms what we already know and have a reputation for,” he said”

It does seem that Vancouver receives many appraisals for being one or top cleanest cities of North America but with Oprah’s stamp of approval, Vancouver may as well be one of the cleanest cities! Oprah ranked 16 out of 50 media’s most influential women. There’s something called the “Oprah Effect”with everything that Oprah touches, turns to gold. This might be a bit exaggerating but companies and publishers have been fighting to have Oprah take a glimpse of their product. Even a casual mention of a product, exposed to 44 million weekly viewers is a boom for the company that makes or sells the products . Several companies from the 2009 Inc. 500|5000 have been so lucky as to score a spot on The Oprah Winfrey Show over the past three years, perhaps accounting for a great deal of their growth during that period.(Hornuckle, 2009)

Amazon Kindle released in 2007 is a e-book tablet that allows you to download, shop, browse and read  ebooks, newspapers, magazines, etc. Amazon Kindle was very popular when it first released, selling out in mere hours but that slowly died down when other competitors, Hp released their tablet in late 2008. In January 2009, Oprah featured the Amazon Kindle on her show, creating a lot of attention. The graph below shows the impact of Oprah’s word of mouth, attracting half  amillion visitors and 2.5x as many online consumers as the week before.

photo credits: http://blog.compete.com/2009/01/07/amazon-kindle-oprah/