One of the best lessons I learned during my bartending days (besides a martini-shaking technique that makes them cold enough to skate on) came courtesy of an industry-savvy pub owner. “If someone has a good time here,” he told me, “they’ll tell a friend. If someone has a bad time here, they’ll tell ten friends.”

Such is the driving mentality behind word-of-mouth marketing. If people have a positive experience, they’re bound to share it. If they have a negative experience, they absolutely will. Human nature.

The funny thing is that you, as an organization, have no control over the feedback. You can only control the product or service you provide. And if you try too hard to sell yourself, you’ll get picked apart if you don’t deliver. Examples of this pepper the web. In their earliest incarnations, company websites were little more than over-amped billboards or Yellow Page listings. People threw up all kinds of affirmations – “We’re the best, just ask us!” – and maybe that flew for a minute, just because we were mesmerized by the fact that you were online.

Jump ahead a decade. Now, visitors have become users. They’re looking for a fulfilling experience as much as for information, and they’re the ones who are going to decide if it’s good or not. Oh, and once they’ve made their decision, they have a near-infinite means of sharing their p.o.v. That’s the muscle behind web-driven word-of-mouth marketing.

This is scaring the hell out of many traditionally minded organizations, and their messaging is suffering as a result. They’re afraid to say anything significant online. You can almost hear the company leaders deciding: “Well, if we reveal who we really are, we’re making ourselves too vulnerable to that devastating negative word-of-mouth. We might as well just keep quiet.”

Bad play, because here’s the news – people are going to find out whether you want them to or not. They’re experiencing your products and services – and those of your competitors – and they’re talking about it in blogs, forums, newsgroups and the like. Play your cards too close to the vest, and you’re just making it difficult for your audience to get the info it now thinks it’s entitled to.

It’s “not damned if you do/damned if you don’t.” More like “maybe damned if you do/definitely damned if you don’t.”

So, figure out what messages you want to push, back them up with credible performance, and your intended audience is bound to appreciate and echo it. Get clandestine and quiet, however, and you can bet that they’ll still find a way to dig out the truth. What’s more, they’ll resent you for making it so much trouble. Then they’ll really start talking trash – and there’s no martini I can make that will help with that headache.