Great case study of a company that 'gets it' - Amazon

Their approach is simple

1) Create a product that earns passionate recommendation

2) Facilitate

    a. online word of mouth eg product reviews, upload your own images to the Amazon site etc

    b. off line word of mouth 'See a Kindle In Your City' program where existing owners VOLUNTEER to meet prospective Kindle buyers to show them their Kindle and share the experience of it.

Here is the See a Kindle in your City forum  where prospects post their requests to meet and owners reply

Here is an abridged version of the piece from Wired 

Mike Pfeffer, a 26-year-old IT professional, was thinking about buying a Kindle, Amazon's pricey new digital book reader, but he wanted to look at the screen and touch the buttons before shelling out $359 for it.

So he went to the Amazon site and, through the See a Kindle in Your City message board, found a current Kindle owner in Manhattan who was willing to meet up. The woman worked in the building across the street from him and enthusiastically showed him everything from how the screen looked to how to turn pages on the device.

"I told her she should go work for Amazon," says Pfeffer, who wound up buying a Kindle the very next day.

To help sell its high-priced digital reading device, Amazon is relying more than ever on its tried-and-true sales strategies of word of mouth and customer reviews, and it appears to be working, although the total market for the device is questionable.

Amazon says its approach to selling the Kindle?no outside advertising and just relying on the Kindle community is deliberate. The Kindle currently has over 4,200 customer reviews on the Amazon website, more than for any other top-selling item in Amazon's electronics category, and the vast majority are positive.

"Customer reviews of Kindle have been terrific?that tends to help sell the product," says Ian Freed, the Amazon executive in charge of the Kindle. More than three quarters of the reviewers give the Kindle at least four stars out of five, with many using words like fabulous, must-have, and changed my life.
The See a Kindle in Your City program, which was started in May, is just another extension of that idea. Freed and members of his group saw that people were especially curious when they saw one in public and decided to capitalize on the phenomenon.

"We tapped right into that, allowing customers to create a space where potential customers could physically meet, like at a coffee shop or a restaurant, and show each other Kindles," says Freed. Since the Kindle is an expensive new technology, selling the device at retail outlets where customers could see and touch it would seem to make sense, but Freed says that would diminish the community-based marketing that's propelling sales. But there may be another reason for See a Kindle in Your City – it could be that stores just don't want to carry the device.

Though the idea of Kindle get-togethers may sound suspiciously like Tupperware parties, Gartenberg thinks Amazon's strategy is different."There's a difference between selling and evangelizing," he explains. "Amazon is not asking its customers to sell, it's asking its fans to sell. And they're not making any commission on those sales."