About this episode

In this episode, Sarah Neely discusses how human conversation can be engineered to enhance word of mouth and its implications for AI.

Can you build word of mouth on purpose? Few people are better equipped to answer it than Sarah Neely. She's spent two decades engineering the conversations most brands just hope will happen by accident, and she's now the founder of SignalSwell, built to make human word of mouth "audible" to AI. She also leads client strategy at Fizz, one of the few agencies built entirely around getting people to talk. Her premise runs against everything a virality-obsessed business wants to believe: advocates are a personality type you can plan for, and the right story dropped in the right place does the rest. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle and Sarah dig into what "story" actually means at the level of a single human conversation, the shorthand one person uses to describe you to someone else. They get into why a cactus at a wedding travels further than a logo, how Red Bull carries the same story from an F1 helmet to a truck stop, and the SHARE framework Sarah uses to build experiences worth repeating. Then the conversation turns to AI. If the machines increasingly decide which conversations get surfaced, communicators have to make human word of mouth visible to…

People in this episode

Host: Daniel Nestle

Guest: Sarah Neely

Topics covered

• word of mouth
• human conversation
• AI
• storytelling
• branding
• communication strategy

Keywords

• word of mouth
• human conversation
• AI
• storytelling
• branding
• SHARE framework
• communication

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: SignalSwell, Fizz

Products: Red Bull

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