I’ve considered carefully exactly what the purpose of this blog report on yesterday’s WOM Forum event should be. 

The easy option would be to simply relay the proceedings of a very well-attended and organised conference, held in a relaxed setting with mostly competent speakers who know their areas of expertise well.  

But that would not really provide this extension of the forum with any sort of longevity or purpose.

The key questions facing WOM

The area of Word of Mouth, or Word of Mouth Marketing, is still a relatively new practice; or at least the ‘discipline’ or ‘harnessing’ of WOM is.  So there’s still a lot of debate around exactly what WOM is, where it fits, how it should be used, whether is it ethical and, indeed, what the future holds for it. 

 

And whilst the conference provided a good mix of case studies, theories and how to’s, it did not generate (and this is not to say there was not the opportunity) real debate about some of the questions still facing WOM marketing. 

 

So after careful consideration and a quick review of my notes, I’m going to attempt to highlight some of these and hopefully people will contribute and continue the discussions from yesterday. 

 

But firstly, the transparent part.  For the last five years I’ve been running WOM campaigns on behalf of clients. So I do have opinions on all of the issues I raise but, because they are industry issues, I have tried to skew them – though I fear my lack of blog writing skills will reveal my biases.   

 

What do we mean by WOM?

 

I want to start at the very beginning and ask the basic question: what is WOM marketing?  The WOMMA (American - Word of Mouth Marketing Association) definition is ‘Giving people a reason to talk about your product/service and making it easier for that conversation to take place’ , a meaning that WOMUK (WOMMA’s UK cousin) has adopted this from its American friends. 

 

And what do we mean by people?

 

Who are these ‘people’?  Are they specially chosen people or does this involve everyone?  One point of view is that these people are ‘Influencers’ – presumably people with a proven background in influencing.  And if we need to target influencers and not people in general – how do we know which of the 40,000 from the Soft Kiss campaign or the 20,000 from another campaign are influencers?  How do we know these are not a large number of hanger ons that have no influence at all or in fact may be people who in real life you do not want your brand to be associated with.  I’m thinking of chavs adopting Burberry and the demise of FCUK here. 

 

So I think there is a good case for targeting the influentials and, if this is the case, then perhaps the WOMMA definition should be about giving the right people a reason to talk about your brand or product, and not just ‘people’.

 

And who should we target?

 

Do we not need to ensure we target influencers at all? Should we in fact be targeting those who are easily influenced and hit larger numbers?  After all, it’s all very well to say you are reaching influencers, but how do you know they really are influential and how do you recruit them for your brand?  And, who influences the influencers? 

 

We live in an age of celebrity.  There is a tendency to undervalue the power of celebrity among some audiences - especially a cynical one made up of advertising and marketing types.  But celebrities are powerful and I’m certain that if my wife saw David Beckham in a pair of branded pants she would rush out and buy me a pair. In fact, I think she has!

 

If we are looking to target the influencers, then is this not something the PR Industry has been doing for years already and should we as industry focus purely more on the early adopters and easily persuaded? 

 

Evaluating what we do

 

As the WOM industry grows, so we are bound to become more strictly regulated and evaluated.  WOMUK is doing a great job with limited resources to advance WOM as a discipline, and anyone who is not a member should join. [I’m not sure if that will make it past the editor, but if it does – thank you James.] [Pleasure Robin – thanks for a great post! James].

 

Globally there are many companies researching and producing lots of different models for measuring and evaluating WOM.  The net promoter score is seen by some as a good tool for this. Even though it was not designed for this purpose, its simplicity is fantastic for helping people put a value against WOM activity. 

 

However, this is not the only model being used and some people make the point that that there is still no true way of measuring WOM’s value – that value being the worth of a believed and trusted source making a recommendation to you.  On the other hand, some companies believe they are actually able to put a dollar value against this – $600 if my memory serves me correctly. 

 

What is apparent to me is that there is no one way of measuring WOM activity, and that any method of evaluation we use should reflect the objectives of the specific WOM campaign we are trying to evaluate.  But one thing that many tracking tools do have in common though is the use of the web, which poses a question.  If 85% of WOM activity takes place offline, how representative, reliable and valid are online WOM evaluation tools?  

   

Do we intervene in consumers’ conversations?

 

The forum raised conflicting issues about the extent to which brands should control the communication between consumers.  In the blue corner (and both parties have support here) Duncan Brown advocates the need to control conversations that are already taking place already about your brand, product or service.  In the red corner Martin Oetting advocates the need to let consumers talk about a brand in any which way they see fit. 

 

I will leave this debate up to others, but I do see one problem with Martin’s hands-off approach.  We were shown this great video by Claus Moseholm to help promote the surf-and-snow brand, Quicksilver.
 

 

 

Of the many conversations this video generated, a key one focused on the faking of the surf that was generated by the dynamite. My concern here is the impression it gives of the brand if the promotional tool being used is itself attempting to deceive the consumer.  I’m not sure I would trust this brand or its authenticity – and to a brand like Quicksilver, I would have thought authenticity and ‘keeping it real’ would be fundamental brand values.

 

Your thoughts please

 

Do feel free to post your thoughts below and pick me up on any of the points I’ve raised. Next year I promise to raise my hand and ask questions directly to the panel, and not leave it until I’m safely behind my desktop!

In our series of guest posts from speakers at the Word of Mouth Marketing Forum, Influencer50’s Duncan Brown looks at the importance of 'influencers'.

People rarely buy just because they are marketed to. The marketing message is carried, corroborated, enhanced and personalised through influential WOM. WOM, therefore, needs ‘sneezers’ with influence (as Seth Godin would say).

WOM carried by people other than influencers is just noise. People that try to carry WOM inappropriately, because they don't have sufficient influence, end up shouting at their audience. We have a word for folks like those – bores.

In other words, it matters whose mouth the words come from. Blogs are an archetype of this sort of WOM. Most blogs are just background noise. Others try to gain attention by shouting, making controversial, aggressive or offensive remarks just to get noticed. Only a few blogs carry influence in any market, and in some markets there are zero influential blogs.

WOM, by its very nature, is difficult to control. Once the message is out there, there is no stopping it. It can die quickly, pervade the market or go where it shouldn't. Influencer marketing is about changing a scatter-shot approach into a rifle-shot one. You target specific influencers, not generic prospective customers. 

 

Sometime WOM gets it wrong. Often these end up as harmless urban myths, but not always, and occasionally this can have serious consequences.

 

3Com is a case in point. In 2000, suffering from fierce competition with Cisco, 3Com exited its high-end router business, leaving many of its larger corporate customers high and dry. Seven years later, 3Com is a different company. There are new people in charge, the product set is strong and focused, and few within the company remember 2000. Unfortunately, negative WOM still exists.

 

The problem with WOM is that the combination of it being wrong and out of control is explosive. You have a ton of clearing up to do, with the prospect that you'll never quite scrub the whole market clean. Unless you use influencers. Because influencers have the inside track to decision-makers they can carry a corrective message.

 

If you are using WOM as a marketing tactic you must identify the relevant influencers. There are two main reasons for this:

 

1) Influencers optimise the message. Influencers talk to decision-makers – that's what makes them influential. So, again by definition, influencers take messages to decision-makers. You therefore have an optimised route to your target market.

 

2) Influencers amplify the message. A message carried by an influencer is reinforced just by the fact that it's an influencer doing the communicating. If the influencer says so, it must be true. So any WOM that traces its origins back to an influencer carries more weight and impact than one that can't be traced (or is traced to someone with little influence).

 

WOM is a powerful communications mechanism. But it matters whose mouth the words come from. Using influencers to communicate messages means that WOM is carried to the right people and with credibility and authority.

As part of a series of guest posts from speakers and panellists at the Word of Mouth Marketing Forum, Martin Oetting,­ partner of German WOM agency trnd and doctorate candidate, reports on the latest findings from his scientific research about how to stimulate word of mouth.

All word of mouth marketing professionals agree that good word of mouth results from the right type of communication with the right type of customers or consumers. Some claim that these have to be influentials. Others, such as Crispin Manners below (quoting Duncan Watts), have found that more easily influencable people might be a better target.

But no matter whom you target in your communication, one aspect often seems strikingly absent from the debate: how does that dialogue actually work? What do you do with these people once you have identified them for your WOM Marketing efforts Should you just pitch ads at them? Ask them to read your corporate blog? Throw parties for them?

At ESCP-EAP European School of Management, we wanted to find an answer to this question. So we went hunting for the drivers of word of mouth: what makes people want to spread the word and what seems to be the trigger that works in a marketing context?

The more word of mouth research you review, the more often you find the term "involvement". Involvement seems to be key when marketing wants to trigger word of mouth. However, the literature also seems to agree that involvement cannot really be produced. It much more strongly depends on each individual and their personal response to a marketing effort.

But if you look a bit further, into other fields of business studies, you can discover an approach in human resources research that is specifically designed to produce involvement: empowerment in the workplace. Companies have long been interested in getting their employees to be more involved and thus more motivated. That is why researchers have identified those drivers that help create this type of empowerment that gets employees motivated.

So we took a model from human ressources studies and applied it in a marketing context. The findings are encouraging. People involved in a marketing project will produce significantly more and more positive word of mouth than other consumers if:

1. They feel they can have an impact on its outcome;
2. The project is meaningful to them;
3. They feel competent about their contribution; and
4. They have a choice in the way they participate.

We call this form of involvement 'Empowered Involvement' and we believe it may serve as an important tool for making better informed decisions about how to conduct WOM Marketing programmes. Our first working paper is available at http://www.empoweredinvolvement.com/.

But it also highlights a larger idea. Maybe it is rather telling that an approach derived from human resources is finding its way into the marketing field. Maybe it means that the way marketing companies deal with their consumers indeed needs to change, and that there is a genuine benefit in viewing your most important consumers as actual partners whom you want to truly empower within your marketing process. It's basically the old insight again that we should market with consumers, and not at them.

I hope you've all be enjoying the pre-Forum posts from our speakers - we have some more in the pipeline.

Meantime, I'm pleased to let you know that Robin Hilton will be the official blogger at the Forum itself, reporting on the proceedings as the day unfolds.

 Robin is one of the founders and a director with Dubit Ltd, a specialist youth communications group incorporating research, marketing and interactive divisions.  

Having set up and founded Dubit's research division in 2002, which now incudes the largest online youth and schools panels in the UK, Robin was then responsible for creating Dubit's marketing division and especially the creation of its Brand Ambassador scheme.  

This scheme was the forerunner to the WOM campaigns that Dubit now run for a variety of clients including Disney, EA, Wrigley, Coca-Cola, DCFS and Defra. 

In 2007 Robin was one of the founder members of WOMUK.

In our series of guest posts from speakers at the Word of Mouth Marketing Forum, GoViral's Claus Moseholm muses on the measurement challenges facing WOM professionals.

Numbers and opinions regarding word of mouth go back and forth and often point in all directions at once. They do, however, provide insights into the complexity of human advocacy towards brands and products. Evangelists are core to your business, no doubt, but how to plan for them seems to be the million dollar question that always remains.

When considering the effects of WOM, buzz, advocacy and the influence of the new digital age on this everlasting phenomenon so closely linked to human nature, I like to take a step back to the basics. Considering your own life is a natural starting point when numbers and complexity get the upper hand.

And yes, I do get influenced by other people - all the time as a matter of fact. Sometimes by the people closest to me, sometimes from a blog I randomly dropped by and sometimes as the result of a specific interest originating from a commercial, a professional review or just a person I have seen on the street. And likewise, I definitely influence other people around me, all the time.

The point I am trying to make is that WOM eventually arises from somewhere in the myriad of connected activities that is human life and interaction - whether online, over the phone or in our offline conversations. Just consider that a small, predictable system like chess has 119,060,324 possible outcomes… within the first 6 moves!

So should we all just give up and go home then?

Well, as a start not all of these combinations are equally likely to happen. Second, from looking at a game we quite quickly get an idea of what the next steps are likely to be. Like chess, we also intuitively know that momentum often leads to final victory. But as Emmanuel Rosen points out below, even though the strongest correlation exists between money spend and the level of momentum reached, it remains a very simplified and often misleading conclusion. Marketing is after all not as easy as a game of chess, as most of us know the modern consumer can be an unpredictable and cynical opponent to face.

Luckily, the new digital age has brought new and fascinating creative options, highly targeted and measurable distribution methods and endless interactivity and integration opportunities. Last but not least, it has brought us almost instant access to opinions, attitudes and activities of real people - about the game we play.

In other words, there is no excuse for not raising your game of marketing in the years to come - the tools, techniques and knowledge is available all around us. Attending on the 16th is definitely an important step herein; professionals in sport often train together, simply because the results speak for themselves. As a matter of fact, professionals train every day. That is why they eventually became good enough to go by that name.

In our series of guest posts from speakers at the Word of Mouth Marketing Forum, Influencer50’s Duncan Brown muses on how the best WOM spreads.

 

Much of the common perception of WOM is that it is spread evenly. The question that marketers usually ask is: how do we get our ideas or messages to spread to our target market?

 

Emphasis in the answer focuses on the substance of the message. The perceived wisdom is: create a viral message and watch it spread. The majority of activity in WOM, therefore, is in the creation of messages or ‘hooks’ that are intentionally viral in nature.

 

The big problem here is that it is difficult to predict which messages eventually do become viral. Who would have thought that Line Rider would spread like wildfire? Or a yeti clubbing a penguin across a snowy landscape? (If you have to ask, you should be more connected …)

 

There is another aspect to WOM that is regarded universally as a positive attribute – that it's good for messages to spread.

 

Spread like what? Oil spreads on water until the layer of oil is a molecule thick (given enough space). WD40 spreads everywhere, into every nook and cranny, but that includes places you don't want it. Why do you want your message everywhere? This is the traditional marketing mindset. Surely it's better to target your WOM efforts at an appropriate audience.

 

It strikes me that today's marketers want to use WOM in the next 50 years like traditional marketers used advertising in the previous 50. WOM, they think, hits the mass market and is the ideal replacement medium to combat the diminishing impact of TV and print ads. Those that think this way have missed the point of WOM.

 

Consider spam e-mail ­– you receive something irrelevant from someone you don't know. Whoosh – it’s deleted without you even reading it. We even use automated tools to filter the spam out before we see it.

 

Much of the generated WOM is the same as spam. It goes from the wrong people to the wrong people. Most marketers don't mind this, because WOM is free at the point of distribution, just like spam and advertising. So just keep sending it out and some of it will stick.

 

What most marketers actually need is a message that spreads like crunchy peanut butter – it spreads, just, but it stays within a defined boundary (the slice of bread). You don't want it running down your arm.

 

Importantly, there are small areas with more impact (the crunchy bits) that influence the surrounding larger smooth parts. It's the crunchy bits that give the whole experience texture and flavour. (Smooth peanut butter is bland, and suitable only for the youngest of kids.)

In our series of guest posts from speakers at the Word of Mouth Marketing Forum, Alex Burmester, European Internet Analyst at Nielsen Online, looks at the importance of ‘influentials’ to successful marketing campaigns.

 

‘Social’ content, as a rival to ‘professional’ content, has two key implications for media and advertisers. Not only does it provide competition for the eyes and ears of consumers but it also provides an alternative and unadulterated, point of view.

 

It’s not just how much is being said, but what is actually being said – and the degree to which socially created content is starting to overshadow the professional version is probably bigger than most think. The last year has seen the twenty most popular social media sites triple their share of web pages viewed in the UK.

 

According to BlogPulse, there are now almost 69 million English-language blogs globally. The last 24 hours have seen 93,000 new blogs and almost 665,000 new blog posts. That’s an awful lot of opinion the professionals aren’t in control of – coming from a lot of different people.

 

A recent Nielsen survey, on the attitudes of online consumers around the world towards advertising, showed the most trusted form of advertising was ‘recommendations from other consumers’ – being cited by 78% of respondents. Furthermore, the third most trusted form of advertising (behind adverts in newspapers at 63%) was ‘consumer opinions posted online’ - being trusted by 61%.

 

The latter, in effect, means that six in every ten of your potential consumers will trust the recommendation of someone online they don’t know when it comes to deciding which of your products or services to buy. They’re more likely to trust these than your brand website, ads you place in magazines, on TV or radio or before movies, more than emails or texts they receive from you, sponsorships you engage in, search engine ads or banner ads that you place. Brand Association Maps (BAM) which plot language, attributes and issues around a topic show that, for ‘advertising’, attributes like “false”, “deceptive” and “misleading” are highly associated.

 

What people are saying about you can have more effect than all of your marketing activities, so it’s vital to understand what is being said and the sentiment behind it – the ‘buzz’. Our studies in the US have shown that monitoring ‘buzz’ can be like a digital version of a crystal ball when it comes to sales. For example, a well-known pet food manufacturer in the US was consistently cited in the same percentage of blogs until early March this year when suddenly its share of buzz increased twenty-fold in just two-weeks due to a contaminant scare.

 

This increase in negative buzz preceded a drop in sales by one week and the buzz spike coincided with a 50% drop in sales. So whilst it’s difficult to control what people are saying about you, by monitoring the buzz it can give you a fighting chance, a window, in which to develop appropriate counter-strategies. Word of mouth continues to grow unabated but so does your chance to improve from it.

In our series of guest posts from speakers at the Word of Mouth Marketing Forum, Crispin Manners, Director of Service Innovation at Kaizo, looks at the importance of ‘influentials’ to successful marketing campaigns.

Many marketers think that the primary focus of an advocacy campaign should be the ‘influentials’– i.e. the 10% of people who are said to influence the behaviour of the other 90%.

 

The logic is sound; after all, there are fewer to track down, and they have been proven through research to influence others.

 

However, if an advocacy programme is going to make a real difference (i.e. on a scale where it impacts both the top and bottom line), then maybe Duncan Watts (writing in the Harvard Business Review) is right when he says that ‘trends in public opinion are driven not by a few influentials influencing everyone else but by many easily influenced people influencing one another’.

 

In my opinion you need both to come together to be certain of triggering the right reaction. I agree with Ollie Joyce when he says advocacy is different to word of mouth, because it is all about recommendations that lead to purchase (or another desired action).

 

But if this is to happen, not only must the recommendee trust the recommender, but he or she must also be interested in the category concerned. Let’s face it, if you hate gadgets it doesn’t matter how much people rave about the iPhone, you just won’t rush out and buy one.

 

Trust is essential and people are very selective about who they let into their circle of trust. You just have to look at the rise in the influence of user-generated content to see that people would rather trust people they don’t know who seem to have the same values as them than a traditional influencer that may have an axe to grind.

 

Research proves this, but if you have your doubts ask yourself if your decisions have ever been swayed by a user review on the likes of Tripadvisor or Amazon. 

 

People trust these recommendations exactly because they believe the recommender doesn’t have an axe to grind. In my experience incentivised recommendations are completely counter-productive.

 

All my work with Net Promoter shows that incentivised recommendations pull through customers (thus achieving the short-term goal), but these customers become detractors – thus causing long term damage.

 

The reason for this is simple: to be certain of motivating action, the recommender has set expectations where they can’t be met or exceeded.

 

And the reverse is true: recommendees become recommenders because honest recommendations are set where they can be exceeded because friends (or people without an axe to grind) want their relationship or reputation to be intact after the recommendation is acted upon.

 

So a good advocate is someone who has had a genuine experience of the product or service and whose opinion is trusted by at least one other person.

 

To make a difference on large scale you need to bring these advocates together (the influentials and the easily influenced) in one place. And you need to trigger their advocacy through active involvement.

This is the subject of my case study at the WOM Forum and of my work with brands who recognise that the strength of their recommendation balance sheet is critical to the strength of the financial balance sheet.

As part of a series of guest posts from speakers and panellists at the Word of Mouth Marketing Forum, Emanuel Rosen – author of the best-selling book The Anatomy of Buzz – looks at the findings of some recent research into word of mouth.

With the increased interest in word of mouth, there’s an avalanche of statistics we’re all trying to understand. But what do these numbers actually mean? Here are some to think about.

In 1997, the expression ‘word of mouth’ appeared in Advertising Age four times. Ten years later, in 2007, it appeared in more than 60 articles in the weekly advertising magazine.

Does this mean that word of mouth is more important now, or that it’s finally getting the attention it has always deserved? Maybe it just means that word of mouth is getting some good PR?

We often see lists of industries and the level of word of mouth they get. In one study by Decision Analyst, 42.4% of respondents reported recommending a restaurant in the past 30 days.

At the bottom of the list, you could see that only 2.6% reported the same about day care. Does this mean that if you run a day care center, word of mouth doesn’t matter to your business?

Decision Analyst’s point is that restaurant recommendations happen more often than day care recommendations.

In other words, many more people have to decide on which restaurant to go to every month, rather than which day care is best for little Joe.

These lists can be interesting, but as a marketer, the relevant question is: what role does word of mouth play within your category?

The Keller Fay Group reports that 73% of marketing-related conversations take place in person, and only 10% happen online. Does this mean that technology is not important to word of mouth?

Technology is important, and in several ways.

The internet increased the visibility of word of mouth, and it allows marketers to read what customers tell each other.

Furthermore, technology has an accelerating effect that hasn’t been fully explored. Don’t limit yourself to offline or online activities. Work on both fronts.

By the way, one of those Advertising Age articles in 2007 suggested that if you want lots of buzz for your next product launch, your best bet may be a big advertising campaign.

A study by Nielsen BuzzMetrics (entitled The Origin and Impact of CPG New Product Buzz: Emerging Trends and Implications) found that, among the products studied, the advertising budget had the strongest relationship with the levels of buzz (the analysis referred mainly to blog buzz).

Does this mean that if you pour enough money into your next ad campaign you’ll get online buzz? As the Nielsen report points out, ‘the formula for generating meaningful buzz is not as simple as spending money.’

There are many brands that spend a lot of money on advertising and achieve little or no buzz. Factors such as distribution, purchase frequency, and product distinctiveness were all important in trying to predict buzz.

The last number I want to discuss is 467. This is the number of words in this blog so far, and they say that a blog shouldn’t go over 500 words or so. I guess this means that I have to go.

See you in London on January 16th!

In the first of a series of guest posts from speakers and panellists at the Word of Mouth Marketing Forum, Rise Communications founding partner Ollie Joyce says we should sharpen up our definitions.

When we discuss key definitions, shouldn't the real debate be about word of mouth vs. advocacy rather than face to face vs. e-mail, txt or website? Advocacy is a direct recomendation to purchase (or not) and has a proven financial value. Word of mouth is a much broader area which has not establsihed this correlation to such an extent.

Think about it ... I'm only slightly ashamed to admit that I love this Boots Christmas campaign for the army of female party goers.

I have raved about it to male colleagues and relatives and would have forwarded it to them had I received it digitally.

This is word of mouth, although the financial value to Boots is limited because I am recommending an ad, not a specific purchase, action or behavioural change. In addition, my friends and family think I'm a bit wierd and boring!

On the other hand, I have recently been introduced to Glenrothes whisky. I know the product story and understand the brand - I know and I use specific resaons to recommend usage. This is advocacy and has a direct financial value.

If brands really want to drive advocacy rather than just word of mouth, they need to understand the root causes of recommendation in each specific sector. They need to understand advocacy advantages vs. competitors, what consumers talk about, how they talk about it and who's trusted. They can then plan effectively to increase advocacy and the resultant financial advantages.

Word of mouth is good, but advocacy is much, much better.

Subscribers to WARC.com will probably know about the ever-increasing collection of papers and cases we have on WOM. But the news may not necessarily have gone further a field.

 

So for those less familiar with what we offer, what follows is a totally-free-to-view (until 25 January 2008)selection of content highlights from our wider collection.

 

In the spirit of WOM, we assume that you’ll be good enough to spread the word if you find something you like.

 

I know I’m probably preaching to the converted, but MPG’s Denise Turner makes a great case for WOM’s influence on brand preference, product choice and customer behaviour in Eight Principles to Harness the Power of Advocacy – which includes some pithy advice for media planners.

 

Next up is piece from the WOM Forum's very own co-chair and opening speaker, Paul Marsden. That's because his paper from the 2006 Market Research Society Conference - Measuring the Success of Word of Mouth- has been high in our most-read lists for ages now. And rightly so. It provides data showing that customer word of mouth recommendation rates predict sales growth across a range of disparate sectors, including retail banking, cars, mobile telecoms and supermarkets.

 

More recent is A New Approach for Measuring "Buzz", first aired at ESOMAR's WM3 event in Dublin, June 2007. Shifting focus from mouth to mouse, a team from InSites Consulting in Belgium introduces a new model and framework for better understanding online WOM and measuring the effectiveness of viral campaigns.

 

So far, so good. But less comfortable reading for WOM evangelists comes in the form of an Admap investigation into the Net Promoter Score. Based on an interview with Ipsos Loyalty, it reports on research that casts doubt on the hitherto alluringly simple metric that’s been taking the corporate world by storm.

 

Last but not least comes an instalment from Andrew Green’s WARC-exclusive Media FAQs series – How Can I Measure Word of Mouth?  It will be a tad simplistic for the WOM veterans amongst you, but it contains onward links to more than a dozen other key papers on the site.

 

These, unfortunately, remain the preserve of site subscribers only.

Word-of-mouth has apparently just broken through the all-important $1 billion barrier - and that's just in the United States.

 

The news comes from the media consultancy and research firm PQ Media, whose Word-of-Mouth Marketing Forecast 2006-2011 report estimates WOM to break the $1bn barrier this year and rise to as much as $3.7bn in 2011. The projection represents annual spend increases of over 30% for the next four years.

 

It sounds a lot, but bear in mind PQ Media’s 2005-06 growth figure – to $981m – is an even larger increase of 35.9%. This clearly makes WOM the fastest growing element of the US’s $254bn marketing services sector (which itself is growing at a more modest overall rate of 6%).

 

For the pedants among you, the report defines WOM marketing as “an alternative marketing strategy supported by research and technology that encourages consumers to dialogue about products and services.”

 

I doubt this definition does much to satisfy Colin Appleby who, commenting on the opening post on this blog, made the case for WOM firmly being defined as – or, at least, most desirable as - face-to-face rather than mouse-to-mouse communication.

 

Either way, there’s plenty to play for. PQ Media cites research from the specialist WOM agency Keller Fay Group that says there are an estimated 3.5 billion brand-related conversations in America every day (although I’d like to meet the person who’s job it was to count them).

 

Within that, Keller Fay states that "nearly" 80% of people trust recommendations from friends, family and “influentials” more than all other marketing and advertising. I'm actually amazed that this figure isn't higher. Does every fifth person in the US really put as much or more credence in marketing advocacy as they do their personal networks?

It seemed a bit of a no-brainer when the WARC conference team approached me about setting up a discussion blog ahead of our Word of Mouth Marketing Forum in January.

After all, WOM might be as old as the hills, but it's the explosion of social media like blogs that's formalised its status of late in the official marketing mix.

So, over the coming weeks - up to and through the Forum itself - we're going to be featuring lots of different things about WOM.

That's going to include the latest news about the event, updates on confirmed speakers, new and recommended WOM reading on WARC.com (including some free stuff for downloading), guest posts from speakers and a lot lot more.

Be sure to check back regularly.

James Aitchison
Editor, WARC.com

Comments on this post:

Face-to-face WOM
Comment from: Colin Appleby,
Posted at: 06 November 2007

Interested to read that formalisation of WOM in the mix comes from the explosion of social media. I wouldn't disagree, but... It's my understanding that, across sectors, face-to-face communication is still the most trusted medium when advocacy is going on. Given the - probably inevitable - scandals of brands trying to manipulate networking sites, blogs etc., I don't expect digital to overtake 'real' conversation as a trusted medium any time soon.





Re: Face-to-face WOM
Comment from: James Aitchison, WARC
Posted at: 06 November 2007

Colin, you make a good point. But whilst face-to-face is the Holy Grail, social media can deliver WOM at a speed and scale that's hitherto not been possible - although a quality drop can sometimes be the trade-off, as you say.



Re: Face-face WOM
Comment from: Colin Appleby,
Posted at: 07 November 2007

The pedant in me wants to add – albeit with tongue firmly in cheek – that word-of-mouth, by definition, involves somebody speaking, and that any written communication doesn't qualify as WOM ... Anybody want to suggest, or create, a more accurate buzzword?