Some PR purists seem to sniff derisively at all the attention paid to word-of-mouth and word-of-mouth marketing. They argue, and rightly so, that new innovations have always had early adopters, and the public has long looked to communities of interest to help them make important decisions.
The complaints revolve around the fact that other related but sometimes competing disciplines – advertising, direct marketing, web marketing, research, and even management consulting – are “stealing” the word-of-mouth marketing concept and calling it their own.
Get over. The time you spend complaining is time you should be spending polishing your word-of-mouth marketing skill set.
Earlier this year, we hosted a meeting with six of our colleagues from the Worldcom Public Relations Group to compare notes on each agency’s word-of-mouth marketing programs. In reviewing each company’s formal and informal word-of-mouth marketing programs, we found a common thread that runs through all of our effective word-of-mouth marketing efforts.
Here are some of the most frequent topics:
You can’t do it without research
Possibly the biggest difference between today’s word-of-mouth and social media marketing programs and those of the past is the ability to base the program on research that improves the likelihood of success.
Bain Consulting Group has pioneered a “Net Promoter Score” that assigns a score to a company’s recommendation based on a single question: “How likely would you be to recommend this company’s product or service to someone else?” “
Kaizo has created a research methodology that identifies the reasons why a person would make that recommendation. This same research methodology could be used to understand why employees recommend employers or why investment analysts recommend stocks.
Reaching the hearts and minds of an organization’s biggest supporters and worst detractors is critical to building your cadre of word-of-mouth marketing advocates. Without research, you’ll be guessing and probably wrong; more importantly, you’ll miss out on an essential metric to show if your efforts are paying off.
Social networks: an integrated outlet for word of mouth
Don’t get caught up in the fact that WOM stands for Word-of-Mouth. It could also represent the word of the mouse. If you’re a homeowner or do-it-yourselfer, you probably have a can of WD-40 on a shelf somewhere in your basement or garage. The product has been around for over 50 years, and people have been recommending it to friends, neighbors and colleagues for just as long to solve problems ranging from a squeaking door hinge to removing tar and dead bugs from bumpers and windshields.
By creating an online WD-40 Social Media Fan Club, the company with the help of Nuffer Smith Tucker Public Relations, was able to provide those passionate fans with a more efficient way to share their experiences through Social Media. The power of that fan club became apparent when the company surveyed its members to identify the top uses for the product. The company originally hoped to generate a list of 200 uses. It garnered over 360,000 submissions leading to a final list of 2,000 with more arriving every day.
Word of mouth: it’s more than marketing
As advertising agencies and direct marketers have jumped on the word-of-mouth bandwagon, most of the focus has been on using the technique to attract consumers. However, Worldcom Group members agreed that companies just beginning to formalize their word-of-mouth efforts can be equally well served by targeting more specific audiences or audiences.
B2B marketing, for example, clearly has significant opportunities to become more disciplined in word of mouth marketing. Several studies have shown that the higher the risk associated with the purchase decision, the more likely the customer is to rely on friends, colleagues, and experts for advice rather than impersonal channels such as traditional advertising and direct marketing (for example, social networks).
It stands to reason, then, that B2B marketing products and services, which are generally “make or break” propositions, are more likely to be adopted through word of mouth than many consumer products, where the consequence of a poor decision it is hardly obvious. long-term.
The nonprofit sphere
And don’t forget word of mouth in the nonprofit world. As part of a broad-based social media program, Padilla Speer Beardsley created a MySpace (social media) page for the National Bone Marrow Donor Program (NMDP). A presence on MySpace provides an opportunity for patients, families, donors, and others to share their stories and invite others to become friends with the NMDP.
The site http://www.myspace.com/marrowdonation hasn’t officially launched yet, but it’s steadily building a friend base (135 at the time of this writing) just through, what else, word of mouth!
For those of you who practice public relations and believe that word of mouth is nothing new and that there is little to learn from today’s successful campaigns, it’s time to think again. We live in the world of Web 2.0.
Access to faster and less expensive research, the widespread adoption of social media, social networking tools, and the rise of influential consumers show that it is time to usher in Public Relations 2.0. A better understanding of the role of personal recommendations in the success of a product or service should force all professionals to reexamine their attitudes toward what is arguably the world’s oldest public relations technique: word of mouth.