WOM

Coke and a Smile

My Coke RewardsMy New Year’s resolution is to kick my addiction to Diet Coke and, depending on how that goes, caffeine in general. The Coca-Cola Company has chosen to make this decision easier for me by ending their My Coke Rewards program at the end of this week. I currently have more than 3,000 My Coke Rewards points, which sadly amounts to more than 1,000 bottles of varying sizes of Diet Coke. Yeah, that’s far too much bubbly brown water to pour into my system and not expect something bad to happen.  Nothing against the product but common sense tells me that an amount like that can probably make lab rats get strange diseases.

Sadly, like most loyalty programs, your so called “reward” for being the mass consumer of a specific brand isn’t really the kind of thing that you would generally get out of bed for.  Of course, if you drink Diet Coke anyway, it becomes somewhat of a game to you and then, if you’re like me, you become a little obsessed and then wake up one morning to discover that you’ve gone too far to quit now.

So – long story short – I took my 3,000+ to the My Coke Rewards Web site and found that there really wasn’t anything I wanted.  I got a couple Xbox games that looked vaguely interesting but I really had no interest in cashing in points for Coke merchandise or gift cards for stores I wouldn’t normally shop at.

Then I noticed that one of the options was to donate your points to Toys for Tots, which, oddly enough, is a program run by the Marines.  Sure, there may be more important things in the world than a poor kid getting a plastic truck but I remember when getting that plastic truck was the coolest day of the year and if my Diet Coke addiction can buy some plastic trucks than I’m happy to do it.

Apparently I wasn’t alone.  The goal of the promotion was to reach 3 million points and donate 100,000 toys.  Well, as of today, almost 6.5 million points have been donated while several decent prizes remain in the store for redemption.  It’s rather nice to think that, if given the choice between charity and branded merchandise, many thousands of people would rather redeem their points to give a toy to a kid.

That’s my marketing warm fuzzy for the day.

The Influencers are Everywhere

Forrester - WOMAccording to a new Forrester report, roughly 6 of 10 consumers surveyed say that they share product advice with family and friends. This runs contrary to other research by Burson-Marsteller that has identified only 15% of consumers to be “e-fluentials.” With more and more data pointing to the WOM being the key driver of purchasing decisions, the studies are probably the first of many aimed at finding out who really is the target for WOM marketing.

While I find the Forrester numbers to be interesting, I think Burson’s methodology for identifying influencers is much more useful to marketers than simply finding out how many people are making recommendations. According to the AdWeek article:

(Burson) found several distinct traits that mark consumers as e-fluentials: they speak to 50 percent more people per day and are more likely to share opinions and experiences with others.

The trick to really identifying influencers isn’t just as simple as seeing who’s talking – not all of the consumer generated noise online is influential – as much as it is a matter of seeing how they’re talking and who they’re talking to.

The New Influencers: Engaging Trolls

TrollBy now most marketers have woken up to the importance of bloggers as key influencers and, with varying degrees of success, figured out how to incorporate them into how they operate. It took a while, and several appearances on the 24-hour news networks, before marketers were ready to admit that not all bloggers live in their parents basement and spend half their day playing Dungeons and Dragons but I feel like the battle has been largely won. It isn’t over by a long shot but you can say that they first layer of social media has definitely been peeled back a little.

However, once you pull back one layer, it’s only a matter of time before you want to go one layer deeper, which brings us to the seedy underbelly that is the blog comment area.

The rabid hoards that dwell in the comment areas of major blogs, seemingly only to start trouble and argue with anyone who will listen to them, are referred to as “trolls.” Due to the anonymity of commenting on the Internet, trolls are generally pretty comfortable posting personal attacks or just about any defamatory statement about anyone or anything. College Humor hit the nail on the head with this portrayal of what life would be like if people in the boardroom spoke like Internet trolls (probably not safe for work):

Pretty funny, right?

The question is “are these people influential?” I think they are.

Obviously not all Internet commenters are trolls but almost every high volume blog has some element of troll-like behavior that you will undoubtedly encounter while trying to engage with commenters transparently. One rogue troll may not, by themselves, have an influence but it is a fact that people who read blogs are more likely to pay attention to a piece of content if there are a lot of comments.

As opposed to the standard blogger relations guidelines that nearly every PR blogger posts at one time or another, dealing with trolls seems to be a bit of a gray area. I think most PR professionals would recommend to steer clear of online conversations that are tainted by troll activity but I don’t think that’s good counsel.

I’m still formulating my opinion on this but I believe it comes down to being nimble. Tactically speaking, I think you need to jump into the conversation at the beginning and then back away when the flaming begins. In addition to being a good communications practice in principle, there’s also the technical problem of your response getting buried in six scrolling pages of a flame war.

Does anyone have a theory on this? I’d love to hear how other people deal with trolls when they’re attacking their brands.

Racing the Leopard

Mac vs. PCPatrick Galvin over at Buzz Builder recently posted his take on the recent Apple advertising campaign that is taking advantage of some negative word of mouth regarding Microsoft’s new operating system, Vista. Put simply, people have been having problems with Vista and switching back to Windows XP. Now Apple has introduced a new version of its operating system that is obviously benefiting greatly from the large enthusiast base that Apple has online.

While I rarely hesitate before criticizing the ad industry for not “getting” WOM, this campaign is a unique way for Apple to enter the conversation using advertising. It’s possible that the negative WOM surrounding Vista was only reaching a very tech savvy audience and not affecting brand sentiment on any widespread level so taking the conversation to mainstream media really allows it to blow up, which can only help a company with a marginal market share like Apple.

The real question for me lies in whether or not this is actually ethical. The Mac vs. PC campaign seems to focus predominantly on the problems with Microsoft’s product and has progressively focused less and less on the features that make Apple superior.

Now I use Macs everywhere but work (we have a client that is a major PC manufacturer) and I’ve been running Leopard for about a week. To be perfectly honest, the only major improvement I see on a daily basis is the new seamless back-up system called Time Machine. If someone asked me to name five things I love about Leopard I would probably stall at two or three. Is that a sign that Apple has to focus on negative WOM around Microsoft’s product because their product just isn’t that remarkable?

It appears that Apple’s market share was flat last month after a record increase in September. I’m curious if this is just a cyclical change or if Apple is having trouble conveying the value of their brand while focusing too much on the Achilles heels of their competitors.

Spreading the Word…All Over Your Chicken Sandwich

Chick-Fil-AAlthough it’s probably a bit of a stretch to call this a word-of-mouth campaign, Chick-fil-A‘s latest kid’s meal toy definitely puts its focus on driving conversation.  The toy is essentially a four-sided cube where each side has a series of themed questions that would supposedly help a family to actually hold a conversation during dinner instead of wolfing down their chicken nuggets in shamed silence.

We get it.  Chick-fil-A wants families to associate their brand with quality family time that is triggered by the great conversations they will have when the family asks each other these probing questions.  Seems reasonable.

The problem, however, lies in the execution.  When you look at a sampling of some of the questions featured on the “toy” – like “What is the most physical pain you’ve had to endure?” and “What is the worst thing you’ve done in a fit of anger?” – you start to see how this might not inspire the Norman Rockwell moment that the good people at Chick-fil-A had in mind.  Maybe it’s just me but I wouldn’t be too keen to tell a toddler the worst thing I’ve done in a fit of anger and I have a hunch that it’s not as bad as many of the steady customers of this largely Southern US located chain.  Does little Billy really need to hear about the time you got into a fight with your ex-girlfriend and stuffed a crumbled up Twinkie through the vent in her locker every day for two weeks?  Probably not the brand experience they had in mind.

While it’s good to push the push the boundaries of conversational marketing, it’s probably a good idea to run it through your Common Sense department before you start stuff toys in the kid’s meals.

The Mouthful

Big WordsSpending the past week in Vegas for the WOMMA Summit, I got to hear a lot of funny sounding new marketing words being thrown around. Until Wednesday, I’ve never really heard people say the acronym for word-of-mouth, WOM, phonetically (it sounds something like “wahm”). Of course, “word-of-mouth” is only three syllables so you could certainly make a case that the very existence of an acronym is a hindrance to the adoption of the discipline but when you put marketing and technology people together you’re almost certain to emerge with a few acronyms. Either way, it got me thinking about nomenclature.

One aspect that really struck me was how few of the campaigns we discussed actually involved driving word-of-mouth recommendations. Sure, board games like Cranium and a few of the other brands covered rely heavily on consumers recommending the product or service to other consumers but a lot of what was discussed, like the importance of blogging and ARGs, don’t really strike me as the kind of tactics that drive recommendations as much as they are simple brand builders.

My first thought was to try to see if everything would fit under a nicer umbrella like “trust marketing.” If you look at the pillars of WOM, like transparency and the democratization of brands, most of the tactics seem more a matter of building trust behind a brand than they are about recommendations. If you take blogging for example, most blogs aren’t trying to get you to tell a friend about the content as much as they want to open a dialogue with the reader. If you step back further, some have gone as far as to say that the Internet has killed advertising and left nothing but trust and noise.

I also thought that “conversational marketing,” which you’re hearing more and more these days (especially from the likes of Federated Media), might be a better term to convey the real value of a WOM marketer. The conversational, or two-way, communication aspect of WOM is really what WOM practitioners do better than just about anyone else. As a person at a PR agency, I sell our services by asking clients who they’ve historically trusted to have their most important conversations with their stakeholders and key influencers. Most marketing disciplines are push marketers, or broadcasters, that don’t really have a mechanism in place for when the public responds to their message, which provides the opportunity. Of course, no CMO is seeing “conversations” as the #1 reason people are buying their product or service.

Of course, that last point is the key issue. How do you market a marketing discipline if there isn’t an apparent need at a high level? The fact is that more and more research is pointing to “word of mouth” as the key motivator for purchasing decisions, including last month’s Nielsen report that put it as the primary reason for 78% of all purchases. Compare this to the 56% for television and even 34% for the CMO’s beloved search engine ads and you can begin to see why word-of-mouth, while not being a perfect term, is probably the key to the success of a now $1 billion industry.

WOM Versus the Ad Agencies

Madison Avenue

David Kiley at Business Week became the latest pundit to pile on ad agencies in light of the growth of WOM, of which advertising has chosen not to play a significant role in due to the traditionally smaller budgets. What I find most interesting about articles such as this is not the insight but that many of the issues that WOM marketers have been talking about for the past couple years are finally hitting mainstream media (only in a blog format would Business Week criticize the advertising that sustains it).

While Kiley talks about the importance of trust in messaging, which is the core value of WOM, he also brings it back to ad agencies by saying “what if marketers and agencies viewed every ad they create and buy as a medium for word-of-mouth?” This is what I believe is really the issue with modern advertising and why the big agencies are seeing declines in both revenue and perceived relevance. I think Andy Sernovitz may have said it best in his keynote at WOMMA yesterday when he said that good advertising is the kind of ad that makes you want to rip it out of the magazine and show your friend. How often do you do that?

I spent five years in media analysis where I worked with ad agencies to determine why their competitors ads were performing better than theirs. The most maddening part of the job was how subtle the differences were between the competitors. Sure the creative varies from campaign to campaign but is there any greater example of how bad ad agencies are at distinguishing brands than in telecom advertising? After watching 400+ television spots a year, can the average consumer really tell you how Verizon differs from Sprint? Why is that so difficult to convey with virtually unlimited budgets?

So marketers have seen word of mouth at the top of surveys on why people buy their products for years and now Nielsen is telling them that recommendations from consumers are trusted by 78% of their peers (15% higher than newspapers). Can ad agencies really survive without being intelligent in this space?

At a WOMMA session on “Who Owns Word of Mouth?” on Wednesday, the leader of the session, Rick Murray from Edelman, asked for a show of hands for any ad agencies in the room. One person raised their hand.

WOMMA Summit 2007: Final Thoughts

ChartSo the WOMMA Summit 2007 wrapped up today in Las Vegas and, since my original plan of live blogging was somewhat derailed (yeah, you try to be responsible in Vegas!), I figured I’d offer my random set of conclusions here.

The presentation that most people were talking about was from Patrick Quinn of PQ Media. Apart from a lot of stats that everyone has seen a million times about people spending more time online and less time watching network TV, the PQ Media study showed some really impressive growth of the industry overall. They found that “spending on word-of-mouth (WoM) marketing jumped 35.9% in 2006 to $981.0 million and is expected to top $1 billion in 2007, making it one of the fastest growing alternative media segments.” Surprisingly, strategic services only accounted for a small amount of this growth, with community and brand ambassador programs seeing the triple digit growth that seemed to fuel this jump in revenue.

The content of the individual sessions steered more towards WOM 101 than digging into advanced case studies, which was somewhat disappointing. However, the majority of those attending seemed new WOM so you really can’t blame the organizers for keeping things on a pretty basic level. For example, the session on social networks just focused on some paid sponsorship opportunities on Bebo, Eons and Gather, with little focus on important breaking developments like Open Social. My primary suggestion would be to make more sessions so the groups could be smaller and the conversations could get more granular.

That’s not to say that there weren’t great case studies. The presentation on the Halo campaign was an amazing glimpse into the breadth of the most successful entertainment launch of the past couple years. I also felt that Neal Stewart from the Flying Dog Brewery somewhat stole the session at Stunts Vs Science when he discussed all the different social media channels his brand was using to drive growth in a very competitive niche on a very small budget.

However, the best thing about WOMMA events is the people. It probably has something to do with the industry only being three years old but there is no one at a WOMMA conference, no matter how successful, that isn’t willing to stop and talk to you about WOM. Whether it was a PR agency who I’m supposed to be in competition with or a vendor that is scaling to meet high demand, no one is getting blown off at WOMMA and the organization continues to be the most educational association I belong to.

Kudos to all the organizers, presenters and Wommie winners. Nice work guys!

WOMMA Summit 2007: The Halo Effect

Jeff Bell

Jeff Bell, Interactive Entertainment at Microsoft, led a really fascinating session on the Halo launch. He spoke some of the challenges facing the telling of the Halo story, such as separating the violent aspects of the game from the rich backstory that appeals the the game’s base.

Bell also outlined the three key groups they targeted in the campaign, including hardcore fans, next gen intenders (Xbox 1.0 users who would like to upgrade), and basically any male gamer between 17-35-years-old.

In terms of opening day sales this year, the game was a runaway success, outselling Harry Potter and Spiderman.

The most interesting part of the campaign for me was Iris, an ARG (alternate reality game). The game included five episodes and existed across multiple technology platforms as well as offline. Clues from the game included a Best Buy partnership that involved a clue in a print circular, which was cracked within 24 hours initially but it got heavy blog coverage. There was also a fake Craig’s List ad to learn how to crack a code pertaining the flood in the game. There was also kiosks in retail establishments for the third secret and the final clue was posted on the Xbox Web site (posting a poem with missing lines that led to a fake book on amazon.com that led to an IM clue from the fake author for final pieces of the puzzle).

Naturally, these are the kinds of campaigns that are somewhat easier to pull off when you have a brand that people are already passionate about (millions of them!) but it’s still extremely creative and you can’t argue with the results.

WOMMA Summit 2007: State of the Industry

WOMMA Summit

Peter Waldheim, Interim CEO of WOMMA, began the conference with a state of the industry address. He began by stating how many who resist moving into WOM go through the 5 stages of grief, eventually settling on acceptance. He cited several examples of other game changing movements in marketing, most notably the acceptance of the Internet in general, and explained how acceptance of WOM could see the same rate of growth.

Peter also shared some interesting research. A 2007 Neilsen report revealed that 78% of consumer trust other consumers more than anyone else. Similarly, a recent study by Deloitte 2007 showed that 62% read online reviews and, more importantly, 99% trust them. He also shared that DoubleClick, an online advertising company, stated that WOM has proven to be the top influencer in their data.

To further show the opportunity in WOM, Peter stated that Nike is spending only 33% of their marketing budget on traditional media in an effort to find better ways to connect with consumers. Where is the extra 50% that they used to spend on traditional media?

One of the key themes was that WOMMA has built an industry in three years and now is the source of the largest network of innovative marketers in the world. It is an industry in its infancy with limitless potential for growth.

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