Having just come back from an inspiring MESH conference among some of the best digital minds in Canada and elsewhere, I've generated some renewed vigour in both what the overall web community is doing in Toronto and also what we're building at Agent Wildfire.
So cause and effect - great conference = my first post in over 2 months on Buzz Canuck.
The biggest help I think I can make after helping conduct a panel on Word of Mouth is to help some very interested word of mouth advocates (we did have a packed and engaged house for MESH) understand this space a whole lot better.
Even though the panel was entertaining and provocative, there probably were as many questions afterward as there were answers - a kind of "i'd like to go out on a date with you, you excite me, but I really just met you, don't know that much about you and based on reputation, could be scared of you" type of reaction.
Here's the conundrum - unlike social media which has a tangible set of tools and technology at its disposal, word of mouth is a little bit more amorphous and tough to nail against the wall. A lot of times, this causes siloed organizations to need more than one function to agree on its application and individual vendors to tout their own specific process as the best.
Result - confusion and lack of action, even though most would readily agree when prompted - word of mouth is the life force of an enterprise.
So let's demystify before someone gets hurt.
1) Is Word of Mouth a process?
Many believe word of mouth happens merely out of chance or being interesting or great. Yes - it's true - serendipity or product-driven WOM happens and constitutes the majority of WOM that is out there.
Product innovation and baking word of mouthability right into the pre-, during and post-purchase experience is an absolute, but think about how many great or interesting products don't ever get noticed. The marketplace is littered with them.
My fellow WOM panelist at MESH Saul Colt brought up the the dilemna of inventor Dean Kamen - even though he is the founder of the cultishly-loved Segway, does anybody know about his equally technoligically impressive iBot for wheelchairs, or for that matter his autosyringe or space age jetpack? No. No. No.
Being a great product is the price of admission nowadays. It's table stakes. Build it, and a lot of times, people won't come. Who wants to talk about something that has 5% better quality or is new and improved. Word of mouth as a process is its own thing - it mines the world of anthropology, customer engagement, storytelling, consumer psychology and ADDS TO what's already in your product, experience or service and accelerates and expands a brand's circle of influence. Some have classified the difference between product-driven Organic word of mouth and marketing-driven Amplified Word of Mouth.
Our process at Agent Wildfire consists of the 7 things we believe lends products enhanced word of mouth - i) create an authentic conversation story/idea, ii) find and excite your influencer audience, iii) provide them a great customized experience, iv) create an online/offline platform and tools that engages them continuously and allows messages to spread easily, v) build activities that sustain interest, vi) host and stimulate the dialogue and become part of the community and vii) measure what you do.
Simple, intuitively smart -no? But is this what's happening with current traditional and even new marketing methods? Absolutely not.
FACT - WOM is product-driven but also is it's own process that can be adopted after a product/service has been developed - avoid at your own risk.
2) Is Word of Mouth a Practice?
Here it comes, I can see the Arnold Horschak-ian hand in the air, the contrarian "must be heard and noticed" swagger, they've grabbed the mike energetically, I can anticipate the question, here it comes - "so um, word of mouth has always existed, it's a function of what we do, what everybody should do - why make it into something more sophisticated than that? and why all the hubbub of making it into its own practice all of a sudden? Geez, why you making such a big deal here?"
Three reasons - some of them selfish, most important :
- the reality - most companies don't focus on WOM and to their detriment. They don't look for it, they don't chase it and they don't measure it. By creating a separate WOM practice, as WOMMA and Andy Sernovitz developed over the last 5 years, WOM gets added profile and attention it needs to get on the CMO's and key decision maker's radar
- by calling it WOM, it differentiates itself from activities that don't attempt to go after word of mouth - the majority of the $12 billion in communications that marketers spend in Canada does not have WOM as a primary or secondary goal - as a separate practice, we can measure up and assess how a brand spends its money on par with word of mouth's cousins of PR, advertising, promotion, online, research and why a company likely needs to invest more in its grassroots touchpoint(s) of WOM
- there are new tools and platforms at play that make word of mouth a reality for marketers that might have been totally out of reach a decade ago - social media is a great advancement, but it's only a tool and oftentimes used inappropriately , word of mouth is the end game - by focusing on word of mouth as a practice and not the bright shiny thing of what Techcrunch is talking about, it focuses on the results companies need to and can now more effectively achieve not the tools they may/may not use
For the 14 types of word of mouth that fall into our definition of a WOM practice, have a peek here.
FACT: Word of Mouth can be considered its own beast with a distinctly different approach than other marketing (typically more grassroots), other media (typically more conversational) and other research (typically more collaborative, digital and influencer-driven)
3) Is Word of Mouth a culture?
No argument here. The companies that are the best at it, have word of mouth as a central part of their DNA. They may call it by some other name - customer engagement, community-building, brand experience-driven - but the result is still the same - their fans, users, employees & customers do the hard work of convincing others of their merits. Zappos is the perfect example of a company that has developed an entire enterprise around the customer and word of mouth. As we speak, 412 of their employees are on Twitter - helping customers help and evangellize to other customers.
But in many companies, particularly established ones, word of mouth isn't an engrained part their culture. Thus, word of mouth, when it happens, may be more a function of activity or an experiment rather than something that spawned out of a company cultural norm.
Think Skittles and the recent makeover of their website to be completely user-generated. They generated huge amounts of word of mouth and buzz, even though MARs would not come close to considering itself as the most customer centric or grassroots orietnted company.
FACT: yes, Word of mouth is often culture-driven, but not always
4) Is Word of Mouth an Outcome?
This is the exciting part. Yes, word of mouth is an outcome and tied most strongly than any other measure to business performance. And guess what, we can measure it now too.
Through a raft of online analytics tools, codes and polling methods, we can actually now see what's happening with our WOM - which is a decided difference to our investment in traditional media that is hamstrung to access, never mind accurately measure its trail of influence.
But to just consider WOM as something to look at and measure at the tail end of the marketing sausage grinder is a disservice. There are ways to stoke it, to orchestrate it and to get it to grow. And it's more than just stunts, it's more than just a Facebook app - it should be considered as an integrated strategy.
If I was to become a CMO or head of innovation at a corporation again, I would immediately anoint a department to be in charge of Word of Mouth. The title might be something unwieldy - Director of Community, Culture and WOM - but it would dramatically change the role of what marketers and/or their colleagues should be tasked to do and focus an organization not only on watching the scoreboard on how much WOM are we getting but also how we can proactively go out and earn it.
FACT: Word of mouth is an outcome, but that's the tip of the iceberg
Hope that clears it up. Once again - loved #MESH09. Thanks to Mark, Stuart, Rob, Mathew and Mike for getting me involced and look forward to MESH marketing.
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