Sunday, June 26, 2011
WOM
In Professor Toubia's Managing Marketing Programs class, we discussed Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing campaigns (think reviews on Yelp or Amazon). These types of campaigns can be very beneficial but the difficulty is in measuring success. Some firms pay people to post positive comments or hire consultancies (like SheSpeaks) to create communities and monitor comments. There is enough data to extract from these discussions but concretely evaluating WOM campaigns can be difficult. Another issue with this type of marketing is that the firm can lose control of the process. Angry customers can post very negative reviews which could hurt brand image more than glowing reviews could help it. On top of that, 90% of all WOM takes place offline. The key is to bridge offline and online commentary. The next evolution of WOM will be tapping into the large Facebook/MySpace communities in order to get more targeted and relevant commentary based on the situation/person. This could be a great source of revenue for Facebook and could actually be the launching pad for a WOM consultancy embedded in Facebook (Zynga but not for games).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I find any discussion of WOM marketing pretty fascinating, and completely relevant to digital marketing. At my last company, I was working on a project to redefine customer service for the company, and we did some polling to gauge how our customers felt about us, where they learned about us, etc. Thankfully, we were lucky- we had a terrific product, a stellar reputation and an unbelievably happy and loyal client base.
While the questions we asked were many, one of the questions I was most eager to get results on was where our customers heard about us and which means were the most important in their decision to do business with us. The definite winner in the polling was “through a friend” and as to what was most influential in their decision, the winner was the company’s reputation for excellence.
Having that, we wanted to harness some way to engage our customers more and turn them into brand ambassadors for our company. We wanted to create our own WOM platform and encourage more of this free marketing. In the end, I left the company before seeing the project through to its completion, but I always wonder what the effects of a formalized WOM campaign by the company could have been… We pushed them to move to web 2.0 and open up a community for its loyal customers, but they still haven’t done that. Interestingly, despite the poll results, the company’s biggest drivers of sales still seemed to be the mass paper mailings that were sent out. As soon as certain brochures were sent out, we knew within a day or two to expect a surge of business. WOM’s influence was never as measurable, but I still believe just as vital as the traditional marketing.
Post a Comment