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Original Papers Presented at
WOMMA's Measuring Word of Mouth Conference
(partial list)
Index (click on titles for more detail)
Word of Mouth within the Simultaneous Media Experience
Joe Pilotta, Vice President of Research, BIGresearch
This paper will explore the key role of word of mouth both as a productive and consumptive form of communication. The following concepts are critical to this exploration; influence, production, consumption, relevance and communication as understood within the field of contemporary communication research. The paper will explore how new communication technology embodies word of mouth. Insights will be based on BIGresearch's database of 65,000 respondents of our Simultaneous Media syndicated survey.
Leveraging Traditional Media for an Integrated WOM Campaign
Jon Berry, Vice President, NOP World
While the Web is an important generator of word of mouth, research shows that most word of mouth starts offline. The challenge for marketers is to create integrated word of mouth campaigns. New research tools are making it easier for companies to identify current and potential advocates and tap large market-research and media-research databases such as MRI and Roper Reports to leverage traditional media as well as the Internet to spread word of mouth for products and services. In this presentation, we will describe the step-by-step use of research to develop, execute, and measure an integrated campaign.
Word of Mouth with PeoplePower™--The Subtle Measures of Optimal Campaign Design
Greg Wester, President, Soapbox Marketing
A key ingredient behind any word of mouth marketing campaign is people. So, the goal of any word of mouth marketing campaign should be to get the maximum value out of participating people. But what are the techniques and measures of getting the most value from people?
This paper defines the concept of PeoplePower™--or how to optimize the value created by word of mouth participants. The PeoplePower™ concepts of Tuning, Transmitting, and Magnetism are described within WOMMA’s Terminology Framework, as are examples of word of mouth campaigns both with and without PeoplePower™.
Online Influence and the Tech-fluentials
Sarah Dietz, Senior Associate, Burson-Marsteller
Influential people shape public opinion and share the uncanny ability to seamlessly spread information by word of mouth. Burson-Marsteller, a global public relations firm, has identified the movers and shakers who have mastered online communications channels as e-fluentials®. These online public opinion leaders occupy a key position in a company’s future success.
In a recent study, Burson-Marsteller used its proprietary algorithm to identify the e-fluentials among WIRED magazine panel members. During this process, the company identified online public opinion leaders who seamlessly connect their work and personal lives while transmitting information about companies, brands and products. Communicating through chat rooms, opinion and company Web sites, and blogs, these “tech-fluentials” can create or change opinions, establish trends, build buzz, and sway stakeholders.
Measuring BzzCampaign Word of Mouth Activity using the WOMMA Terminology Framework
Matt McGlinn, Director of Research, BzzAgent
This paper utilizes the new WOMMA Terminology Framework in the context of a BzzAgent Word of Mouth marketing program. Quantifiable results in regards to the number of WOMUnits created and sent, the total amount of participants (creators, senders, and receivers) as well as qualifiers such as the polarity of the messages and credibility of the participants are highlighted. Differences and similarities in word of mouth behavior among disparate demographic groups are also noted.
Mapping the Conversational Geography of Word of Mouth Marketing: An Application of the Word of Mouth Terminology Framework
Walter Carl, Assistant Professor, Northeastern University
This paper will apply the WOM Terminology Framework to measurement issues when researching the "conversational geography" of word of mouth marketing communication. Goals of the project, working definitions of WOM and WOM marketing, and the following measurement issues will be discussed in light of the Terminology Framework: frequency of WOM episodes (Actions), Outcome variables, and Credibility measures of Participants. The paper will conclude with how the WOM Terminology framework can be applied to future studies of the conversational geography project in online and offline Venues. Implications for WOM marketing practitioners and academic researchers will be highlighted throughout.
Measuring Word of Mouth Today - CPG Sampling Case Studies
Larry Burns, President, StartSampling
See specific measurement approaches that StartSampling is executing for brand owners who already integrate various WOM techniques within ongoing brand programs. We will share tangible approaches and results using research completed and reporting tools we have deployed to date.
Word of Mouth and Brand Emotion
Pete Blackshaw, CMO, Intelliseek
Emotion and word of mouth share a critical, symbiotic relationship. The extent to which consumers feel the need to recommend or tell others is deeply rooted in how they “feel” about a company, brand, product, or service. Certain emotions such as the feeling of “betrayal” – or even brand “love” -- can result in unusually high levels of consumer-generated media (CGM) creation and pass-along.
What specific techniques can marketers apply to “quantify” emotion and thereby inform key predictive assumptions regarding word of mouth intensity, shelf-life, and net-impact. How do such techniques expand upon traditional research? Intelliseek, a leader in advanced text analytics, will provide a preview of its proprietary framework for quantifying brand emotion across all forms of consumer-generated media
Finding Influentials in Your Product Category
Brad Fay, Managing Director, NOP World
A core principle underlying word of mouth marketing is the need to reach the right consumers--those with high propensity to create and send marketing-relevant information to their peers. NOP World will present new research that builds on their cross-industry social Influentials(sm) segment by optimizing for specific product and service categories, including technology, investments, food, travel, fashion/apparel, and media.
Product Seeding with Influencers
Matthew Stradiotto, Co-Founder, Matchstick
The purpose of this paper is to use this Diageo case study as an illustration for how Matchstick has come to track and measure our product seeding programmes for our clients. Within, we aim to demonstrate how we have adopted the new WOMMA standards terminology, and how we have come to measure and assess the outcomes and ROI on this innovative form of marketing for our clients.
Why You Can’t Measure Word of Mouth by Standard Methods
George Silverman, President, Market Navigation
You can’t measure word of mouth with a conventional control group design, because the purpose of word of mouth is to contaminate the control group with second-order word of mouth. You can’t use a pre-post design because you can’t control for the other variables without a control group, which you can’t use. Also, the second order effects are much more powerful than the initial exposures. Your boss is going to hit the roof over this. How to deal with him/her.
Automotive Brand Buzz - New Ways to Target Customers
Ted Morris, SVP Strategy and Corporate Development, Brandimensions
For some automotive brands, up to 90% of all vehicle buyers shop online before they even set foot in the automotive dealership. Men, women, young, old, professionals, factory workers, GenX, baby boomers - the use of of the Internet for commerce cuts across all demographics, lifestyles and geographies. Brandimensions research shows that the Internet is an important source of information about customers not just about what they are saying about automotive brands. Unlock further value in your automotive brand by understanding what drives consumer purchasing behavior and how various social, econonomic and cultural factors play when people talk into the purchasing equation. Who they are and what they like is often as important as what they say and how.
Betwixt & Between the Codifying of Word of Mouth Marketing Metrics
John Moore, Marketing Medic, Brand Autopsy
The WOM Terminology Framework standards signal a small step for marketers but also a giant step for marketing. The small step being marketers have a unified set of terms to use making it easier to define, create, and measure WOM activities. The giant step being marketers now have the building blocks to make WOM marketing as credible and measurable as traditional marketing is. However, will these standards cause us marketers to over-complicate how WOM works? Do we really want to apply the same media metrics structure to WOM marketing as we do with traditional advertising? By making WOM less alternative and more traditional, are we running the risk of mainstreaming WOM to the degree it begins to lose its effectiveness?
In Betwixt & Between, a long-time WOM marketing advocate, explores questions facing the maturation of the marketing art form he practices.
Testing the Effectiveness of Word of Mouth vs. Email Marketing to Introduce a New Feature to College Students - An Experiment in Progress
Sean Glass, Founder and CMO, Higher One
Universities are an ideal community to utilize word of mouth marketing techniques. Our belief is that students as participants have high propensity to create and send WOMUnits, have access to many well populated online and real world venues, and also have a high degree of influence and credibility, thus leading to an ideal circumstance to drive consumer action through word of mouth marketing. Recently Higher One added a new feature to our student checking account offering (online bill pay). This feature has not been marketed to accountholders and thus presents the opportunity to test the effectiveness of a word of mouth program to drive usage. Higher One will use this opportunity to perform the following test: 1)Effect of WOM marketing only. 2) Effect of Email marketing only. 3) Effect of synergy of WOM then Email. 4) Effect of synergy of Email then WOM. In the article, we will describe our word of mouth program, it's historical results, the planned experiment, and how we will setup and measure the progress of the experiment to produce results that can be explained through the Word of Mouth Terminology Framework.
How Word of Mouth Can Drive Advocacy Campaigns to Reach New or Hidden Social Networks
Michael Lewis, Lead Strategist, OnMessage Communicaitons
Today’s media marketplace has become more fragmented which has made designing and executing advocacy campaigns more challenging. At the same time technology has created even greater means for decentralized communication, increasing the ability to tap well-defined social networks. As government advocacy, awareness and political campaigns become more sophisticated, new word of mouth applications can help shape policy, grow markets and influence public discourse in ways never before imagined. This paper will examine recent social awareness and advocacy campaigns and their effectiveness in tapping word of mouth to reach niche and hidden markets. It will also discuss ways that these applications can be translated for new areas.
Density and Velocity Prevail at Online Photo Sites
Jeremy Shermak, comScore Networks
The proliferation of digital cameras among American consumers has resulted in growing interest in sites that allow consumers to manage, share and print their digital images. In April 2005, 62 million Americans had access to a digital camera and 43 million consumers - a quarter of all Internet users - visited sites in the Photos category.
Online photo sites are viral in nature. This, coupled with their hosting abilities, repeatedly attracts consumers to these sites for extended periods of time. ComScore, using data from comScore Media Metrix, will delve into the evolution of photo sites, and explore the marketing opportunities that exist within this unique category.
Put The Money Where the Mouth Is: How Business-to-Business Technology Marketers Shape, Measure and Demonstrate the Impact of Word of Mouth
Promise Phelon, The Phelon Group
Word of mouth works. One customer tells two friends, who buy and tell two colleagues, who buy and tell two more friends...and before you know it, your company's product or service is the hit of the marketplace.
Revenue grows. Sales reps stay busy closing more deals. PR gurus joyfully spread the market's momentum. And marketing professionals, well, they try to make sense of it all. Marketing professionals try to find ways to encourage and facilitate word of mouth, that strange phenomenon that springs up when products or services exceed marketplace expectations.
To harness the raw power of this word-of-mouth energy, marketing professionals at B2C firms create blogs, launch mass media campaigns and referral programs, and engage customer advocates tokeep the word running. Yet because the B2C audience is often large and mostly unknowable, and because B2C word of mouth takes place in an unstructured environment-namely, wherever the consumer happens to be at the time-B2C marketers struggle to show the impact of word of mouth marketing efforts.
All the same is true of unstructured word of mouth marketing efforts within B2B firms. One VP of IT talks about the wonders of a company's product to another VP of IT at an industry meeting, on the train, in the elevator. And IT marketers try to harness that energy. But in the B2B realm, particularly in B2B enterprise technology hardware, software and solution firms, another way exists-a structured way-to harness customer word of mouth and illustrate the impact of those harnessing efforts. You know this structured way as customer marketing or customer reference programs.
Through these programs, marketing professionals formally capture, manage and proclaim the successes of customers. Word of Mouth: It's not Just for B2C Anymore, authored by Phelon Group founder and partner Promise Phelon, shows IT marketers the various challenges inherent in such structured word-of-mouth programs, as well as how successful programs have overcome those same challenges. Promise also shares with readers a set of metrics that allow customer marketing and reference professionals to measure and illustrate the impact of their structured word of mouth marketing efforts.
A Case For Using The Internet To Track Offline, Organic Word Of Mouth
Karen Kraft, Decision Analyst
This paper examines how to measure and track offline, organic word of mouth for a specific brand or category in light of the low incidence of senders and receivers in the general population. The ease and benefits of using Internet-based consumer panels for this type of research is discussed.
Integrated Interactive Marketing: Quantifying the Evolution of Online Engagement
Charles Buchwalter, Nielsen//NetRatings
While the online medium continues to transform at electric speeds, maintaining relevance is becoming more and more challenging for all marketers. Will today's darling be tomorrow's has-been? The answer likely lies in the concept of online engagement.
What sets your site apart from your competitor's, and what are the common denominators for high engagement sites? In this white paper, you'll learn from successful case studies and analysis of the current environment and emerging trends as to what it will take to secure the loyalty of your users.
Innovators, Connectors, Salesmen, Mavens and WOMMA: Fitting the Tipping Point Groups into the WOMMA Schema
Dr. Max Kilger, Simmons
One of the more recent theories about word of mouth advertising has been proposed by Malcom Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point. In his book he posits that four types of individuals - Innovators, Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen - are key to the viral-like spread of ideas, products and trends. A set of 27 questions was developed to help identify Innovators, Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen and these questions were inserted into a recent National Consumer Study re-contact project. A confirmatory factor analysis was performed to determine if the questions did in fact load highly as predicted on the four Tipping Point categories. Further statistical analysis in the form of cluster analysis and latent class analysis was conducted to see if the four types could be isolated. Once these individuals were identified, descriptive analyses were conducted to paint a portrait of each of the four Tipping Point groups. Finally, we take a look at how one component of the WOMA scheme - influence - relates to these Tipping Point groups.
What Makes a Product Worth Talking About?
Terry Pittman, Executive Director, Digital Services Research, AOL
The marketing world is a buzz with talk about, well… talk. Everyone wants their product to go viral, to grow like wildfire as the result of passionate conversations between devotees and non-users who, once infected by the devotee’s passion for the product, will rush out and buy one too. The hitch is…there has to be something to talk about. Mercenaries will talk for pay, but regular people talk about things that they car about – things they are passionate about. Regular people are passionate about their hobbies, music, cars, food, particular gadgets, family, and more. When a product enables them to enjoy their passions, and does it in a way that is remarkable, they will talk about it. When the way a product works makes them feel good – when its design becomes an extension of their personality - when the product enables them to do something effortlessly that they couldn’t do easily before – the product is worth talking about.
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