Brad Fay
Ed Keller
An interview with Brad Fay and Ed Keller, Co-founders of the Keller Fay Group, COO and CEO respectively; and co-authors of the forthcoming book, The Face-to-Face Book: Why Real Relationships Rule in a Digital Marketplace.
Brad and Ed will Keynote at WOMM-U, May 7-9, about the research findings from their book that prove how all media are social.
How does the “social media is word of mouth on steroids” argument miss the mark?
In several ways. First, there’s nothing more impactful than a face-to-face word of mouth conversation. When we compare the credibility of advice about brands, we find that face-to-face gets the highest scores, followed by phone and then online. Face-to-face interaction has the benefit of emotion and facial expression that just doesn’t convey electronically, and this leads to more actions taken based on offline conversations.
Second, offline conversations enjoy greater scale, despite conventional wisdom to the contrary. Nine times more conversations happen offline than online, and it’s possible for marketing activities to trigger enormous cascades of offline word of mouth. For example, we find that the Monday Night Football advertisers enjoy some 3 billion conversations each year throughout the season based on advertising-triggered WOM.
Finally, the scale of social media is not quite as great as advertised. We’ve seen research that shows typically less than 1% of the Facebook fans of brands engage with the brand following the initial decision to “like” the brand online. Online social media has great potential, but it’s not “word of mouth on steroids” and it really needs to be integrated into a larger strategy that almost certainly includes traditional media or marketing approaches as well.
The term “Social Media” generally refers to digital media like Facebook and Twitter. How did this definition fare against your data?
Yes, that’s the definition most commonly used by marketers today. But our research suggests that all media are social, in that all media have the chance to trigger or support consumer-to-consumer conversations and recommendations.
No medium sparks more brand conversations than television commercials. Print media are better than just about any other in reaching influencers—the most active recommenders. And “traditional’ internet sites like brand websites, search engines, and online publishers are extremely effective at producing shareable content. We advise marketers to think socially with all their communications channels.
Considering how social media have become such a focal point for so many brands, how do you think media will change in the coming years?
More than 50 years ago, the Columbia academics Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld described a “two-step flow” for mass communications in which mass media sparks conversations, which then lead to purchasing. They said mass media almost never leads to purchasing without first passing through a social step. They were right then, and we see a “back to the future” trend in marketing that will once again emphasize the two-step flow.
To be successful, marketers will need to have talkable messages, aimed at people who like to share, and using channels likely to reach them when they are best able to share. It’s a huge opportunity for everyone, and WOMMA is at the center of that conversation. We can’t wait to see everybody at WOMM-U in May, share the stories from our book, and learn what others think!
——————–
Ed Keller and Brad Fay run the Keller Fay Group and are co-authors of the forthcoming book, The Face-to-Face Book: Why Real Relationships Rule in a Digital Marketplace. The book explains how ALL media and marketing can be social, based on market research and case studies from companies like Pepsi, Dell, Procter & Gamble, General Mills, and Apple.
Read more about their research and how TV drives word of mouth at MediaPost.
Keynote Sponsored by
