Word-of-Mouth Industry

Psst. Have You Heard About the Word-of-Mouth Industry? As it grows up, marketers want to give it the sheen of respectability. By Thomas Mucha, April 07, 2005 Burger King's Subservient Chicken website. Oprah Winfrey's Pontiac giveaway. Two of last year's most talked-about marketing and advertising campaigns had one thing in common: They got consumers talking. More to the point, they transformed consumers into credible marketers who blithely sparked buzz, increased brand awareness, and spread positive product messages. Word of mouth, of course, has been around as long as marketing itself, because humans seem to be hardwired for passing on tips. According to Boston-based PR agency BzzAgent, 27 percent of all conversations include a word-of-mouth recommendation, whether it's the 411 on a twisted graphic novel, hip restaurant, or hot baby stroller. What marketers are discovering these days is that positive third-party opinions bestow credibility and can actually be a key driver of the economy. Consultants at McKinsey claim that two-thirds of all economic activity is influenced by shared opinions about a product, brand, or service. So what's a modern, progressive marketer to do? Pass the word on to other marketers that a new industry organization has been formed to promote this strategy. That's the idea behind the Chicago-based Word of Mouth Marketing Association, which has in five short months signed up more than 100 corporate members, including heavyweight marketers like Dell (DELL), Kraft Foods, and Motorola (MOT). The group and its founding members are determined to turn the word-of-mouth "industry" into an integral part of a company's overall marketing strategy. This is a rapidly evolving world filled with buzz and viral marketers, corporate bloggers, product seeders (those who put brands in the hands of influential consumers), and other new marketing tactics that aim to help consumers talk to one another about brands, products, and services. "Word of mouth is becoming a profession instead of a thing," explains WOMMA CEO Andy Sernovitz. This marketing philosophy is catching on, mostly because it is moving out of the hands of the amateurs and into the spreadsheets of the quantifiers. "The science of tracking and measuring it has finally matured to the point where companies can do something about it," Sernovitz says. An ability to track Web rumors and blog postings does more than give the practices a veneer of respectability. Word of mouth can now be tweaked to improve the results, which means you need the services of more marketing professionals. "You used to just buy an ad and blast it out there," Sernovitz says. "Now, with tracking software from companies like BuzzMetrics, Intelliseek, and others, the ad is just the start of the impact." BuzzMetrics's software measures brand awareness in a large population of online consumers and ranks major topics of conversation in the blogosphere. This can be useful for product launches, as well as crisis management. (See "Anatomy of a Buzz Campaign," December 2003.) The New York-based firm also studies the language the most influential bloggers use about a particular company, so marketers can incorporate those words into their own marketing and communication strategies. Cincinnati-based Intelliseek has software that scours blogs to report on what consumers are saying to one another about a particular brand, product, or service. So, for example, when Mazda wanted to know what consumers thought about its RX-8 model, Intelliseek collected data from blogs, sorted it, organized it into categories, and presented it to the company's marketers. That information was later used to plan the car's production and to help structure a PR campaign around its launch. WOMMA also wants to raise the respectability of the field. The trade group is particularly critical of techniques such as spam, stealth marketing (deceiving consumers about the participation of a marketer in any communication), shilling (paying someone to endorse a product without disclosing that fact), and infiltration (using fake identities in an online discussion to promote a product). So sticking pretty girls in bars to ask for a certain vodka brand is wrong, unless those pretty girls identify themselves as paid marketers. Likewise, sending "consumers" to blogs to say nice things about a company is a no-no. And turning children into stealth marketers to create in-school buzz? "Sleazy behavior will be exposed by the public and will backfire horribly on anyone who attempts it," Sernovitz warns. "Any practice intended to deceive people is unethical and should not be used." So WOMMA intends to show marketers where the lines are. Word is getting around that such a group just might be useful. The first WOMMA Summit, which took place last week in Chicago, attracted 360 people with only six weeks' notice -- so many, in fact, that the organization had to find a larger venue at the last minute. Naturally, WOMMA used only word-of-mouth marketing to spread the word