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Look Smart, Be Smart: A daily compendium of what you need to know to be effective as a word of mouth marketer
Suresh Vittal has joined Forrester, from SPSS it seems, and wades right into the deep-end, asking the critical questions about the measurement of consumer-generated media: Will CGM increase in relevance as a customer insight forum? Who, within the organization, will...
Some folks may have missed this due to the 4th of July holiday here in the States, but Matt Creamer over at Advertising Age wrote an article entitled "Do You Know Your Score?" [print edition, cover story and p. 24...
Anyone doubting the power of word of mouth to create -- and resolve -- a PR nightmare needs to look at a recent situation involving John Campea of the Movie Blog and Paramount Pictures. According to his play-by-play, Campea posted...
Nokia Canada was looking for a way to get people talking about a new camera phone, so it worked with Toronto-based Matchstick to recruit 90 bloggers in Toronto and Vancouver. Similar to a blogger outreach program conducted in the US...
How do you get local citizens interested in a project of vital interest to their community? Residents of Pollokshields, a Glasgow-area neighborhood, used word of mouth to organize a grassroots campaign to clear clutter, garbage, and litter from its community....
WOM works for many businesses, not just those selling "cool" products. Pavement maintenance firm J.B. Bostick has built a $30 billion business paving and repairing roads, and owner Jim Bostick attribute that growth largely to word of mouth. The company...
David Leonhardt wrote an interesting column about the value of Google Trends in the Business Section of last Wednesday's NY Times. He comments on the ability of this powerful source of CGM (Google searches) to serve as a "real economic...
How does the behavior of influencers compare with non-influencers? Jupiter Research analyst David Card recently looked at a set of influencers -- so-called "cool" high school girls (the influencers whom others try to emulate) -- and found that they don't...
Consumers with a high overall media consumption, particularly in network, print and electronic media, are most influenced by WOM in home improvement purchases. That's the key finding of a study by BIGresearch, which also defined several different categories of media...
A customer who receives satisfaction during a phone call to a customer service call center hangs up with more customer loyalty than one who is originally satisfied with the product. That satisfied call center customer also makes more future purchases...
Individuals' receptivity to both positive and negative WOM information is determined largely by its "fit" with their prior evaluative positions. This is the key finding of a 1989 study published in Advances in Consumer Research. Once an individual assumes an...
When we think about what drives WOM, we might also consider phenomena that are similar, but not quite WOM (which we can define generally as C2C communication regarding products, services and brands). What I am suggesting is considering established research...
Burst is reporting that nearly 3/4 of all Summer travelers go online during the planning process. This is interesting to us, specifically because of work like Yahoo's Trip Planner. Travel is one of those categories where we know--intuitively and from...
A recent research paper on the Dynamics of Information Access on the Web finds that 36 hours is the average amount of time it takes for half of the total readership of a given article to have read it. This...
SPEECH! SPEECH! It seems like everyone is winning awards these days. * Congratulations to CHRIS BAGGOTT of ExactTarget has been named one of the best bloggers in MarketingSherpa's Top 10 Best Blogs & Best Podcast of 2006 Readers' Choice Awards....
Even more companies have joined WOMMA. Welcome to: * Yahoo! * Techdirt Corporate Intelligence * SimpleFeed * SPSS * Porter Novelli We thank everyone for their support!...
On the first day of WOMBAT 2, we tried something that (as far as we know) hasn't been done before. We asked 10 word of mouth practitioners and experts to share a WOM idea that could be implemented tomorrow. The...
Help save "word of mouth marketing" at Wikipedia. A proposal has been made to close the Wikipedia entry for "word of mouth marketing" and subsume it into the larger entry for "viral marketing". Viral is a marketing technique of word...
Andrea Wojnicki: How About Leveraging Other Relevant Research...? Learn more Gary Stein: Travelers Going Online for Trip Info Learn more Kate Niederhoffer: WOM's Shelflife Learn more Call Center Customers More Loyal than Others Learn more Heavy Mass Media Consumers Most...
In the UK, buzz marketing is on the rise. That's the key finding of a new survey from CommentUK. According to the survey, 65% of UK marketers plan on implementing a live buzz campaign in 2007. Interestingly, 85% of those...
If nobody is linking or leaving comments on your blog, conversational media consultant Amy Gahran has hit upon a novel idea: strategic commenting. "If you view your blog as part of a public conversation, rather than a mere publication, then...
As more companies consider starting a blog, eMarketer has taken stock of the corporate blog landscape. According to a new report by eMarketer Senior Analyst James Belcher, 5.8% of Fortune 500 companies and 1.5% of the Fortune 200 Best Small...
If you build it, the editors will come. Boston marketing firm Cercone Brown Curtis has outfitted a home in Martha's Vineyard with new products and invited influential magazine editors to come and review products in their "natural setting." Using the...
For WOMMA's WOMBAT 2 conference, Ann Green of Millward Brown, Ed Keller of the Keller Fay Group, and Greg Wester of VoodooVox all co-authored a presentation with the latest research on how word of mouth is being adopted, who is...
While personal experience still carries the highest influence on consumers, word of mouth and employee opinions are not far behind. Those are some of the key findings of a recent survey from Harris Interactive. * 92% said personal experience with...
In the video game business, word of mouth has become one of the most important factors influencing individual purchasing decisions. In fact, word of mouth specifically passed from friends and family ranked as the number one factor in game buying...
Blogs and podcasts have become strong vehicles of consumer-generated media and word of mouth marketing, so naturally they have attracted the attention of advertisers. Currently, blog advertising leads the way, but podcast advertising should surpass that by 2010. Those are...
Walter Carl: WOM Among Youth Learn more Gary Stein: Familiar Strangers and WOM Learn more Kate Niederhoffer: pWOM and NWOM in online communities Learn more Hit Songs Depend on Whether Peers Like It Learn more Perceived Justice Impacts Negative WOM...
At WOMMA's WOMBAT 2 conference, Jackie Huba showed a music video from pop singer Shakira that featured clips contributed by fans. Another singer, Janet Jackson, is going a similar route using consumer-generated media. She is asking fans to design the...
Here's a great story. A father from Baton Rouge, Louisiana named Jack Marucci decides to make a baseball bat for his son. A local college ballplayer hears about the bat and decides he needs one. He uses it and tells...
Every fall, TV networks debut a multitude of new shows and fervently hope that word of mouth will transform one of them into a success. Instead of just wishing for it, the networks are now actively trying to create some...
Tourism can mean big business, and many booster organizations pour large amounts of money into promotional campaigns to draw visitors to an area. But sometimes, just by being nice and friendly, ordinary people can do more to spread positive WOM...
Weak and strong social ties play different roles in WOM referral behavior at both micro and macro levels. That was the key finding of a paper on WOM published in the Journal of Consumer Research in December 1987. Highlights of...
Word of mouth is the top influencer on young TV viewers in deciding what to watch. That's the key finding of a new Magid study. Messages most likely to be passed on are likely to be funny and entertaining, scary,...
A new study from crmmetrix entitled "BaroBlogs: The Barometer of the Blogosphere" finds that France is one of the leading blogging countries outside the US and its corner of the blogosphere is growing fast. Key findings from the study include:...
There are 8.68 million bloggers and 7.16 million social networking service subscribers (SNS) in Japan as of March 2006. This was the key finding of a report entitled "Information and Communications in Japan" published by the Japan Ministry of Internal...
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