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10) What's in Your Cereal Bowl? Measuring the Landscape of WOM Participants in Consumer-Generated Media
A-Blog-a-Day Countdown to WOMMA's Word of Mouth Marketing Research Symposium in Washington, D.C., Dec. 11, 2006.
From WOMMA's soon-to-be-released book, Measuring Word of Mouth Volume 2:
What's in Your Cereal Bowl? Measuring the Landscape of WOM Participants in Consumer-Generated Media
Cymfony's Jim Nail, Pat Fennessey, Ronnie McNeill, and Laura Malone evaluate the viability of analyzing online consumer communication as a source of consumer insight to help shape marketing strategy. Since companies often wonder if there is enough volume of online discussion about their product to warrant brand monitoring and online word of mouth initiatives, Cymfony selected a common, daily product that does not require significant research or evaluation -- breakfast cereal -- to illustrate the possibilities.
The authors detail a five-step process of determining the volume of topical word of mouth, correlating levels of online discussion with general market indicators (each brand’s rank in market share), classifying the word of mouth participants, creating brand/participant profiles to understand the composition of the consumer base, and extracting insights from these profiles. Through this process, the authors demonstrate that there is indeed actionable, marketplace-relevant information that can be gleaned from the analysis of online word of mouth episodes.
Want to know more? Come see this paper presented at WOMMA's Research Symposium in Washington, D.C., Dec. 11, 2006.