September 2006
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Who do consumers tap for word of mouth advice when they have decision-making worries? According to Klaus Schoefer's 1998 dissertation (for his M.A. in Corporate Strategy and Governance from the University of Nottingham Business School) "Word of Mouth: Influences on the Choice of Recommendation Sources," when consumers are faced with a difficult decision they turn first to their strong-tie sources (family and friends). This tendency holds true even when there are other weak-tie but high-knowledge sources available.
Research conclusions:
* Consumers who perceive greater difficulty in the decision task are most likely to seek advice from strong-tie sources.
* Weak-tie sources that involve personal contact (i.e. a travel agent) are qualitatively different from weak-tie sources that don't (i.e. a travel website).
* Consumers concerned with risk avoidance are more willing to rely on experts with whom they have personal contact.
Learn more
Source credibility and personal relevance make a difference, but not all the difference, in getting consumers to open emails. So Peter Alexander contends in his dissertation (for his Doctorate of Philosophy in Business Administration degree from the College of Business Administration, Touro University International) "Electronic Word of Mouth Communication: Factors that Influence the Forwarding of Email Messages."
According to Alexander, source credibility increases the chances that a recipient will open a message and click on its contents, but has little impact on whether or not the message is forwarded. Incentives can motivate a "Refer-a-Friend" action, but for the demographic studied -- 18-year-old, college bound Americans -- the impulse to forward is hard-won.
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Just because YouTube.com is big doesn't mean it can't get bigger. According to comScore Media Metrix's monthly analysis of U.S. digital activity, the consumer-generated media hotspot is continuing its ascent.
In August, the site had 19.1 million unique visitors. The 19% leap from July's figures makes YouTube.com the 32nd most-visited site. YouTube.com debuted at No. 40 in July.
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As the volume of consumer voice swells, marketers have to track a myriad of influences to keep a finger on the pulse of online word of mouth. Brand monitoring vendors are charged with the task of scrutinizing and tracking WOM in consumer communities.
The Forrester Wave: Brand Monitoring, Q3 2006 evaluates leading brand monitoring vendors -- including Factiva and WOMMA member companies Biz360, Brandimensions, Cymfony, MotiveQuest, Nielsen BuzzMetrics and Umbria -- to see which were most effective. Nielsen BuzzMetrics and Cymfony were tapped as top performers for flexing "technology platform" and "coverage" muscles.
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WOM is a powerful influencer among consumers who give purchase advice to others. That's according to WOMMA member BIGresearch's latest Simultaneous Media Survey of 15,000 people regarding their media consumption. It found that while "advice givers" often formulate recommendations based upon personal experiences, they also are affected significantly by media -- including WOM, which ranked first as a media influence for electronics purchases and third for grocery buys.
Learn more:
http://www.bigresearch.com/news/big091206.htm
One in every five advertisers plans to employ viral marketing strategies next year, according to a new report from Jupiter Research, and more than half of those will be new to the practice. Attracting them, says report author Emily Riley, is the recent surge in social activity online, which has viral marketers spending more than 40 percent of their ad budgets on web-based marketing -- more than double what other marketers spend.
The most popular viral marketing techniques, according to the report:
* Tying online advertising into offline events (44%)
* Advertising within blogs (40%)
* Advertising that encourages consumer participation (38%)
* Advertising within games (35%)
Learn more:
http://www.jupiterresearch.com/bin/item.pl/press:press_release/2006/id=06.08.29-social_marketing.html
More than 80% of business and IT professionals worldwide read blogs, according to the results of a new survey on emerging media in the BtoB marketplace by KnowledgeStorm and Universal McCann. Of those, a full 70% recommend or pass along to others blog content on a monthly basis.
Other findings:
* 53% of respondents say blogs impact their work-related purchases
* 53% of respondents read blogs weekly for business information
* 57% of respondents read blogs weekly for tech information
* 59% of respondents are "somewhat" to "very" familiar with RSS feeds
* 31% of respondents subscribe to RSS feeds
Learn more:
http://www.knowledgestorm.com/MainServlet?ksAction=aboutus&subpage=s_pressrel&pageName=/resources/content/c_press_rel_091106.jsp
http://www.marketingvox.com/archives/2006/09/11/research_blogs_a_powerful_b2b_presence/index.php
When shopping online, consumers choose products twice as often if they are recommended via user-generated product reviews. So says a 2004 study in the Journal of Retailing by Canadian researchers Sylvain Senecal and Jacques Nantel, who sought to measure the influence of online product reviews on consumer's online choices. They concluded that online reviews' influence is impacted by the recommendation source -- other consumers, for instance, or media reviews -- and the type of product -- products that can be "inspected" vs. those that must be "experienced" -- but not by the type of website -- a retailer's site, for instance, or a third party's.
Learn more:
http://egsh.enst.fr/survey/CanauxInformBienExpe/senecalnantel.pdf
http://www3.babson.edu/Publications/JR/
It's common knowledge that emotional marketing is good marketing. But one emotion in particular -- surprise -- is key in effective WOM campaigns, according to a 2003 pilot study in the Journal of Economic Psychology. The authors of the study, French researchers Christian Derbaix and Joelle Vanhamme, found a strong correlation between surprise, subsequent emotions and the frequency of WOM, concluding that pleasantly surprising experiences foster positive word of mouth while bad surprises foster negative word of mouth; the more intense the surprise, they add, the stronger the WOM.
Go to the Journal of Economic Psychology's website
Read the report (Word document)
In the past 12 months, 48.3% of business executives have been directly influenced by WOM in making a technology-related purchase decision. That's according to MarketingSherpa's 2006 Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide, which was published this summer in partnership with WOMMA member CNET Networks. In addition to WOM in general, executives cited blogs from experts and professionals (19.6%), industry media and analysts (10%) and vendors (4.6%) -- all types of WOM -- as influential.
Execs' purchases also were influenced by:
* Trade shows (41.9%)
* Print magazines (40.6%)
* Enewsletters from a known company (34.1%)
* Email from an unknown company (4%)
* Cold calls from telemarketers (2.8%)
* Podcasts (2.7%)
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Early this summer, Interpublic Group announced the formation of a user-generated content (UGC) practice as part of its Emerging Media Lab to help its clients understand UGC such as blogs, shared videos and podcasts. An initial study of online video found that consumers who create UGC do so in order to connect with others.
Survey highlights include:
* Of those who create online videos, 61% share them publicly.
* Of those who create online videos, 25% have featured a brand in their movies; 32% haven't yet, but would be willing to do so.
* A majority of those who create online videos also generate content elsewhere online; 68% blog, 52% contribute to message boards, 38% write product reviews and 20% create content on social networking sites.
Read the study (PDF download)
When it comes to emerging media channels and techniques, the vast majority of marketers report interest in WOM, more than are interested in podcasts, RSS and even blogs, according to research released this summer by Epsilon in association with WOMMA member GfK NOP. The report examines contemporary marketing trends, which reveal a shift away from traditional advertising toward trackable media and, in particular, customer insight-based marketing.
Learn more
Could be. A fresh look at the research nets an upsetting conclusion: the experiment largely failed.
But...it may not really matter. From the article:
It is just as likely, though, that Milgram was wrong. But if we don't live in a small world after all, why do people find this idea so easy to believe? My research suggests that first, the belief that we live in a small world gives people a sense of security, a feeling that we are all somehow holding hands. And small world experiences that we encounter naturally buttress people's religious faith as evidence of "design."
Maybe the notion of 6 degrees is far more interesting and insightful into the human condition that the actual connectedness of humanity.
Clearly, the interest on behalf of both managers and scholars regarding WOM and WOM marketing has increased recently. This is for a variety of reasons, including issues with traditional marketing media (fragmentation, lack of credibility, cost, and PVRs) as well as new communications technologies (such as the internet and mobile phones). For consumers, the Internet, provides the opportunity to talk to each other more often and more easily. We know that online reviews affect product sales , that "cool" influencers are more responsive online, that online communities boost customer engagement , and so on.
How do we know this? Well, much of the recent WOM research was conducted with online data. For researchers, the Internet has provided a vast opportunity to analyze (semi-) permanent archival data of real -- ONLINE WOM conversations -- the low hanging fruit of WOM research, if you will. I wonder, how generalizeable is all of this new online WOM research to the offline WOM context? This Q seems particularly important, since we know that 92% of WOM happens OFFLINE
An important placeto start in answering this question is to list the differences between the online and the offline communication domains:
THE CONSUMERS
* Offline WOM usually entails a two(or more)-way, interactive discussion. In online chatrooms and bulletin boards, there are posters (those who post their product experiences on the Internet ) and lurkers (those who read others' postings without communicating or interacting in any way with the posters)
* The open structure of the Internet means a diverse, multiple audience (i.e., anyone can post or access content), (therefore) posters are often speaking to an audience composed of diverse individuals...
* Consumers may be more likely to talk to their close family and friends offline, but to strangers online.
* Consumers can create their own identities online -- not just aliases, but they can craft what they say to create a persona.
* The world wide web is an incredibly vast reseource with effective search functions. As such, it is possible for consumers to find very specific information as well as groups of other consumers who are interested in a specific topic. These 'groups' are probably less common offline. ('I have only 2 friends that participate in triathlons, but there are thousands online!')
THE MESSAGE
* Consumers have the opportunity to edit their comments online -- whether in an email, a chatroom, or a blog -- like this one! Offline, consumers may be forced to be more spontaneous.
* In a one-on-one offline conversation, there is no permanent archive of what you said. However, online, many (most ) conversations are archived (whether we want them to be or not...)
This list is just a start (please reply with more! ). But every one of these differences between online and offline WOM contexts has significant implications for WOM: who is talking, what is being said, and the implications of such communication. Yes, the differences are a big deal. Therefore, we need to be very careful about generalizing from one context to the other.
There's a fascinating article this morning on Aaron Swartz's blog, examing the question of who writes Wikipedia. I love this kind of stuff. As more communities are built online, we get a new opportunity to monitor and understand how communication occurs. This new study of Wikipedia entry authorship sheds some new light on the subject.
Swartz found that most entries follow a similar pattern, split among two groups of people:
Outsiders: people who infrequently contribute and may not have accounts
Insiders: people who frequently contribute, have accounts and are often on the site
Ends up that most entries are begun by outsiders, then added to, modified and generally tweaked (ie: fixing typos or formatting issues) by the insiders. The Outsiders (it seems to me) are interested primarily in the information itself. That is, they may be experts about a particular subject and want to share their knowledge. The insiders are more concerned with the Wikipedia itslef. That is, they want to make sure that the Wikipedia is complete.
This is good learning for WOM. This may, in fact, serve as the basis for a hypothesis about how information may spread within a particular group ("clique through"). A group's influencers may, in fact, be external to the group. But the information they bring is vetted and ultimately accepted or declined inside the group.
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