HotHouse makes brands work for people online

By Simon van Wyk

In the same way that digital technology helped convert the world’s oldest profession into the booming global industry of Internet pornography, word of mouth, probably the oldest of all marketing techniques, has emerged as arguably the most powerful selling tool of the 21st century, thanks to the Internet.

Traditional advertising and marketing is in chaos as people turn their back on advertising messages and turn to recommendations from their friends, via social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter, when deciding what products and brands to buy.

Businesses who can use online tools to cleverly and ethically leverage the power of word of mouth will be able to successfully make the transition from traditional marketing .

Word of mouth marketing online can even be a successful business model in itself. Yelp, a US-based service where people write reviews of restaurants and other local service providers, recently knocked back a US$500 million offer from Google to buy its business.

Justin Kirby, interviewed for this month’s HotHouse podcast, is the founder and CEO of both one of the UK’s first digital agencies and Australia’s word of mouth marketing firm Yooster, and is a globally recognised expert on word of mouth marketing.

He says that, “Word of mouth is an outcome, not a set of techniques. You need to achieve a commercial goal, otherwise you just have a viral campaign, some creative content that doesn’t really get you anywhere. Word of mouth needs to lead to customer engagement, in the form of advocacy.”
He cites as an example Budweiser beer’s “Wassup” viral campaign, which, when it was launched in the UK, quickly added a catchy term to the cultural zeitgeist, but was accompanied by a drop in sales.

In Australia, Carlton’s “Big Ad” and Queensland Tourism’s “Best Job in the World” campaign, while wildly successful in terms of downloads, sharing, participation and column inches, were both followed by decreased sales/visits.

What is word of mouth marketing in the digital context?

According to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), word of mouth marketing is “a pre-existing phenomenon that marketers are only now learning how to harness, amplify and improve. Word of mouth marketing isn’t about creating word of mouth – it’s learning how to make it work within a marketing objective.”

The basic elements are:

• Educating people about your products and services
• Identifying people most likely to share their opinions
• Providing tools that make it easier to share information
• Studying how, where, and when opinions are being shared
• Listening and responding to supporters, detractors, and neutrals

Justin Kirby prefers to use the term “connected marketing”, which is broader than word of mouth, although he says it’s important not to get bogged down in definitions. WOMMA, meanwhile, uses word of mouth as the broad term. It has identified more than 10 types of word of mouth marketing, (and claims to be finding more all the time) including:

• Buzz marketing - attaching a brand to a popular topic in the news
• Viral marketing - entertaining or informative messages that get passed along exponentially
• Community marketing - forming or supporting niche communities that share interests about the brand and providing tools, content, and information to support them
• Grassroots marketing - organizing and motivating volunteers to engage in personal or local outreach.
• Evangelist marketing - cultivating people who love your brand and actively spread the word on your behalf
• Product seeding - providing information or samples to influential individuals
• Influencer marketing - identifying opinion leaders likely to talk about products and who can influence the opinions of others
• Cause marketing - supporting social causes to earn respect and support from people who feel strongly about the cause
• Conversation creation - interesting or fun advertising, emails, catch phrases, entertain¬ment, or promotions designed to start word of mouth activity.
• Brand blogging - creating (open and transparent) blogs and participating in the blogosphere, sharing information of value that the blog community may talk about
• Referral programs - creating tools that enable satisfied customers to refer their friends

Justin Kirby says that WOM is still largely an offline phenomenon, one which has been greatly facilitated by online technology. “Research shows that 95% of all conversations still happen in the ‘real world’. However, the digital domain allows us to engage a large number of customer easily,” he says.

Marc Guldimann, CSO of Spongecell, points out that the Internet not only makes it easy to share opinions, but it creates an obligation to do it. “Consumers have become increasingly stubborn when it comes to brand engagement as they have been given more tools to research purchase decisions and feel that they are more informed now than ever on products and services,” he says.

“They also feel that it’s necessary to very publicly share their opinions and personal experiences on the latest products — from iPods to iPhones — to books, celebrities, songs, shows… you name it, someone’s got a blog, Facebook comment or online video on it.”

Making word of mouth work

Laura Lake, writing on About.com, identifies five ways to get your customers talking about your products/services:

• Ask them to try your product.
• Find ways to make your customers feel like company insiders.
• Provide a forum for influencers to have a conversation on behalf of your brand.
• Provide quality service and treat every customer with respect.
• Stay in touch - provide them with specials that they want to talk about.

She also says that you need to do your homework, finding out info such as:

• What are potential customers asking those who have purchased and used your product?
• How are product purchasers and users responding to those queries?
• Are questions, suspicions, and reservations regarding your product handled effectively?
• What are the factors which decide whether someone who hears about your product will actually go out and buy it?
• What is your primary source of referrals, i.e., how did customers learn about and decide to purchase your product?

Not a silver bullet

Justin Kirby makes the point that social media is a confusing term, because it is not ‘media’ in the traditional sense, but is a technology. “Media can exist without an audience – in theory you can have a newspaper, magazine, TV or radio station without an audience, although of course without an audience none of them is financially viable. But with social media technology, you need people in order for it to function in the first place. The real ‘media’ is people themselves.”

He stresses that word of mouth isn’t a new marketing technique, but a technologically-enhanced traditional method. “It’s simply marketing 1.0, applying Web 2.0 technologies. People are on Facebook so let’s speak to them. Why are we not speaking to them in bars and pubs? Because it’s easier to track things on Facebook.”

And like all marketing methods, traditional or new, word of mouth marketing doesn’t work in all instances. Harking back to the four Ps, in particular product, Justin says, “Word of mouth is not a panacea or a silver bullet. If your product isn’t very good, word of mouth isn’t going to help you.”

Listen to the podcast

Tags: digital, Facebook, Justin Kirby, Marketing, podcast, Twitter, viral, WOM, WOMMA, word of mouth, Yooster