It’s that old adage you see, ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity‘. So when Harry Hill reaped Harvester restaurants for a bit of Saturday night comedy the other week, it’s hardly surprising traffic to their website doubled.
This is great news for any business of course. More eyes leads to more intrigue, and the law of averages alone says you should get a few more covers through the door. But a big bang quickly dies down, and hits on a website can only do so much. Where do potential diners go from there? What do they hear when they ask their peers about Harvester? What do they experience when they actually get there and chow down? These experiences for any customer, are just as important as the catalyst that drives their interest in the first place.
By all accounts, Harvester didn’t know about the impending flurry of interest, so it will be interesting to see how things pan out long term. Come next week, it would be nice to see their conversation continuing to tick over. If not, then it could serve as a lesson on missed opportunities for others looking to capitalise on mass media coverage. Word of mouth thrives on mass coverage, not in spite of it. Fail to stimulate it and you fail to nurture the long term conversations and advocates that will help you convert the intrigued, into the committed.
I for one, hope things go well for Harvester however, if only because a positive outcome carries with it the possibility of seeing the writer’s of ‘Have I Got News For You’ go in front of a tribunal for receiving bungs from Little Chef. Now that would be good weekend viewing.
I know, I know. A post involving the ‘c-word’ already. But for brands wanting to maximise recession-hit holiday retail, it’s already high on the agenda – and many are realising that word of mouth could be the key to their success. The American digital marketers at OneUpWeb have just released their 2009 Holiday Report, and one of the key findings is that WOM is driving on and offline retail in the US like never before.
A recent Penn State study found that one in five tweets mention specific brands or services. But according to eMarketer research cited in the report, consumers aren’t just airing opinions – they’re getting much more direct in their referrals, with 25% of US social media users now directly linking to a company, product or service as part of their regular interaction online. As the report authors conclude, ‘long-term growth on social sites may play a more influential role in consumer behaviour this holiday season than ever before.’
It seems no coincidence that The Wall Street Journal is reporting that online retailers are focusing on customer service rather than big discounts to secure festive sales. It’s the experience of a brand that really gets people talking, so in a word of mouth dominated environment, it’s no wonder the likes of Amazon, Zappos and Ebay are devising ways to restore the ‘wow’ factor into the customer journey, rather than pushing cheap sales at the cost of the quality of engagement.
It’s a lesson companies around the world need to start learning: this trend is only going to increase.
What is ‘a trusted source of information’ for you nowadays? If you’re in the majority, it’s a close friend or family member – someone in your social network who you can rely on to filter facts through an intelligent viewpoint and root out the interesting and relevant stuff. That’s the principle behind Google’s Social Search, launched this week.
The idea is that Google scrape the WOM from your contacts on the likes of FriendFeed and Twitter – any account you’re willing to add to your Google profile – to get their take on whatever you’re looking for. It’s a big step in the right direction for those of us who use our relationships with others as our chief filter in the great untamed wilderness of social media; many of us have been using Twitter to do that for a while.
However, there’s still a big search gap to be bridged between ‘high page-ranking official blurb’ and ‘stuff my friends happen to be nattering about’. As Matt Morrison, Global Head of Digital for Porter Novelli, aka @mediaczar, discussed in this morning’s presentation about Social Network Analysis for WOM UK, homophily (‘love of the same’) tends to mean that we gather likeminded folk around us, but also become more like them as we spend time interacting. It’s one of the chief social glues, but it also means we can get trapped in closed and self-reinforcing microcosms.
The truth is that search will never be the only, or even the best, route to discovery. Many of my passions – theatre, literature, Hitchcock films, gin – are only shared by few of my close friends, and the real discoveries I make in social media happen when I leap a couple of connections to find new global voices discussing these things. So often the best way to really find out about what you love is to socialise, not search – mine existing networks for interesting new members, click through the blogrolls of your favourite writers – the equivalent of bumping into people at a party in a place you love.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m having great fun playing with Social Search today and discovering just how much my mates like talking about over-the-knee suede boots – although it’s still very restricted on the ‘friends’ it can identify. But it’s also reminded me that word of mouth impacts on my life in incredibly disparate, random and amorphous ways, beyond the visible island of my ‘inner circle’ of trusted influencers.
There’s a nice piece in the Chicago Tribune this week about a new business trend emerging: reverse mentoring, where social media savvy young employees induct their older superiors into the landscape and language of the connected world. It’s an example of using conversation as an internal change agent, something I touched on last week, and it’s really resonates with the brand consultancy I’ve been involved with over the past few days.
A common complaint execs make is ‘I just don’t have the time. Playing around in these platforms and communities is a massive drain on our resources’. The only real response here is: tough. As Gordon Brown’s foray onto Mumsnet showed, there’s no shortcut to understanding why and how online word of mouth works. In fact, it’s that investment in time and effort – not money and advertising – that consumers will repay with their attention in social media.
Nearly every company will have staff members who are active in these spaces every day, and whose enthusiasm could be used to drive buy-in throughout the business. In fact, the best person to run your Twitter feed or blog might not be the CEO, but the bright kid who joined a few months ago, but who is bursting with passion for what he does, and who knows how to offer a personal and colloquial entry point for others interested in the brand. Yes, he’ll need some mentoring around what is appropriate, but don’t dismiss the energy and skills he can bring.
So ow do you find him (or her)? If you’re a small organisation, try talking to your employees (gasp). If you’re big, take advice from The Wall Street Journal and try social computing and social search within the company…
If you’re looking to trade in new terrain, you need a native to be your guide.
This is a post about Pheidippides or, more accurately, what he got up to one afternoon in 490BC.
It was the day of the Greek victory over the Persians at The Battle of Marathon, and since status updates were a fair way off, ole Phei’ was charged with relaying news of the win to Athens. Unfortunately, Athens was 25 miles away, and that meant a brisk jog. On arriving in Athens, Pheidippides managed to utter just three words – ‘We have won’ – before dropping the floor, where he died of exhaustion. It seems the 150 mile jaunt he’d had to Sparta just the day before didn’t help his cause.
Now, what does this tale of Athenian expiration have to do with us? Well, Pheidippides was carrying a message. Indeed he carried that message and he delivered that message. But then he died. After that, he didn’t carry any more messages. Nor did he have time to pass on further information, or discuss the implications of the message. That’s a lot of effort for three words.
What Pheidippides did was fulfil the basic function of carrying a message, and no more. Two and a half thousand years later, not everyone’s progressed much further…
The technological revolution has dropped the cost of mass communication significantly. Now anyone with access to a computer can begin pumping their own message into the world without so much as a need to move a mouse 25 centimetres, let alone 25 miles. Suddenly we’re being bombarded with messages, which makes upping the quality of what you say (and how you say it) important if you want people to take notice of it.
All too often I still see platforms, fan pages, blogs and websites created for one purpose only: to carry a marketing message.
“We want to let people know about our new range of waterproof socks” yells Marketing Manager A. “Why don’t we build a microsite based around them and let people learn about them there?!” hollers back Marketing Guru X. “And what do we do with the site after the campaign finishes?” muses Marketing Manager B. “Meh” grunts Marketing Guru X…
It’s strange thinking.
With such a wealth of platforms already out there online, it makes more sense to position a message somewhere people are already talking. That way, they can take the message and keep running with it, talking about it, shaping it and discussing it for as long as they want. Even better, if it turns out you have another message that you want to pass on, you can revisit – envelope in hand – and with minimal fuss, keep the conversation going.
I’ve long thought of it this way: would you found a newspaper just to pubish one story?
You wouldn’t.
It shouldn’t be any different in the online world, just because you can.
The richest conversation and the most trustworthy messages come from the places we know and love. If they’re already out there why not make use of them?
This is a post about Pheidippides or, more accurately, what he got up to one afternoon in 490BC.
It was the day of the Greek victory over the Persians at The Battle of Marathon, and since status updates were a fair way off, ole Phei’ was charged with relaying news of the win to Athens. Unfortunately, Athens was 25 miles away, and that meant a brisk jog. On arriving in Athens, Pheidippides managed to utter just three words – ‘We have won’ – before dropping the floor, where he died of exhaustion. It seems the 150 mile jaunt he’d had to Sparta just the day before didn’t help his cause.
Now, what does this tale of Athenian expiration have to do with us? Well, Pheidippides was carrying a message. Indeed he carried that message and he delivered that message. But then he died. After that, he didn’t carry any more messages. Nor did he have time to pass on further information, or discuss the implications of the message. That’s a lot of effort for three words.
What Pheidippides did was fulfil the basic function of carrying a message, and no more. Two and a half thousand years later, not everyone’s progressed much further…
The technological revolution has dropped the cost of mass communication significantly. Now anyone with access to a computer can begin pumping their own message into the world without so much as a need to move a mouse 25 centimetres, let alone 25 miles. Suddenly we’re being bombarded with messages, which makes upping the quality of what you say (and how you say it) important if you want people to take notice of it.
All too often I still see platforms, fan pages, blogs and websites created for one purpose only: to carry a marketing message.
“We want to let people know about our new range of waterproof socks” yells Marketing Manager A. “Why don’t we build a microsite based around them and let people learn about them there?!” hollers back Marketing Guru X. “And what do we do with the site after the campaign finishes?” muses Marketing Manager B. “Meh” grunts Marketing Guru X…
It’s strange thinking.
With such a wealth of platforms already out there online, it makes more sense to position a message somewhere people are already talking. That way, they can take the message and keep running with it, talking about it, shaping it and discussing it for as long as they want. Even better, if it turns out you have another message that you want to pass on, you can revisit – envelope in hand – and with minimal fuss, keep the conversation going.
I’ve long thought of it this way: would you found a newspaper just to pubish one story?
You wouldn’t.
It shouldn’t be any different in the online world, just because you can.
The richest conversation and the most trustworthy messages come from the places we know and love. If they’re already out there why not make use of them?
Conversation happens in a whole host of places. On the bus, in the pub, at the water cooler and – of course – online. One thing to always be aware of therefore, is that where you hear a conversation can impact hugely on what you will learn from it.
Let’s take Nick Griffin’s appearance on BBC Question Time last night – a nice hot topic of conversation today. I’m sure you have your opinion on it if you saw it. If you didn’t however, and you wanted a run down of the general concensus as to how it all went, you might jump online. Say you went to Twitter, and search on the #bbcqt hash tag. You’d get a broad view, and you’d probably feel things had gone a certain way. Say however, instead, you opted for the BBC’s news forums. Read that conversation, and you’ll get a very different view.
The freedom for people to discuss what they want is not, and should never be in question. The understanding that different people have different conversations in different places is however, important to remember.
From most commentary you see on the web, you’d be forgiven for thinking that word of mouth was invented by the US and UK, and that all social media is rooted in western psychology and the English language. However, as a global agency, we’re keenly aware of the opportunities and challenges of working with WOM in different continents and countries, ensuring campaigns are hyperlocal but with a consistent worldwide reach.
In this vein we exchange a series of guest posts with global WOM experts - see Spolem’s post for us on social networking in Poland, and ours for them on our pan-European work for Castrol – and also arrange virtual events on Tangler whereby those embedded in online communities around the world can share their insights, hopes and challenges.
Our latest panel has been on the state of social media in Asia and we’ve put together a top-level summary of the discussion below. Have a look through and join our next WOM Expert Group on Latin America, taking place this afternoon and on Friday, 2.30 – 5.30pm.
I’m a word geek. An etymology nerd. So this morning I went back to basics and sought out the roots of ‘conversation’ in the dictionary. In amongst the obvious definitions – informal interchange of thoughts and ideas, intimate acquaintance etc. – was an interesting, now obsolete use of the term: behaviour or manner of being.
It’s about time that one came back into common currency.
Most brands now understand that a conversational approach helps them to listen to their consumers and engage with them in a personal and flexible way. But it’s the ones who see conversation as a whole way of being for their business, inside and out, who are benefiting the most. WOM is about how you talk internally, quickly and creatively sharing information, links and ideas with everyone from the lowliest admin guy to the swankiest CEO (we love Socialcast so talk to us if you fancy it for yourself). WOM is about how your staff talk about the business in their everyday lives and on social media, maintaining the fine balance between freedom of speech, enthusiastic advocacy, and necessary discretion. WOM is about how you recruit new staff in a way that feels natural and empowering to them. WOM is about how the teenager in your store treats his customers, about the simple functional twist in your packaging, about what you serve in the canteen.
That’s why WOM needs to be ‘owned’ by every department, not just Digital or PR.
As this is already starting to sound a bit Yoda, I may as well go ahead and quote the wrinkled one himself: “Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” Be conversational; don’t just do.
The PM’s repeated refusal to name his favourite biscuit was only one reflection of his generally awkward tone. But the press obsession with what is now being dubbed ‘biscuitgate’on the boards suggests that the issue was the Brown’s failure pander to the lighthearted, chatty approach of the online community.
Instead, the real problem was his avoidance of the gritty issues – the fact that he underestimated his audience. This from member hatwoman:
blimey – I spend ages the night before composing my question about the Human Rights Act (something I actually care about). it got completely ignored (confirming my suspicion that, in fact, no-one cares about it), and then I make a short quip about something I don;t actually care that much about (childcare vouchers – I don’t care about them in their form of a tax relief for those people I’m not allowed to call “middle income” -I’d rather see the money spent on the more needy, as someone else has said), and said quip is flawed anyway (because of the tax credits thing someone pointed out to me) and…I make the Times! funny old world.
People who aren’t familiar with social media often make the mistake of patronising those who do. Brands are a great example. They want to believe that the only folk out there expressing opinions about them are bored teens, or obsessive geeks, or ranting nimbies. It makes them feel safe. It allows them to pretend that social media doesn’t in fact represent the diverse and authentic voice of the consumer, from academics to switched-on OAPs to young professionals. Because if they admitted it does, they’d have to face the truth that these are the people determining their reputation and revenue, and they’d have to treat them as educated equals.
Brown’s webchat also highlights the fact that you simply won’t understand how these online communities interact, what motivates them and inspires them and the language they use, until you immerse yourself in them. Again, I frequently hear executives complain that they just don’t have the time for all this stuff, that they don’t even know where to start.
The answer is to start by listening to and participating in social media (just as yourself, not as your brand) for half an hour or so each day. I can consult for you until I’m blue in the face, but until you actually invest some time and effort getting to know this space and finding how you yourself can become inspired by it, you’ll never ‘get’ why it is so important and influential to your customers.
In this respect, Brown is owed some respect for actually taking the risk and starting to engage – in some ways it’s more appealing that he wasn’t thoroughly coached into slick perfection. And at least someone in the PM’s office has a sense of how to be social – yesterday Mumsnet founder Justine reported that she’d “just taken delivery of six tubes of choc chip butter biscuits from Downing St with a note from the PM saying he enjoys these ones”. But how much more impressive would it have been if Brown had sent over some longer answers to the policy questions he didn’t have time for?
A common complaint execs make is ‘I just don’t have the time. Playing around in these platforms and communities is a massive drain on our resources’. The only real response here is: tough. As 
