Experience Manifesto

MediaPost Publications - WOM: Real People Win Deals, Corporate Blogs Spin Wheels - 12/30/2008

As you know if you're a regular reader of this blog, I'm not always really crazy about the whole idea of WOM marketing. You can go to here to get a good primer on our thoughts if you're not familiar with them. But our basic thinking is this:

WOM is not a tactic or strategy by itself. It is the outcome of doing something really well.

So yes, people respond to other people telling them that a product or service is good. Isn't this how product messages got out for thousands of years before mass and now social media came into play? But, at the end of the day, the product and/or service has to be worthy of WOM and that's the only way to do it well!

My concern about turning WOM into a marketing discipline is that we lose what makes it work. Too many clients/agencies start at how can we make a cool WOM campaign and not enough of them start by asking how we can make something that people truly want to talk about. And by focusing on the wrong end first, we will devalue the entire idea of WOM.

This video was done as a spoof, but it's actually something that has gone on in liquor/tobacco advertising for years, when people in bars pretended to be interested in you simply to get you into a conversation about the brand they were pitching. It's also an idea that was part of the book Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.

Sure, that video is very funny, but what does it mean for advertising? Having a 7 year old (Sydney), I frequently think about the world we're leaving to our children on many levels and certainly, how our work in marketing/advertising will impact how she lives in the future. And I do worry that our manipulation of WOM will create a world where Sydney has to somehow check everything she's told by people just to make sure it's not just a sales pitch.

So, WOM has always worked in the past and will always work in the future. It's not really all that new, we just have better ways to track it today. But it won't work if people believe it's something that our industry has manipulated so that it has little or no validity to the audience. Advertising is when someone pays to get their marketing message out. That's not WOM. WOM is a natural outcome of brands, big & small, doing really cool things organically and authentically. If it's manufactured, people will know and, at best, it will have a short term impact. The truth will almost always prevail!

Word-of-mouth marketing remains one of the most effective marketing channels--provided that it's done well (Emphasis mine), according to two new studies from DEI Worldwide and Forrester Research.  

Consumers don't put much trust in corporate blogs or social network profiles, but will readily listen to people--even if they are employed by the company selling the product--provided that they are open about their mission and relationship to the company.

DEI commissioned a study by OTX, a consumer research and consulting firm, which surveyed 500 Americans over the age of 13 from August 8-13. The study showed that 67% of consumers are likely to pass along information from an actual ("real live") brand representative to other people, and 57% are likely to take action based on that information--if it is believed to be accurate. Sixty-two percent of consumers felt that information received from a brand representative was more valuable than advertising or promotional materials.

In addition, DEI found that 70% of consumers have used social media--including networks and chat--to get information about a brand or product, and just over one-third have then passed that information along to others.

Of this second cohort, 60% once again used social media to propagate the information (that's about 20% of the total). DEI is also launching a social media analyzer tool on its Web site that allows marketers to see how their target audiences respond to different social marketing channels.

Consumers are far more skeptical of information insinuated into social media but lacking the personal touch, according to another study from Forrester Research, which found that just 16% of consumers trusted corporate blogs. A mere 18% trusted corporate social network profiles.

By contrast, 77% of consumers say they trust emails "from people you know," and 60% said they trust consumer reviews.

MediaPost Publications - WOM: Real People Win Deals, Corporate Blogs Spin Wheels - 12/30/2008.

Experience Manifesto: Goodbye, Mary*.

Goodbye, Mary*

AmandaGravel posted the link to this video on Twitter today and it was really funny! Well, at least I thought it was funny. Great take on what the future of marketing might look like. Reminds me a little of one of the main character's from Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, but it was well done and you know, I could just see it happening!

Link: The Future of Viral Marketing… at Social Honeycomb.

Brand New Day Word of Mouth: Madison Ave.--Are You Listening? - BusinessWeek

Reading through the blogworld today and came across this posting by David Kiley over at Brand New World.

Here'€™s an idea to save traditional media. What if marketers and agencies viewed every ad they create and buy as a medium for word-of-mouth.

A few years back, we wrote:

And just look at the entire WOM phenomenon. Now, as part of full disclosure, we participated in the first WOMMA conference and are very good friends of the WOMMA team. But think about it, if you identify campaign 'A' as your WOM campaign, aren't you in effect saying that you don't expect anything from the rest of your campaigns? Shouldn't the goal of great storytelling be that people talk about everything you do??? Shouldn't you be creating TV commercials, events or online activities that all make people want to talk about them?

Honestly, we believe that it doesn't matter what tactic you use, as long as it creates a compelling, authentic and relevant experience for your brand. And it doesn't really matter what tool you use to deliver that story, as long as it's a good story and people want to hear it.

We still spend so much of our time trying to figure out how to intrude into people's lives, that we don't think about what to do so we're invited in. WOM is not a marketing strategy; it's the outcome of a great product telling a great story. During another rant on WOM, I wrote:

My final comment is this. This artificial debate about who's better isn't helping us at all with our clients --€” the brands that buy our services. Frankly, the amount of time that we spend arguing about which tactic is better is why we'€™re not being invited to the strategic thinking table. ALL forms of advertising have value -- based on what story you'€™re trying to tell. It's not a battle between traditional media and new media. We should be focusing our collective efforts on how we can help our clients captivate their audience, rather then on tactical ways we can help them capture their audience.

We believe that agencies will have a greater responsibility in the future to not just help clients talk about their brands, but how to make their brands better and more valuable to their audience. We can't just use cool tactics any more. We have to help clients create relevance with their audiences.

One of my favorite examples today of a brand that has really created a brand new relevance for their audience is Webkinz. Ganz took stuffed animals and made them cool, hip and the must-have toy for 5 - 8 year olds, at least the ones that we know. I need to write a full article about them, but my daughter and her friends spend lots of time on Webkinz.com and collecting Webkinz animals. My daughter even plays online with my Mom and her significant other.

OK, time to start getting ready for the day. Lots of Xmas shopping to do and now that I know CompUSA is closing, I need to see if they have any good deals today!

Link: Brand New Day Word of Mouth: Madison Ave.--Are You Listening? - BusinessWeek.

Link: Experience Manifesto: WOMMA's Word of Mouth vs. Advertising.

Link: Experience Manifesto: WOMMA's Word of Mouth vs. Advertising: A logic game.

We Didn't Start The Viral

Fun youtube video making the rounds showing all of the viral video hits of the past couple of years. Some commercial, some amateur, so professional pretending to be amateur. But mostly just lots of fun!

http://view.break.com/388696 - Watch more free videos

Link: We Didn’t Start The Viral - Commercial Successes at ExperienceCurve.

Advertising Age - So Much for Intellectual Property

Yes, there's a much bigger story here on how brands are dealing with the IP of agencies, but I wanted to give Dell a simple answer to the question that surrounded a full day program that included the likes of Bob Greenberg of Interpublic Group's R/GA, Jack Klues of Publicis Groupe and Sean Finnegan of Omnicom to discuss "how to drive positive word-of-mouth in the digital world," as a Dell blogger put it.

The way to drive positive WOM in the digital world is exactly the same as it was in the analogue world. Make a great product, treat your customers and your employees well. You want people to talk about you, give them an authentic reason to talk about you. Everything else is just tactics. I’ll be no one at their agency confab told them that!

Link: Advertising Age - So Much for Intellectual Property.

Viral Video from Silverjet

We wrote about our first Silverjet experience last week (Experience Manifesto: Silverjet: In the Air) and I just came across the video talking about their women's only bathroom. Little different for an upsclae airline!

Link: Travolution Blog: Carry On SilverJet.

MediaPost Publications - Edelman, Microsoft Roil Blogosphere With Laptop Giveaway - 01/02/2007

You know me, I love to jump on things that I don't like and have even done the occasional dumping on Edelman for some of its previous issues with flogs (see previous comments here). But this, I didn't get too excited about this and think the responsibility here needs to fall on the bloggers, not Edelman and Microsoft. Let's face it, for years companies have sent out samples for journalists to test and then write reviews. That's how it's always been done. So why the beef about doing it with bloggers? Yes, some of them didn't report that they received it from Microsoft, but shouldn't they be held accountable for that? These systems weren't sent out anonymously so that the bloggers would have felt that they were just gifts from heaven? And with many of the new operating systems requiring newer hardware configurations, it does make sense that they would send out a new computer with the new software.

I think that one of the mistakes that we make in this new world is pretending that the old rules don't apply any more. Frequently, they do. So, whatever the processes and procedures are for sending out review copies to traditional media should be the same procedure when sending out to new media. And good writers, whether they be journalists or bloggers, will tell people that they received a review copy and then give an honest review. Period, end of story. I agree with Andy Sernovitz on this one here (he's quoted below). I think that people love to jump on a company when they're down and given Edelman's recent flog fiascos, I think people just wanted to join in. But on this one, I'm not sure I understand what Edelman and Microsoft did wrong!

PUBLIC RELATIONS FIRM EDELMAN HAS once again roiled the blogosphere, this time by giving laptops to prominent bloggers on behalf of its client Microsoft.

The laptops--which were sent out to a host of tech bloggers, including Brandon LeBlanc, Scott Beale, Maurio Freitas, Mitch Denny, and Zen.Heavengames--were top-of-the-line Acer Ferraris, retailing for between $1,800 and $2,300, pre-loaded with Windows Vista--the new operating system the move was designed to promote.

But Andy Sernovitz, head of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, said that the bloggers and commenters are simply piling on Edelman, which was recently involved in a fake blog scandal with its client, Wal-Mart. "This is a small group of anti-corporate bloggers who would attack all marketers," he said. "Because it was Edelman, they get outed by the people who are looking for a scandal. But there's no story here." Sernovitz added that sending review copies of software and hardware was standard procedure.

Link: MediaPost Publications - Edelman, Microsoft Roil Blogosphere With Laptop Giveaway - 01/02/2007.