FreshNetworks Blog

Emmanuel Vivier gave a really detailed and great view of word of mouth marketing. For him we have entered the Consumer 2.0 era - for marketeers the time when you could control people is over. They have become immune to advertising spam and are facing death by choice. You have to be cleverer about how you target people and how you use word of mouth. So Emmanuel’s eight best practice ideas are:

1. Create products that are so good that people want to talk about them

• As Martin Oetting from trnd had said earlier this can either be because the product itself requires word of mouth (no point having a fax machine or using Skype if nobody you know does), or because the product is striking and makes people want to talk about it

2. If your product is not cool, offer great and attractive content for free

• Why has Kinder always given out toys with it’s eggs? Because the chocolate itself isn’t great but people buy it for the additional gift.
• In France Bonux, a dishwasher powder, used to give out free toys for a similar reason - to encourage sales by pester-power. It now gives a free mp3 download with every purchase from it’s site tulaseuou.com.

3. Don’t sponsor the entertainment, be the entertainment

• Lots of great examples here and a real trend at the moment. A good one is Burger King, who made and sold (admittedly rather good) computer games that you could buy for $3.99 with any meal in store. They sold over three million copies. Advertising that the consumer pays you to see!

4. Let consumers participate in making your marketing

• As well as cocreation tools, a real opportunity here is to leverage user-generated content (UGC). As Emmanuel admits, most UGC is not very good. But volumes are high and some is.
• The French radio station Skyrock launched a blogging platform a few years ago and took a significant share of the market. They saw this fitting with their role as a media organisation who helped people to stay up to date. Blogging now contributes 50% of their revenue and also provides the content for their web presence.

5. Provide a service to the community

• This is what Nike have done with iPod. Creating a joint campaign which includes an ability for you to use your iPod, nike trainers and a website (here) to track and record how much exercise you do and to keep up with your training schedule.

6. Make it easy for people to forward your message

• Make it something they want to forward and then let them do it easily.

7. Surprise your audience

• People notice things that are different, especially in the world where we are drowning in advertising. BBC World did this with a series of billboards which allowed people to text to vote in a question - with the results updating on the billboard immediately. Questions included things like were the US troops in Iraq liberators or occupiers. Challenging stuff (see here).

8. Turn bloggers into brand champions

• As previous people at the conference had said - if people are writing about your brand, and they’re well read, then you really should be engaging them. Provide special content for them and they’ll spread it for you.

Another interesting issue raised by Wolfgang Lünenbürger-Reidenbach of Edelman PR was his view that word of mouth is an outcome and not a strategy. He cites the example of viral videos and the fact that usually viewers can remember the video and the concept but not the brand. Unfortunately for Wolfgang, he spoke after a presentation showing a couple of really memorable branded viral spots, but the point still stands.

For me this is perhaps a wider issue with the way we think about word of mouth. Too many people focus on it as a push mechanism. Measurements often focus on the number of people who the campaign pushes out to and not the number of people to whom they then spread word of mouth. We concentrate more on the givers of word of mouth than the receivers. Perhaps something we should build on here - it might reveal some interesting observations.

A great presentation from Wolfgang Lünenbürger-Reidenbach, Head of Social Media Europe for Edelman PR. Too much to squeeze into one post, but he talked in particular about the baby monitor principle and how this, for him, describes the change in communications that we are seeing.

The story goes something like this…

Children know that if they cry, their parents will come. Before the baby monitor you ahd to get out of bed, walk along the corridor and check to see if the baby was crying or not. It took a while for you to get the answer to your question. But with the baby monitor you just need to switch it on and you can bring your baby to you; you get the answer to your question straight away.

This is true of communication. Previously you had to go out to find your customers and then listen to see if they were talking about you. Now you just to switch on the metaphorical baby monitor that the web offers and you can listen directly.

A neat explanation!

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