FreshNetworks Blog

I have to admit that I have never been to an Olive Garden. In fact I only know it from an episode of Will & Grace, and only realised it was a real chain when I read an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. And not only is it a real chain, but it has a great and loyal following.

One famous brand ambassador in particular takes every opportunity to tell us about the brand. Sounds great, the kind of endorsement many brands dream of. The only problem is that this particular brand ambassador is not completely wanted by the brand.

Kendra Wilkinson, a Playboy cover model, television star and one of Hugh Hefner’s three live-in girlfriends, professes deep love for the Olive Garden Italian restaurant chain [...] To the consternation of Olive Garden’s marketers, who have spent millions crafting the franchise’s family-friendly image, the 23-year-old adult-entertainment star and aspiring real-estate mogul repeatedly uses her spotlight to rave about its midprice eateries

Ms Wilkinson’s brand advocacy is strong and she uses a mix of traditional and social media to spread her thoughts on the brand. Pictures and endorsements on her MySpace page are particularly effective as she has more than 730,000 friends. On one hand Olive Garden is getting the benefit of the kind of amplification of brand advocacy that you get in social media. But for them, this advocacy may not come from somebody they want associated with the brand.

So what should a brand do if it gets an unwanted brand ambassador, and should they even worry about who is enthusiastic about them? In reality there is very little that you can do. Brand ambassadors are great - they enjoy your product and are willing to go and tell lots and lots of people about it without you having to do a thing (except continue to give them the great product you make anyway). You can really benefit from them, we know that people are much more likely to trust real people than they are a brand and so when these real people recommend your brand the power is great.

The problem is that you do have no control over the situation. You can’t control who will really enjoy your brand, and you can’t control which of these people will be passionate enough to tell other people. So maybe you shouldn’t try. Maybe you should do what Starbucks do, and never comment publicly about who may or may not have been pictured with your product. Let them get on and do their thing and talk about your brand if they want to.

What you can do, however, is work actively to find advocates and amplify their word of mouth. Your brand advocates can be very separate from the brand itself - but they are really passionate about you and so engaging them can bring real benefits. These people truly believe in your brand, they want to belong to it and want to go and bear witness, telling other people about it. Though you can’t control them, what you can do is to equip them with the tools to do this. The means to tell people and to pass on their brand advocacy.

You can’t choose who your brand ambassadors are, but amplifying the word of mouth of all these people will be only positive for your brand. And it will mean that it is not just the more famous ambassadors who are widely associated with your brand, others will too.

Some more reading

• Olive Garden Would Prefer to No Longer be Playmate’s ‘Soul Food’ [No Accounting For Taste]
• Olive Garden Shuns Playboy Endorsement; Sticks To Breadsticks [Public Relations]
• What Happens When a Big Breasted Blonde Offers an Unsolicited Endorsement of a Family Restaurant Chain
• Playboy’s ‘Girls of Olive Garden’ Pictorial Likely to Be Served Lukewarm, In Need of Flavoring [Service With A Smile]

Many of our clients and others we talk to are looking to use online communities or social networks to influence the word of mouth for their brand or product. They see the conversations that people are having about their brand, recognise that these are influential, and want to use them to impact positively on how people perceive them.

It’s true that online conversations are important sources of word of mouth. As Forrester told us earlier this year, 83% of people trust recommendations of peers or contacts and so harnessing the power of social networks and online communities can be powerful.  Influencing this communication can reap serious rewards for an organisation in terms of influence and opinions about the brand, although it must, of course, be done correctly. Too many examples (such as the classic Wal-Marting across America) show the dangers of trying to influence word of mouth and failing.

At FreshNetworks we like to distinguish between social networks (a place I go to for me) and online communities (a place I go to for us). From a word of mouth perspective, both offer opportunities but in very different ways. Social networks are better for buzz and online communities for building something that is more sustainable.

Both buzz and sustainable word of mouth are valuable, but in terms of building brand and building engagement, it is the sustainable version that is more important. Buzz is great for pushing out a message, whereas the sustainable version creates the ongoing engagement and word-of-mouth that builds brand and contributes to the recommendations and referrals that are important in the online world.

So growing ongoing word of mouth is something all brands should be thinking about.

We’ve been asked by the Word of Mouth Association in the UK (WOM UK) to present our thoughts on this at one of their Espresso Briefings. We’ll be looking in more detail at social networks and online communities. Showing the benefits different organisations have had from engaging through social networks and online communities, how they can help engage customers and, critically, how they build advocacy and amplify word of mouth.

If you want to join us at the WOM UK Espresso Briefing on the 30th July then more details of how to register can be found here.

After the event I’ll post the slides on the blog for those who can’t make it.

Some more reading

• Word Is You Can Be a Word of Mouth SuperGenius
• The Art of Conversation - It’s About Listening Not Marketing
• Managed Word of Mouth-Still Thinking
• My Word of Mouth Saves You Over Two Hundred Bucks
• Andy Sernowitz on Word Of Mouth Marketing

There is a great blog post by Jennifer Leggio here about how Mozilla achieved a world record in number of software downloads for its latest Firefox 3 browser launch. Famed for their word of mouth customer engagement strategy, they have continued to show other brands just how its done.

The interesting thing about the latest strategy is the creation of their own Spread Firefox community site, making it the central hub that connects up all the other networks in the ecosystem. From this site their brand advocates were invited to help get ready for ‘Download’ Day’ and were equipped with badges and download pledges to put on their other social network sites. Members of these communities were pointed back to the Spread Firefox community site.

A great example of how word of mouth can be measured in spades: 1.7m pledges, 43m people reached through the placing of badges on other networks, 8m downloads in 24hrs!

Some more reading

• Firefox 3 Makes It Into the Guinness Book of World Records
• Its official - you helped set a World Record
• Firefox over 19% market share mark

A new study from ExpoTV shows that 55% of consumers want an ongoing dialogue with brands. The study investigates how brands and consumers interact, and in particular how consumers want brands to engage them. And the results are exciting. In addition to the 55% wanting an ongoing dialogue, 89% of respondents said they would feel more loyal to a brand if they were invited to take part in a feedback group

These results mirror our own experiences, where involving people in a true feedback process has positive impacts on loyalty and advocacy. The ExpoTV survey looks into this in more depth and shows also how consumers will spread this positive message.

Of those who have a positive experience, 92% said they would recommend the brand to somebody else. Perhaps more striking from the perspective of generating buzz, 60% of people said they would tell 10 people or more about a brand they liked and a third would tell 20 people or more. There is a lot of willingness to create buzz and word-of-mouth for a brand that you like. There is a real strengthening of positive feelings when a brand engages a consumer. And there is a real willingness on the part of the consumer to take part in such engagement.

These are the building blocks of a really successful word-of-mouth and advocacy campaign. People want to be engaged and if you do it, this will only have a positive impact on feelings towards the brand.

For every 100 consumers about 55 want to engage with you. And nine out of ten of those that you engage would feel more positive about you as a result. So from any group of 100 customers that you try to engage in a feedback group or online community, 50 would be more loyal to the brand as a result.

From these 50 people, about a third (or 16 people) would tell more than ten people about the brand (so at least 160 people from our group) and another third would tell more than 20 people (so at least 320 people from our group). So as a conservative estimate from those 100 people you try to engage:

• 50 of the original 100 become more loyal to the brand, and tell a further
• 480 other people about how positive they feel about the brand.

This survey helps us to understand motivation for taking part in an online community or feedback group, and the benefits it will cause.

As a conservative estimate, these results suggest that for every 100 people you try to engage in an online community, 50 will leave more loyal to the brand and a further 480 people will hear about this loyalty through word-of mouth. That’s a huge impact for engaging a relatively small number of people.

There is a real willingness on the part of the consumer to engage with brands, and a real and demonstrable benefit to the brand of them doing this.

This morning we spent some time with Robert East, Professor of Consumer Behaviour at Kingston University. His research focuses on word of mouth and brand loyalty and we spent the morning talking about how you can measure these things and in particular critiqued the Net Promoter Score as an approach to this.

One of the outcomes from the session was an initial set of five principals to bear in mind when trying to measure word of mouth. We’re going to be bouncing these around and building on them internally at FreshNetworks, but if you have any comments or can add to the debate let me know:

1. Don’t confuse word of mouth with satisfaction - only a small proportion of word of mouth is prompted by a satisfactory or dissatisfactory experience
2. Measuring word of mouth by the likelihood to talk (positively or negatively) about a brand misses the critical element - the impact the word of mouth has. A better measure is based around how people act when they receive word of mouth (positive or negative) - how this changes their propensity to purchase
3. Anybody can be an advocate and pass on positive word of mouth. It’s more important to activate the whole user base than to try to find a particularly segment of advocates
4. The world is just more positive than negative - that’s the way people think about things. So you should expect more positive word of mouth than negative
5. One size doesn’t fit all - people are just more likely to talk about some products than others. Recommendations are more important for a dentist than they are for a supermarket. So you can only compare brands at the category level; indeed a different measurement tool may be needed by category

We’ve spent the last couple of days at an event in London which gets together Marketing Directors from across the UK to meet each other, discuss current issues they’re facing and explore some innovative solutions. It was a great opportunity for us to meet people across different industries and find out the issues they’re facing.

The one word that came up again and again during the day was ‘advocacy’. Two great examples from the day are Aga and Save the Children.

Aga are currently launching a campaing called ‘This is My Aga’ (see here) and encouraging people to join a community where they can log where their Aga is, chat with other owners and share ideas, news and stories. This kid of activity is a great way to allow passionate customers to contribute to the brand, feedback and it gives them a unique place to go to online. For Aga this is about building a network of passinate Aga owners who will discuss their product on the community and outside the community. Building advocacy for the brand and product in the wider communities they’re in. By letting owners connect and feel part of an exclusive community they create positive attitudes towards Aga, which can only be good.

In a different sector, Save the Children, want to educate people about what their work involves, who is helped and where. They need to build a network of people who understand this and spread the word - becoming advocates of their work. To help achieve this, they’ve built Kroo Bay, an online community that lets you see video tours of and connect with the Children of Kroo Bay in Sierra Leone. The purpose of this site (and the campaigns that will drive people here) is to let people see and understand first hand what life is like in Kroo Bay and the work that Save the Children are doing there. They believe that by interacting with people in this way they will build real knowledge, support and advocacy for their cause.

These two examples are jsut typical of the discussions I had over the two days. People from different sectors and with different needs are talking about advocacy. A need to engage in a deep and sustainable way with people (whether they’re customers, donors or just supporters). A way to make these people feel special and like insiders to your brand or cause. A way to involve them in your brand and to involve yourself in their’s. Something that’s at the core of what we do at FreshNetworks.

I attended a briefing this week by Weber Shandwick on their very interesting European Advocacy Study, hosted by the Word of Mouth Association UK.  Let’s start with a few definitions. Word of mouth (WOM) is simply a form of communication between two people (about brands, products etc.). Whilst this isn’t new, the speed at which information can now spread is what is creating all the excitement. Brand advocacy is described as “the personal recommendation of a brand or idea by an independent third party”.

So why is there so much focus on this at the moment?

There are two reasons. The first is because of the rise of the ‘amateur culture’ – fuelled by the uptake of broadband, the democratization of technology with the arrival of social media and subsequently marketing power. Anyone can contribute and publish their content or opinions online with few barriers. The second reason is because research has found that over 80% of consumers believe that the best source of ideas about information or products or services comes from personal recommendation.

The Holy Grail for business is to harness their brand advocates and to support them to spread the word about their brand. According to Weber Shandwick, “advocates are more than just passionate customers – they are believers, they speak out and they pull others along. They don’t love a brand they live it”.

Research in 2005 by Dr Paul Marsden at LSE into word of mouth advocacy (as measured by net promoter score) and negative word of mouth were significant predictors of sales growth. The new Weber Shandwick research, in conjunction with Paul Marsden, builds on this original work. It found that brand advocacy prompts product purchase in a third of all cases (which is on average five times greater than from advertising) and that of a total customer base, 30% classed themselves as advocates and 30% as detractors. How do advocates tend to spread the word? No surprise to learn that they tell stories, describe their experiences and help people find answers to real needs. They do not talk about advertising.

There is no doubt that there is incredible potential to converse directly with customers online to support advocacy (which should in turn increase sales; lower advertising costs and help protect brand reputation). There are other benefits too – such as turning to customers to gain insight and involving them in product and service innovation. There are countless examples of success in this area including Dell Ideastorm and Threadless.

Brands are experimenting with WOM marketing using a range of different techniques including viral marketing, buzz marketing and building customer communities to support opinion leaders and influential customers. There is a good explanation of the differences on Emmanuel Vivier’s blog here.

But there is a potential conflict with some WOM techniques. I still feel that there are some marketers that see WOM as another ‘push’ model or just another marketing channel to control and measure. This may create some short term benefits but consumers will see through much of this as yet another form of advertising that lacks authenticity. And if your house is not in order, negative WOM can amplify the message to an even greater extent and your customers will have no problem in talking loudly about your shortcomings online.

Creating open, transparent and sustainable conversations with customers is the secret to long term success. Conversations need to be held in straightforward language, not corporate speak for ordinary folk to understand. Accepting that this is a two way process and that people will want to talk about the positive and negative aspects of your business will build trust and long term engagement. One of the key drivers of brand advocacy is ‘surprise’ when a brand exceeds customer expectation. An online customer community is an excellent way to extend this principle as you will be more responsive and more relevant because you’ll be listening.=

A lot of money will be wasted as businesses attempt to trigger WOM advocacy without a community blueprint. A good blueprint will cover mapping your communities across your business, developing a proposition that relates to customer activity and pain points, figuring out how to manage and resource the community, leveraging related social networks in your space and importantly aligning the purpose of the community with your strategic objectives.

Address these and you will be the one of the winners in any economic downturn because you will have invested in building genuine engagement, trust and loyalty with your customer base.