Monday, June 12, 2006

Revision

A few weeks ago, a good portion of the students weren't feeling too great. A bunch of us had just had the mid-term for our Consultation Skills class, the one we have at 8 am, right before WOM. We'd been busy memorizing all sorts of hierarchies and models, and all of them seemed logical enough that we could come up with them by ourselves. Instead, someone else came up with them first, and so we have to spend our summer memorizing the terminology and structure they decided on. At least by our WOM class, for good or bad, the evil mid-term was over.
As part of our WOM class on that Wednesday, we were going over the levels of involvement to on-line buzz. This was a change from my consulting class: the professor who came up with these wasn't some guy I'd never meet. It was my professor. These were Dr. Walter Carl's Levels of Involvement(pdf). That alone made them more accessible, but as we talked about them, the class decided monitoring, listening, and joining in (the three levels Dr. Carl presented) may not completely cover the various levels of involvement. So we added a level between listening and joining in: responding. We then talked about how many companies are oblivious to WOM in general, so the lowest level should be oblivious. So now the hierarchy we agreed upon was oblivious, monitoring, listening, responding, and joining in.
This was not some arbitrary scale given to us by a text book and some random teachers; this was a hierarchy that we as a class discussed, worked out, and agreed upon. Instead of just memorizing what other people tell us in this class, we are coming up with out own frameworks. This is an aspect of the class I particularly like: the field of study is so uncharted, that not only are we students, but we are also teachers. Why else would people read our blog?

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2 comments:

tanyak said...

I agree. That is an aspect of the class that I love as well. I also love that because it is so uncharted, and so few people are avidly involved so far in WOM marketing, the people we learn about in class and their theories- we get to meet. All three of our text books cite each other repeatedly. And our books also cite our guest speakers that we've had. It makes the class so much more interesting when you read about a theory or program and then the creator of it comes to our classroom to explain it to us first hand.
It also makes it a lot easier to remember when you can pair a theory with a face and personality.

Walter Carl said...

Hi everyone! I just posted about this model on my research blog. Thanks for all the excellent feedback!