Reflection On Jodi Long's Visit To Class

On Tuesday, our class had Jodi Long as our guest speaker on the topic of "Integrating WOM Into the Media Plan." Jodi is a media professional with over 20 years of experience. A large chunk of that time she was involved with CBS in general management of radio stations as well as a national promotion group. She has also done local and national sales management as well as account management in cross-media planning.

I asked her to speak to our class because of the depth of her industry experience and passion in this space. She gave an extremely informative presentation on what it would take to get WOM into the media plan. What I liked most about her talk, and why it was perfect for this class that blends the study of organizational communication, marketing, and media, was that she talked about the organizational decision-making that goes into the media planning and buying process. She layed out, in extensive and entertaining detail, the relationship between the brand client, the ad agency and media buying firm.

I want to summarize some of the key stages but not get into all the details for each one.

Starting with media planning she discussed how the media budgets, goals, and objectives are set annually (making it extremely difficult for WOM components to get into the plan if you're timing isn't right). The Agency then prepares the media plan and the important thing here is that inertia is the guiding principle. That is, if you want to make a change you have to justify it; thus, the burden of proof is not in justifying that the old plan makes sense for this year, but the burden is on justifying why this year something should be done differently.

The approved plan is then passed to the buyers. Jodi explained the "avail" process, which is like a Request for Proposal (RFP), but in this context is specifically an opportunity to pitch business with specific criteria. The avail is sent to traditional media outlets and then the negotiations begin. A key point here is that WOM marketing companies are not getting the avail since they aren't yet consistently on the radar.

The media playing field right now is dominated by the primary choices of TV, cable, Radio (broadcast and satellite), out of home (like billboards, transit, taxi tops), print (newspaper and magazines), direct mail (free-standing inserts [FSI] and custom campaigns), and interactive (online search, email blasts, etc.; mobile might also be included in here). The key point here is that WOM doesn't have a place at the table, yet. [[MY OWN COMMENTARY HERE: Some people might argue that, depending on how you define WOM, you might be leveraging WOM principles but still using traditional outlets in doing so (for example, you might be designing your traditional ads to generate talk value or using your ads to highlight the specific features built into products and services that are designed to elicit certain types of social activity, like engaging in consumer-to-consumer WOM. Others would argue that, while WOM strategies should figure into the planning process from the beginning, it should not be considered a media channel]].

A very interesting point that Jodi made is that existing media channels all "own" something. For example, TV owns reach. Radio owns frequency. Magazine owns branding. News owns sales (for example, coupons). At this point, I asked what WOM could own. And we agreed that one way to sell WOM is to say that WOM owns "credibility."

Jodi then talked about the role of media sales representatives, and the media buy (lots of details here I won't cover due to space).

Then, Jodi went into specific advice she would offer WOM marketing companies if they want to get into the game. She talked about how agencies are very protective of "their" clients and are not keen on having someone else enter the mix, so a WOM company has to be politically astute.

Also, she provided the top five reasons why new media, in general, but also specific to WOM, are not purchased.

#5: No accepted standard for deliverables and cost (ROI models don't exist and there are limited industry-standard metrics)
#4: It's hard to determine how much to spend to acheive an agenda like penetrating a market
#3: Lots of inertia in business. People feel safe with TV and print.
#2: Funding comes from mass media. It's difficult to compare costs analysis because WOM is not a mass medium.
#1: It's an extremely intricate and complex sales process (there's a high turnover rate of CMOs and market managers), with big workloads and short deadlines.

Jodi also provided the class with suggestions about what WOM companies could do to try and overcome each of these obstacles. I won't post them all here -- if you want to find out you can hire her, or take the class at Northeastern :-)

Thanks Jodi for an outstanding and highly informative class!

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Tags: WOM word of mouth Word-of-Mouth Marketing buzz marketing viral marketing marketing communication Northeastern University

Reflections on Ed Keller's (The Keller Fay Group) Visit to Class

On Friday we had Ed Keller from the Keller Fay Group come in to talk with us about the services his company provides and how companies are restructuring their operations to leverage WOM principles. Last summer we had his partner, Brad Fay, visit the class.

We felt very fortunate to have him talk as it's clear his knowledge of WOM and the market research industry is expansive. As I was reading his bio to the class I was wondering how he manages to accomplish everything. He is a board member of the Advertising Research Foundation, president of the Market Research Council, and is President and Director of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. And last year we served together, along with Jonathan Carson, as co-chairs of WOMMA's Research and Metrics Council.

Ed began his talk by explaining how Keller Fay wanted to take well-tested research methodologies of diary-based, day after recall that had been used for many years in the advertising industry and apply them to consumer-to-consumer WOM conversations. Starting in April 2006 they launched their TalkTrack™ service which collects reports of people's WOM episodes at the rate of 3,000 reports per month from a demographically representative sample of the U.S. (disclosure: I worked with them early on as a consultant in the design and pilot phases). One of the more interesting findings to date is just the sheer volume of conversation that take place. According to their research, the U.S. population generates approximately 3.5 billion brand-related conversations every day.

They are also tracking the contributions of what they call "Conversation Catalysts™." These are people who are actively engaged in WOM (as evidenced by how they make recommendations across multiple categories of marketing-relevant topics), and have the largest and most diverse social networks (WOMMA members can download a copy of their recent report, which Ed referenced in class).

One other point I'll mention from Ed's talk is how they are tracking Net Advocacy. Net Advocacy is a measure of the volume of positive and negative WOM. The methodology of computing Net Advocacy is similar to the Net Promoter Score™, but instead of using likelihood to recommend, it is computed using volume and polarity/valence (positive, negative, neutral, and mixed). The Net Advocacy formula is as follows:

Net Advocacy = % PWOM - (% NWOM + % Mixed WOM)

Like NPS, the neutral WOM doesn't figure in to the calculation, but unlike NPS, which doesn't have a "mixed" category (both positive and negative WOM), "mixed" is added to the negative category and then that combined amount is subtracted from the percentage of positive WOM.

So, let's say 50% of a firm's WOM is mostly positive, while 10% is neutral, 10% is negative, and 30% is mixed. Their Net Advocacy score would be:

50 - (10 + 30) = 10

And like NPS, a firm's net advocacy score can be negative, positive, or zero.

Ed explained that a firm could monitor their Net Advocacy score over time as an indicator of how well the company is doing in the conversations of consumers. It will be interesting to see if Net Advocacy is tied to key performance metrics and/or correlated with market share.

At the end of Ed's talk I facilitated a discussion about how companies are organizing for WOM. Ed cited the example of Intuit as one company who has been doing a great deal in organizing to leverage WOM principles, especially with the communities that form around their products and services (a point that we also heard Jackie Huba make in her talk). Ed also indicated that when he presents to companies he has far fewer "background" slides (in comparison to a year ago) about why WOM is important to companies. Most companies now already get that point and they want to move quickly about how to learn from consumer conversations and whether or not, and how, to engage consumers.

Thanks Ed for a great class visit! It was a cold and windy day with an impending snow storm so we appreciate your time and trip to Beantown!

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Tags: WOM word of mouth Word-of-Mouth Marketing buzz marketing viral marketing marketing communication Northeastern University

BzzAgent Dave

Today we were fortunate to have the Big Bee himself, Dave Balter, CEO of BzzAgent. Dave was a big hit last summer when he came to class and he didn't disappoint this time either.

Dave shared some new aspects of his presentation including Five Rules of Word of Mouth and Four Tips for Companies Who Want WOM. The five rules are:

1. Don't sacrifice your brand for entertainment. (Dave's point was that some brands seem to be doing anything they can to get noticed even if it has really nothing to do with the brand).
2. Consumers will do what they want with your brand. (The point here being that companies have to loosen the reigns of control over the brand).
3. Buzz doesn't always equal WOM. (The point here is be careful of doing campaigns that just get people talking about the campaign itself rather than the product or service).
4. Don't lie, steal, cheat, or deceive. (Obviously this is a point about being ethical when implementing WOM initiatives).
5. The only magic pill for WOM is to make a great product. (All good WOM starts with a great product or service experience).

Dave summarized his talk by providing four tips for companies who want to have good WOM. These are:

1. Make a product worth talking about.
2. Let people experience it.
3. Give tools so they can share their views effectively.
4. Get out of their way (let people do what they do best when they have a great experience -- tell others).

Dave does a great job illustrating these points with compelling stories and examples.

There were a number of other issues we discussed but I'll leave it to my students to raise them.

Thanks Dave for a great visit!

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Tags: BzzAgent WOM word of mouth Word-of-Mouth Marketing buzz marketing viral marketing marketing communication Northeastern University

Reflection on Jim Nail's Visit to Class (Cymfony)

On Friday our class had the opportunity to hear Jim Nail, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, from Cymfony. The students really enjoyed Jim's guest lecture last summer and so I was sure to invite him back again.

This time around I had him in to speak about monitoring and tracking WOM, which is one of the first class periods where we're going into detail about WOM program principles and measurement. Whether you're tracking WOM in whatever venues it occurs (face-to-face, phone, e-mail, blogs, chat rooms, usenet groups, discussion forums, online communities, etc.) it's important for organizations to understand the existing WOM that is already going on about them.

To set some context for the students, Jim started off with contrasting models of Influence 1.0 and Influence 2.0 to show the impact that social media is having on how we traditionally understand the influence process between organizations and audiences (in many ways, organizations are now becoming the audiences of what people say about them). He then discussed a number of examples of how social media tools give individuals and smaller groups an amplified voice and also how they interact with more traditional mainstream media sources.

There were a couple aspects that I found really beneficial for my students:

1. The goals companies having for monitoring and tracking social media. These include tracking buzz, issues/reputation management, competitive insight and consumer understanding, crisis detection and prevention, awareness of developing trends, and monitoring employee activity (the last one is a bit "Big Brother" and shows, to me, the control aspect that can still dominate some organizations).

2. The advantages and disadvantages of social media analysis versus more traditional market research techniques. He identified a number of challenges that more traditional survey research is now facing, including response bias, the ease with which people can avoid surveys, opinion fatigue resulting in lower response rates, and the danger of polling the same people again and again. The advantages he identified of social media analysis were that it was observational (unaffected by a researcher's presence), access to direct consumer language that is not filtered, and it was available in real-time. Even though his company's business model clearly favors social media analysis he did a nice job to talk about the advantages of more traditional quantitative and qualitative approaches, including ethnography, as forms of market research. He also identified a couple challenges that social media analysis faces -- representativeness and identifying speakers -- and how these challenges are confronted by companies like Cymfony, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Brandimensions and other players in this space.

At this point I'll let my students comment on what they took away from Jim's guest lecture. Students posed some good questions so maybe they can share what they asked and what Jim's response was.

To Jim, thanks so much for coming in again this year. I really appreciate the care you took in customizing a presentation just for the class and covering so much ground in such a short time!

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Tags: WOM word of mouth Word-of-Mouth Marketing buzz marketing viral marketing marketing communication Northeastern University Cymfony