The age of dialogue is upon us. The ubiquity of the web has given rise to conversations, both online and off, about brands, products and services that are candid and public, giving a new meaning to the term "word of mouth". Unsurprisingly, brands are keen to get involved.
Word-of-mouth marketing - referring to information-spreading and informal recommendations - has been around for as long as people have been able to communicate. For brands, products and services to be recommended in this way lends them a level of credibility that even the most expensive TV ads often fail to achieve.
Word of mouth can also change the way brands are perceived by consumers, making them "cool" in the eyes of potential customers, either through association with particular social currency, such as entertaining content, or an association with ethical values, such as that represented by The Body Shop. Martin Loat, director of PR agency Propeller Communications, contends: "In truth, PR people have been creating buzz and word of mouth about brands in 'the real world' since before computers, the internet or even media agencies were invented. This can be anything from seeding samples, to briefing opinion-formers, to good old editorial placement."
But the rise of the internet has given new impetus to word of mouth as a marketing technique. The exponential growth of social networking sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook over the last few years has had a huge impact in both the real and the cyber world. The size of the communities is awesome: MySpace has 6.8 million unique users in the UK, Bebo has 3.6 million and Facebook 2.7 million (source: Nielsen//NetRatings). People who use them are exchanging opinions all the time, not just about who they fancy, what they listen to or where they like to drink, but - crucially - about what they buy and why.
The agency world is hip to this and MediaCom recently created a new business unit called, cryptically, Word of Mouth, through a partnership with the US online company BzzAgent. And ZenithOptimedia has launched Newcast in an attempt - in the words of its managing director Mark Waugh - to "make brands famous".
Sue Unerman, chief strategy officer at MediaCom and one of the brains behind the launch of the network's Word of Mouth unit, asserts: "Consumers don't respond to advertising and advertising images as they did, and life's a bit more complicated than it used to be.
"The analogy I would use is that, back in the 1950s, politicians used to tell people they'd never had it so good. Now people respond to politicians in a much more challenging way. There is an analogy between how certain brands have been talking down to the consumer, but now need to be aware that consumers are challenging what's going on."
The growing importance of the conversations taking place about brands and products both on and offline is reflected in the number of groups springing up to measure that dialogue. Companies such as MyMediaMonitor and Nielsen's BuzzMetrics track media coverage and online conversations on blogs and social networking sites for client brands, recording when and where they happen, and the tone of the dialogue - whether it's positive or negative.
There are no set techniques for how to create word-of-mouth marketing either on or offline, but the importance of the internet as a media channel in the lives of consumers has forced all companies - PR, advertising, manufacturing and so forth - to innovate.
Katy Howell, managing director of Immediate Future, the online PR agency, explains: "What we are doing is supporting the campaigns online and offline by inspiring conversation. We actively seek influential bloggers and talk to them.
"You e-mail them and have a conversation online, because you can't do that from a distance by running an ad on YouTube."
Howell stresses the importance of creating "social currency", which usually comes in three forms - entertainment, conversation or participation. "If you go to a dinner party and don't know people there, you would bring a bottle of wine, not just stand there," she says. "You'd introduce yourself and find out what those people are up to and talk to them. In society we tell jokes, we find out about people, and that's how it works online too."
The methods companies use to create a buzz about their products is only limited by their imaginations, but the current noise around word of mouth has primarily been prompted by BzzAgent, which launched in the UK through a joint venture with GroupM earlier this year, through which all the group's media agencies have access to its expertise.
BzzAgent recruits agents, encouraging them to sign up by offering them new products early. These people then go out and seed the word about client products in a "natural" way. Crucially, says chief executive of BzzAgent in the US, Dave Balter, the majority of those conversations actually take place offline in the real world.
"What consumers really want is the credible opinion of someone telling them whether something is worth buying, before they make a purchase decision," he explains.
Kevin Murphy, board planning director at Zed Media, adds: "Nothing has more credibility than a recommendation from someone with nothing to gain."
BzzAgent has three key rules: they never pay agents, agents have to disclose that they are a volunteer for that brand and conversations are never scripted. But that means that BzzAgents can say negative as well as positive things about brands and products online.
"We can't make a bad product good," says Balter. "Typical marketing can, but Bzz marketing can't. Marketers' jobs were to make products look great no matter what their components, but this is about the honest opinions of real people.
"There's no value to the company if agents are badmouthing someone, so we ensure that the clients we take on have good products."
And therein lies the rub - word of mouth is not about managing or blindsiding the consumer, as traditional advertising has done for years. It has to be much more honest and transparent, otherwise people will realise quickly they're being toyed with. After all, if you went to meet your best friend in a pub and they started talking about how great they thought Persil washing liquid was, you might think it rather odd. There are many sensitivities regarding how word-of-mouth initiatives are managed - if in fact they can be managed at all.
James Cherkoff, director of Collaborate Marketing and editor of the blog Modern Marketing, says: "The whole idea of hiring people to go out there to talk to their friends about products is pretty creepy.
"Unless, that is, it's managed extremely sensitively with people being transparent along the way, for example saying 'I've joined this social network run by BzzAgent and they've given me a Vauxhall Corsa for the weekend and do you know what? It's really great!'"
Getting it wrong
Getting it right is crucial because mistakes can cost brands dearly. Walking into it with an old school marketing mindset can mean many companies are likely to come a cropper. Cherkoff gives an example that happened about 18 months ago, in which a campaign for kitchen cleaning product Cillit Bang went very wrong.
The ads featured a character called Barry Scott explaining why the product was so brilliant in his own loud, inimitable style. Wanting to capitalise on the character's popularity, the company created a Barry Scott blog with the idea of bringing him to life.
"But they got themselves into a lot of trouble, because the person who was blogging as Barry Scott started to leave comments all around the blogosphere as Barry Scott," explains Cherkoff.
One that he left was on a blog where someone had written a very personal account about meeting his father after 20 years apart. Barry left a comment saying he hoped everything worked out, but a fellow blogger followed the comment through and realised it was a fictional, commercial character, stepping into a sensitive area.
"That ended up in The Guardian in the UK and BusinessWeek in the States. One small comment blew up," says Cherkoff.
Another pitfall is just not being transparent enough - and there have been situations where brands have tried to pay people recruited to say the right thing. That just won't work - it's too obvious to the consumer what's going on.
Sean Smith, technical director at MyMediaMonitor, relates: "In the US, Walmart paid a couple to set up a blog and travel around America staying in Walmart car parks. That was rumbled pretty quickly and then you get a lot of negative word of mouth happening about how these companies can't be trusted."
In another example, when The BodyShop was bought by L'Oreal, MyMediaMonitor picked up on conversations in the press suggesting that the chain, founded by Antia Roddick, suffered a blow to its ethical credentials as a result of the deal. "Through the press we observed that there was a lot negative stuff going on," says Smith.
Many are still cynical about the power of word of mouth in a formal sense, due to difficulties in measuring it and providing clients with hard evidence on return on investment.
Some targets - such as changing consumer attitudes to a product - can be hard to detect. And while many agencies are embracing the current trend, some are yet to be convinced.
"I'd be intrigued to see what it actually generates," says Murphy at Zed. "ZenithOptimedia is all about ROI, so we understand there's perceived to be a value in buzz activity, but it will be interesting to see hard numbers behind what this actually achieves."
PROCTER & GAMBLE'S TREMOR NETWORK
The consensus among specialists is that the strongest case study of successful word-of-mouth marketing is the Tremor network, created by FMCG giant Proctor & Gamble in the US.
Created in 2000, the system works in a similar way to BzzAgent in that Tremor taps into "connectors" - those consumers with "wide and deep social networks and a propensity to share product news". The Tremor network is hooked into 450,000 mothers and more than 250,000 children aged 13 to 19. It rewards connectors who volunteer to be the first to get new products, with tacit agreement that the brand benefits from the connector's social network and credibility via endorsement.
First, Tremor attracts potential connectors to the site, where they are asked questions like: "How many people do you talk to on a daily basis?" They look to recruit individuals with three qualities: inquisitiveness, connectedness and persuasiveness. The chosen few then make it through to a training camp of sorts, to see if their actual behaviour matches their claimed behaviour. Then they're in, and connectors who like the products they try become advocates.
Tremor initially started with the promotion of P&G's own products, but it has been so successful that P&G is now quietly selling the product to external clients - rivaling the world's media agencies.
DreamWorks, Toyota and Coca-Cola are just some of the (unconfirmed) top brands on its books and chief executive Steve Knox claims that 80% of Tremor's campaigns are now for non-P&G brands.
BZZAGENT'S CAMPAIGN FOR CLAMATO TOMATO COCKTAIL DRINK
Clamato's main target audience in the US is 21 to 34-year-old Latinos and it spends 100% of its marketing budget targeting that group. The manufacturer found that trial is the main driver of future volume growth.
It approached BzzAgent to help it achieve the following:
- Diminish the barrier to trial and place the product in the hands of new consumers
- Identify an effective medium that could get the word around about the drink at a grassroots level
- Help drive sales in conjunction with other marketing efforts.
BzzAgent conducted a campaign across 2,000 agents to generate trial and evangelism of Clamato among the target group. Each agent was sent a trial of the drink and 10 money-off coupons. Agents were targeted in both English and Spanish.
Results showed that, within the month prior to the Clamato Bzz campaign, 68% of agents in the campaign had not consumed a single glass of Clamato, while 42% had never even heard of the brand before.
As the campaign progressed, agents became actively engaged with the brand and tried the drink, causing positive opinions of Clamato to rise from 52% to 78% among the group. In addition, agents were able to directly buzz 34,000 potential customers.