Measuring Word of Mouth…
Nov 28th, 2006 by Simon
It’s US-based, but Keller Fay are on a quest to actually measure Word of Mouth, in addition to creating it.
The New York Times have written an interesting article on it, including some interesting facts…
1. People talk about roughly a dozen brands a day.
(Even though they’re exposed to about 3-5000 ad messages each day!)
2. The most talked about are TV, Movies and Magazines.
(Maybe content is truly the future for brand comms?)
3. The people you want to be talking aren’t always doing so!
(Who you think your customer is may not be right!)
At the same time, marketeers are busy discussing the value of word of mouth in blogs and social communities vs. traditional marketing spend…
Can Google, Fox turn YouTube, MySpace buzz into cash? by ZDNet’s Donna Bogatin — Does a million plus views of a corporate marketing “viral film” at YouTube translate into a guaranteed brand touchdown? AdAge says “Better ROI from YouTube Video Than SuperBowl Spot,” referencing “Dove Evolution.” Smirnoff’s “Tea Partay,” another proud corporate marketing member of the YouTube million plus views club, has not yielded SuperBowl size ROI, according to Fran Kelly, President & [...]
The point - not sure really! Just seemed interesting, so I thought I’d share.
But, I do think that we need to know what we think about it.
Is it OK for people to mention brands for cash?
Is it going to make people reassess a brand?
Can brand’s make themselves famous purely through buzz marketing and word of mouth?
Or do you still need to ‘position’ a brand in the first place?
Or does it all come down to control - and the thought that people will define your brand without you deciding what it stands for is just too frightening to accept!
Interesting to see if Keller Fay can measure online buzz and talk.
Something worth spending time with on this is topic is Google. Google has had success predicting the box office success of a feature film 8 weeks before the movie opens in theaters — based on their research and online search patterns.
Wow.
Now, imagine if we could use online to measure offline advertising effectiveness.
That would be the holy grail of marketing media metric measurement madness!
No Effie would ever be the same.
…and if anyone Google can do it.
For example, using a combination of Google’s geographic targeting we might look at online Search patterns along a specific street where say an outdoor bus ad campaign ran. We could in effect look at online to measure offline.
“Google Trends” is a simplistic tool that begins to tap into this that anyone can play with.
No doubt the minds and brains at Google are sitting on an amazing resource inside the Googleplex…
…the “Database of Intentions”, as John Battelle describes.
Screw the multi-million advertising research tracking thing that takes months to see results!!