Consumers love social network status updates for personal reasons, but marketers are beginning to see their appeal as a buzz measurement tool. Advertising measurement firm Millward Brown is now pushing for digital word of mouth to be considered an essential metric for all online campaigns after discovering that Twitter and Facebook updates can generate great buzz for products, according to Adweek.
Millward Brown has joined forces with social media tracker Cymfony to track great word of mouth alongside other ad effectiveness metrics. The team will look at message boards, blogs, and social networks and measure them according to volume, voice personality, and sentiments.
The new metric could possibly help marketers differentiate between poor marketing and poor product. Dynamic Logic used Cymfony's capability to measure the success of an online campaign for a consumer products company. After the campaign, Dynamic found that the numbers for the new product were down despite popularity in the social media sphere, suggesting that marketing was the problem.
