Tapping into online word-of-mouth may seem scary, but marketers can't ignore it (last of two parts).

In part one, Jonathan Carson, president and CEO of BuzzMetrics, explained how the Internet has revolutionized word-of-mouth and created accessible and trackable databases of buzz. Today he shares how some marketers are learning to tap those resources.

iMediaConnection: At this point, it doesn't seem too many marketers are taking advantage of the online word-of-mouth channel. Why?

Carson: Well, the rules sound easy enough, but they are actually difficult for marketers. Marketing is largely founded on control, and to effectively play in the word-of-mouth channel, one must let go of that control. 

But that’s a scary proposition. What if you get in the ring and people start beating you up? If you are a marketing director and all of a sudden your program results in a bunch of people trashing you online, how are you going to explain that to your CEO? There’s hesitancy to take such chances. That results in a lot of marketers who are really fascinated by the concept but who are in organizational situations where they just don’t feel comfortable taking the risks.

The change mandate must come from the top. The highest levels of management need to understand and create an organizational atmosphere where it’s ok for some mistakes to happen. This isn’t an unreasonable goal because it’s very likely that online consumers are already causing some havoc. Really, the riskiest choice is to simply ignore the word-of-mouth channel. Marketers need to get in there and stand up for their brands.

The good news is that things are changing. I spend a good deal of my time meeting with marketing executives to just let them know how we do business. They’re extremely smart people. They get it. So it will come around, it just takes some time and lots of pilot projects. 

We help marketers apply the same rigorous research and planning to word-of-mouth marketing as they do to all other marketing disciplines. Word-of-mouth is now online and we can study it and apply high-quality research methodologies. That is comforting to marketing executives who want to get involved in word-of-mouth, but want to do it in a smart and careful manner.

iMediaConnection: What are marketers who are beginning to embrace this doing?

Carson: An increasing number are researching and monitoring word-of-mouth. We have worked for almost 50 Fortune 1000s already. However, big brands have been a little more cautious to actually execute the marketing. But we are now in the planning and early execution stages with top blue chip brands in the credit card, auto, pharmaceutical, beauty and appliances categories. So there will be much more on the way.

Certain industries are already getting pieces of word-of-mouth right. Software companies have always been strong at leveraging their customer evangelists, and they have translated those relationships online. Apple is among the more brilliant examples, and its evangelism programs have been going on for over 20 years. A lot of the most robust user groups are run by the companies themselves, and the software makers also typically have employees participating in external support forums as well. Macromedia, Sun, Microsoft -- most of the big companies are savvy in that regard.

Auto companies have had to be proactive, because word-of-mouth is such a huge source of buying decisions. Most of them actively track ongoing discussions, and several even actively participate.

The hospitality industry has been savvy as well. For example, Starwood has a famous customer service rep that posts under the name “Starwood Lurker,” and has become a mini-celebrity among business travelers. 

But the big picture is what’s to come: active relationships with the brand evangelists; company sponsorship of individual category influencers; and open participation by company employees in the forums. These are the types of programs that are in planning and that we’ll start seeing a lot more of in 2005. 

iMediaConnection: How do you measure these efforts?

Carson: The fundamental breakthrough that has occurred in the last few years is, of course, that word-of-mouth can be measured because it is in this public, archived format. But it is still a difficult task because the commentary is dispersed across hundreds of thousands of individual forums and platforms, and these points are constantly shifting and changing. BuzzMetrics uses a proprietary software system that was built specifically to meet the challenges of discovering these data, and then gathering and processing it into a structure that is easy to mine, measure and analyze. So we have a database with hundreds of millions of conversations that we gather continuously, and we constantly add new sources that are relevant to developing client situations.

Once you have the data, there are all sorts of measurements to perform. Specifically, when we are measuring campaign effectiveness, we use two primary mechanisms: One, we look at how word-of-mouth changed as a result of the campaign. So we track how the relevant market segments talk about the brand before, during and after the campaign. We look at things like volume of discussion; dispersion of the conversation; positive remarks towards particular aspects of the brands; and attitudes within particular market segments.

And two, we can track the level of activity of individuals that are engaged within a campaign. So for the particular 100 or 500 or 5,000 users that are actually enrolled in a word-of-mouth marketing campaign, we can watch how their posting activity changes as a result of the campaign.

This two-prong approach is powerful because the latter method gives you very tangible direct-response metrics, while the former gives a nice read on total ROI.

iMediaConnection: In sum…

Carson: Word-of-mouth marketing represents a huge opportunity for marketers, but it is a tricky proposition. You can’t buy word of mouth -- this channel is a free space that consumers control. While the PR industry is experienced at working in free, uncontrolled spaces, most other marketers are not. To become effective word-of-mouth marketers, we must learn to listen intently to consumers, and then engage with them in a person-to-person dialogue. This means real-person-to-real person conversation -- not sending a slightly personalized commercial message.