Media Strategies Editor Jim Meskauskas reports in from last week's WOMMA, where he learned that Word of Mouth starts with Word of Mouse.

In today’s massively advertised environment, Word of Mouth, or WOM, marketing has become a popular phrase used to describe the phenomenon of consumers influencing other consumers to engage products or services. In an age where people are beset on all sides by the near-tyranny of perennial marketing, the din of advertising has inured audiences to the messages being presented to them. Because of this, advertisers are looking to the advertised to serve as their most potent vehicle for carrying those messages.

I can easily ignore a marketing message, either by skipping over it with my DVR, blocking pop-ups with software, or just plain ignoring it out of hand. But it is a lot harder to ignore my friend who advocates a product or service and, being my friend, knows my likes and dislikes better than the many companies that seek to gain my attention and pique my interests. My friend's advocacy thereby lends greater credence to the endorsement of that product or service than a message from the purveyor of that product or service.

But what constitutes word of mouth marketing is more than just my buddy telling me about how great he thinks the iPod Nano is. It is also the collective influence of like-minded persons with similar interests that can spread information, both positive and negative, about people, places and things being marketed.

This dissemination of opinion is made possible through the miracle of modern media technology and the phenomenon of consumer-generated content that it has enabled. Word of mouth has long been, in a non-technical sense, the way that many people come to know and eventually engage a product or service. The difference between WOM in 2005 and my Grandmother’s neighbor sharing with her home remedies for treating poison oak with Witch Hazel and oatmeal is that, today, passions for a product or service -- be they positive or negative -- can be shared with several multitudes more people at once through the use of the internet.

Word of mouth marketing is really word of mouse marketing. And advertisers are trying their best at getting a handle on how to turn this kind of communication into a tool that they can use to their advantage.

WOM can also mean ‘Word of Mouse’

The talk of the town for some time has been blogs and blogging. These personal websites and their often consumer-generated content have come to serve as the hub for what most marketers are now calling word of mouth marketing. According to the latest figures from the blog-watching outfit, Technorati, there are now some 18.7 million sites identified as blogs. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, five percent, or 4.1 million people, read a blog at least once a day (these numbers are from a survey done in the winter of this year; no doubt these figures are going up every day).

After search, the blog has quickly become a source for all manner of information, be it news, alternative points of political view or product details. Blogs have become a phalanx of information on the internet. Marketers know this and want to harness the power blogs have demonstrated as the embodiment of the notion that, as the Cluetrain Manifesto claimed, “markets are conversations.”

The marketer must talk back

At last week's Word of Mouth Marketing Association event, David Balter, founder and president of BzzAgent, talked about an experience he had with a P&G product, a new kind of single-serve coffee maker that uses disposable packets of coffee.

For those of you who don’t know, BzzAgent has a panel of over 100,000 people (these people are not compensated) who are at liberty to choose from a number of campaigns BzzAgent conducts on a client’s behalf. Those who opt in receive a kit typically including a sample of the product. They then post their opinions about the product to the BzzAgent blog.

For reasons unexplained, these coffee makers were suddenly bursting into flames. Though relatively small, given the number of customers versus the number of those customers who are regular users of online media, a “blogstorm” -- or “buzzstorm” -- ensued on the BzzAgent board (it may be hard to believe, but there is also a blog out there titled Single Serve Coffee.

Being a savvy marketer that is coming to understand the notion of markets as conversations, P&G responded to these panelists and their other customers and had those original machines replaced. By doing so, they created a small group of brand advocates who, feeling positive about the company’s response, would now protect the brand against negative WOM.

As Jonathan Carson, CEO of BuzzMetrics, pointed out, the traditional instinctive response of a marketer is that when something bad happens, or bad news emerges, the company “squashes it.” As we learned from Watergate, it is better to open the kimono in the face of accusation than to cover up the errant or misdeed. 

Andrew Nibley, chairman of Marsteller, a full-service agency sibling of Burson-Marsteller, in a later panel made the point that a new blog is created every second. With so much consumer-created content out there, marketers need to do whatever they can to encourage people to commit some of this content to telling positive stories about their product.

Aside from themselves, people love to talk about two things: what they love and what they hate. By creating a strong product, a desirable brand, and maintaining open conversations with your base of consumers even if what they say about you is negative, you will be creating a class of influential brand advocates.

Paul Rand, partner and managing director of Ketchum Chicago, summed this point up very succinctly albeit hysterically, when he said that if you ignore the “Hear Me’s” they will become “reputation terrorists.” In contrast, a marketer addresses their concerns and even if the problem can’t be fixed the fire in the belly may be quelled and the potential for negative WOM curtailed.

ROI for WOM?

Bless the soul of the woman who, during the Q&A period after one of the panels, got up and asked what kind of accountability can be attributed to WOM marketing?

For a moment, I could hear crickets in the distance and tumbleweeds blowing across the plains.

Gary Stein, a senior analyst for Jupiter and moderator of the panel quickly followed the ensuing silence by noting how one mentions “ROI and everyone scatters.”

And that really is one of the most important points to raise about WOM marketing, isn’t it? It’s interesting that what we are seeing in the media universe is both a growing insistence on the accountability of media and a widening quest for non-traditional advertising.

Experiential marketing, WOM and branded entertainment are more popular than ever before. Yet, there is a greater call for attribution of results to the media being employed than there has ever been in the history of advertising.

Needless to say, the crowd laughed and the panelists looked uncomfortably at one another. David Balter offered a possibility for measuring WOM, by suggesting that we tie WOM efforts to something that is measurable, for instance online content developed specifically as part of a WOM campaign and track actions taken as a direct result of contact with that content.

Instant messenger and email are also devices that can be used to affect word of mouth, given their inherently viral nature, and actions taken in relation to them can be tracked to some degree beyond the word of mouth that happens in a random, open environment.

On a later panel, Dave Evans of Digital Voodoo suggested that WOM brings a different dimension to an analysis of the profitable versus unprofitable consumer, pointing out that you may have what looks like an unprofitable consumer whose influence on other consumers may render him or her profitable by virtue of his or her ability to affect action on the part of other people. But actually tracking this effect is far more difficult to do than assuming that there is one.

Word of mouth marketing as a practice is in no small part a reliance on word of mouse activity. People exchanging their thoughts and ideas about brands -- with audiences larger than their own personal interactions can allow -- is possible only through the use of the web as the means for transmitting those thoughts and ideas.

It seems that planned word of mouth campaigns only really begin with word of mouse.

Jim Meskauskas is the media strategies editor for iMedia Connection.