Advocates and conversations

Robin Jaffray.

Creating a great word-of-mouth campaign

Most amplified word-of-mouth programmes begin by seeding products - or branded content - to the most influential people in targeted communities. These individuals are opinion-formers and leaders - they aggregate groups, run blogs and moderate online forums. Providing them with early access to services, information and products will capture their attention and get them talking to their peers and followers. Finding them is rather challenging, though, and usually involves extensive online research and outreach. The main things to look for are fan sites, people forming and moderating groups, and others who are starting conversations positively and repeatedly around your brands. Once contacted, a database of 'voices' allows a brand to invite activity, or sentiment, around its new campaign or product.

Some advocates are sponsored by brands but the majority are just ordinary people pursuing an interest. For example, womworld.com/nokia is a Nokia-sponsored resource providing the latest news, comment and feedback on all things about Nokia from the world of social media. Nokia enthusiasts can fill in a form on the site to trial a new Nokia phone, and then post feedback on the site. While direct incentives from brands are often frowned upon, and anyone receiving any benefit will need to disclose their involvement, brand advocates are more likely to be enthusiastic about propagating a brand's message if it is made interesting and original to their audiences.

Brands need talkers

When it comes to social media, brands and retailers should try to not obsess over numbers of friends, followers or group sizes. Forrester Research reports that over half of marketers simply blanket everyone they can - regardless of relevance to the product or offer. However, it is more important to identify who is going to be interested enough in your offer - and here we refer to the experiences, not just the product - to start talking about it in a public forum. Once a brand or retailer has found a community that is willing and keen to discuss their proposition, they can be provided with the tools and content to engage with the brand, or propagate the conversation. Over time, it will be possible to identify and nurture relationships with those individuals who are more active or leading conversations.

Supermarket giant Walmart, for instance, identified an active and influential group of bloggers called 'Elevenmoms' - who blog about money-saving issues and the challenges of raising kids and running a household - and created a Walmart-owned media platform in collaboration with them. Walmart specifically tapped into these bloggers for their quality content and social influence and the Elevenmoms - and the community built around them - now provide invaluable feedback to help shape Walmart's business.

Steer the conversation

Social media conversations are quite different from a traditional brand campaign. Conversations are not entirely predictable: they ramble or speed up, they go off at tangents and evolve. Hence, it is important for brands and retailers to have a sense of where these exchanges might go and to steer the conversation. We at inferno use a 'touch point model' which anticipates how a narrative might appear, take form and develop during different stages of its lifecycle. Ideally at some point, the narrative will become self-sustaining, or owned largely by the customers, while still following a positive and pre-planned direction. Looking around the nokia.com/ responsiveness hub that was mentioned earlier, an example of how consumers react to a provocative question can be seen, and how the conversation has consequently developed around that pre-planned framework.

Internal resources

At the same time, campaigns hosted by companies need to be properly resourced internally. Social media platforms have to be planned and built. Communities must be managed and the conversation edited. A brand may take the opportunity to host a blog or hub where it can be transparent about its motives, or reveal the product story. Marketing departments need to ensure that they have a workforce with good technology skills (electronics retailer Best Buy looked favourably on candidates who could demonstrate Twitter know-how in a recent recruitment exercise). The company should designate people in the organisation who can talk on the brand's behalf, and who know the parameters and just how far they can go. An issue that can feel like a challenge to many marketers is the real-time nature of conversations. Often responses cannot be planned out in advance, or wait for approval before being posted. They have to happen when customers are online and involved. A brand may choose to outsource much of this work to a dedicated agency, but even then, it is important to ensure the retailer, their store staff and managers are not only linked to the brand's marketing department, but are also actively involved in online conversations and programme implementation.

Tracking sentiment

Measure everything, but don't expect everything to work. A bit controversial, this one? True, though. Word-of-mouth marketing is increasingly well planned, delivered and accountable. However, because of the nature of social media, consumers will in large part be responsible for, and own, the conversation. They might not actively do anything, they might abandon a thread of conversation or they might even badmouth the brand. Sentiment-tracking and buzz-monitoring tools will give brands a decent sense of what's happening, and social media editors will be able to provide specific feedback. Useful tools to consider include Radian6, which tracks millions of blogs, forums and news sites, and Omniture or Webtrends, which can track the number of visits, duration and actions such as the number of times content is added to social media sites. However, the nice thing about trying to fulfil a social media campaign in retail is the added tangibility it affords: you can meet and talk to the people who were online.

Read Part 1 of Robin's "Closing the loop" series here.