Every marketer is looking for the secret sauce that will help them create buzz.

“The pressure to create ‘viral’ advertising, the urge to get more views online, that leads people to push the envelope,” said the President and chief creative officer at Grey New York in a recent New York Times article.

Only a few fortunate brands, however, will realize their dreams searching for viral hits. Among the top 500 brands on YouTube, for example, the average video is seen by a modest 84,000 people. Edgy advertising & clever stunts add to hoping that millions of followers on social media all start sharing what you have to say. These are great when they work, but by and large they are low percentage strategies.

If you want to have a strong batting average, then focus on the consumer’s day-to-day experiences with your brand. Good experiences with a product or service are what triggers people to talk. After all, why do people engage in WOM? To get advice and share experiences about what has worked well for the people they know before they head out to buy a new product or service.

Experience-driven word of mouth is the key to creating positive buzz that will be shared by millions and lead to strong financial outcomes for brands. It is also the topic of a new study my firm has conducted on behalf of House Party, a social marketing company. The findings are being unveiled on May 20 at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s WOMM-U. A white paper is available for download here.

The core finding from our research is this. Positive brand experiences are a very powerful force that leads people to engage in word of mouth, far more than ads, or websites, or social media. Good experiences are second only to “having a need” in sparking conversations across multiple product categories.

Here are some of the other highlights:

• The majority of these conversations which are triggered by a good experience occur face-to-face.
• Word of mouth based on experience is highly credible and actionable, more so than word of mouth triggered by media or marketing, including social media.
- In fact, half of conversations that are triggered by a good experience lead to a strong “buy it or try it” recommendation.
• Conversations based on experience are also significantly more positive in sentiment than conversations triggered by media or marketing alone.
• While experiences are the key trigger for conversation, marketing still plays an important role – media/marketing is referenced in 58% of these experienced-based conversations. Good experiences + good marketing = a word of mouth home run.
• Word of mouth influencers are 1.4x as likely to start a conversation based on a good experience as the average, suggesting that experience-based WOM is particularly important for unleashing the power of this important part of the population.

What are the implications that emerge from this research?

Find ways to create good experiences, which are the key to triggering powerful offline WOM.

Good experiences prove to be highly effective in triggering offline conversations and getting people to talk about the brand. What’s more, these conversations can be very influential – positive in sentiment and highly likely to lead to future action. The bottom line? A good experience can trigger a great deal of powerful, high-quality brand WOM. By delivering a great product, brands effectively create good experiences. In addition, brands should consider experiential marketing strategies that both introduce potential customers to their products and extend the experiences of current customers.

Use media/marketing in conjunction with in-person events.

Our data suggest that some of the most powerful WOM is found in conversations triggered by a good experience that also reference a media or marketing element. Brands should consider integrated campaigns that use both in-person events and some other form of media or marketing campaign (i.e. promotions). The combination of media/marketing and good experiences has shown to be the key to strong and actionable brand word of mouth.

Find the influencers and the message will go further, faster.

The everyday influencers within your customer base are a key segment for starting conversations based on good experiences. Not only are they highly likely to have a conversation based on a good experience, these conversations are even more positive in sentiment. In-person events can leverage the power of influencers for the brand message to go even further since this segment engages in 2-3x as much WOM as the average person.

Wired magazine declared that we are witnessing “The Platinum Age of TV” in its April cover story. This boom time for quality TV, it says, is powered by a “hyper-social, data-driven” approach to new show creation and promotion. “It all adds up to a potentially thrilling new era for television, one that values shows that spark conversations, not just those that hook us for 30 minutes.”

I agree completely that the ability to spark conversation is what separates the winners from the losers in this new, “social era in which we live.”  That’s true for TV as it is for just about all sectors of the consumer marketplace.  And word of mouth statistics bear out this part of Wired’s premise.

Conversation About TV is Soaring

During the month of March, for example, nearly one in five Americans were talking about TV shows during the typical day.  That’s 41.8 million people talking about TV each day and represents a whopping 30% increase from the same time a year ago.

Source: Keller Fay Group’s TalkTrack®, October 2011 – March 2013

What Does it Mean to Be Social?

Where Wired is not quite right, however, is when it starts to conflate conversation with Twitter posts. “When a full 40 percent of Twitter’s traffic, during peak usage, is about television, it’s not hard to see where the action is headed” says Wired.  “And that’s why, some day in the near future, a show’s tweetability may be just as crucial as the sheer site of its audience.”

I have no doubt that a large percentage of Twitter traffic, during prime time, is about television and that social media helps consumers to engage with television in new and still evolving ways.  But it is a huge mistake to think that Twitter has replaced the water cooler or that what’s talked about on Twitter is a mirror of what’s being talked about in the real world.  Consider the following:

Of the 77.6 million daily word of mouth impressions about TV programming, 90% take place offline and primarily are face-to-face.  Social media accounts for 3%.  Is the social media number growing? Yes?  And might it have a disproportionate impact due to the one-to-many nature of social media posts?  Perhaps –although the jury is still out on that.

Source: Keller Fay Group’s TalkTrack®, July – December 2012

The contrast between monitoring just Twitter conversation rather than all conversation is stark.  When Bluefin Labs tracked Twitter posts about the major broadcast network shows throughout the 2011-12 television season, it reported that Fox programs were the most social – garnering 16.8 million posts or comments, or 43% of the total.  CBS was fifth out of five, with only 3.2 million or 8% of the total.

When we look at offline word of mouth, a very different story emerges.  Fox shows earned 3.5 billion word of mouth impressions, or 25% of last season’s total – still a strong showing, but not enough to best CBS.  CBS shows earned 5.1 billion word of mouth impressions, or 36% of the total.   It went from last, when looking just at online social media, to first when looking at the much larger world of word of mouth.

Source: Keller Fay Group’s TalkTrack® & Bluefin Labs

The Youthful Skew of Social Media

There are many reasons for this sharp difference.  One is the nature of the programming, with reality shows like American Idol garnering lots of social media posts.  Also, the demographics play a large role, with two-thirds of those who converse about television via social media coming from the 13-29 age cohort – double their proportion in the population.   A network with a youthful skew will find its programs get more Tweets, but not necessarily more conversation overall.

Source: Keller Fay Group’s TalkTrack®, July – December 2012

Buzz Counts, But We Need to Count All Buzz

Word of mouth is hugely important in TV as it is on other sectors.   But it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that social media is one piece of a much larger social ecosystem.  We need to listen to and count all conversations if we are to truly understand that conversations are powering the platinum age of television.

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A recently released Pew study declared, “The reaction on Twitter to major political events and policy decisions often differs a great deal from public opinion as measured by surveys.”  Sometimes Twitter reaction is more liberal than public opinion, sometimes more conservative, said Pew.  But when it comes to Twitter reaction regarding the 2012 elections and President Obama’s inauguration, the tilt was decidedly pro-Obama.

My firm tracked word of mouth throughout the 2012 election in partnership with the National Journal, picking up both the 90% of word of mouth about the election that took place offline, as well as what was being talked about online via social media, texting, and so forth.

When the Pew results came to our attention we looked again at our research and found the pro-Obama bias is not just a matter of what gets tweeted, it’s inherent in the Twitter audience itself.  In the data below, we are showing the results of adult Twitter users compared to the total adult public, regardless of whether they are tweeting or talking offline about the election and the candidates.

When we compare the totality of adult conversations about Obama and Romney throughout the fall to the conversations of people who use Twitter (defined as the 10% of American adults who use Twitter once per week or more) the results are clear.

Conversations about Obama are more positive among Twitter users than among the total public, while conversations about Romney are less positive.

The differences are even more dramatic when we look at the topics people talked about when they talked about each candidate.  In conversations about Obama, Twitter users are far more likely than the total to have talked about liking the candidate, wanting to vote for the candidate, and talking about issues about which they and the candidate agree upon.

Contrast the Obama results with these about Romney.   Twitter users are more likely than the public as a whole to talk about disliking the candidate, not wanting to vote for the candidate, and about issues about which they and the candidate disagree.

Pew concluded its report by observing, “Overall, the reaction to political events on Twitter reflects a combination of the unique profile of active Twitter users and the extent to which events engage different communities and draw the comments of active users.”  Our analysis suggests it is more about the inherent nature of the Twitter audience itself, at least at this stage of Twitter’s development.

Click here to read the full article.

The transformation in our media landscape is breathtaking no matter who you are, but it holds special import for the so-called “Digital Natives” who are consumers young enough to have no memory of a life without web browsing, cell phones, texting, and high-definition video.

This digital generation, born during the last two decades, was the subject of this month’s panel discussion at the iMedia Video Summit organized by Jack Myers, author of Hooked Up: A New Generation’s Take on Sex, Politics, and Saving the World. Jack’s book provided the premise for the discussion, describing this generation as “the small band of impatient, empowered, multi-tasking, curious, confident, confused, sexually liberated, sometimes binge-drinking and often fragile kids who were the first to be born into the Internet Age.”

In preparing for the discussion, I spent some time digging into my own firm’s database of consumer brand conversations to understand how today’s 13- to 22-year-old consumers—all born since 1990—differ from the older core of the primetime viewing audience, ages 30 to 49. Here’s some of what I found and shared:

- Media Mavens: The Digital Natives are highly engaged in conversation about media and entertainment—TV shows, movies, websites, etc. Whereas their older counterparts talk about media brands on average 7 times per week, the Digital Natives do so 18 times per week, and those who watch TV on Hulu talk about media brands 24 times per week!

- Brand-Oriented: Across all consumer categories, brands are a conversation currency. They talk about brands 120 times per week compared to 70 times per week for their older peers. This brand engagement helps to make them more influential in spreading recommendations, and makes them an attractive target for advertisers.

- Engaged with Advertising: When the Digital Natives talk about brands they are much more likely to refer to something they’ve seen in the media—whether that message has been paid, earned, or owned. Two-thirds of their conversations refer to media, compared to half of the time for older consumers.

- All Media Are Social: Yes, digital media (25%) drives more conversation content for this generation than TV (19%), or magazines (8%), but for virtually every form of media – both new and old — the younger consumers out-perform their older peers in leveraging content for conversation. In fact they are nearly twice as likely as their older peers to refer to content from magazines, radio, and direct mail when talking about advertiser brands.

- Face-to-Face: As one might expect, Digital Natives have twice the proportion of conversations online as the older group (14% vs. 7%). But the surprise is that face-to-face still dominates as their preferred mode of conversation, in three-quarters of conversation, similar to that of their older peers. Rather than stealing from face-to-face, digital tends to steal share away from an older technology: talking on the telephone.

When one takes all these results together, we see a “lean forward” generation, who views media as a participatory activity rather than as a passive one. The sharing of ideas and information has become instinctive for these consumers. Using digital media to seek out additional information in response to marketing is second nature. Technology is an enabler, but this is a generation that lives as comfortably in the real world as they do in the digital world.

In the 1960s, the communications guru Marshall McLuhan described media as “an extension of ourselves.” With their active use and sharing of media in all its forms, the Digital Natives are proving how right McLuhan really was.

Seattle – Feb. 25 (invitation above)

Dallas – Date TBD

Los Angeles area – Date TBD

Additional cities to be announced soon

Think of what’s hot for the holidays and chances are you will think about some new technology product, or the latest toy, or maybe a hot video game. You would be correct in thinking all these categories get more buzz around the holidays than they do during the rest of the year.

But the brands that get the biggest word of mouth spike? It’s the consumer electronics retailers themselves, far more than the products they sell.

With an eye on what might be hot during the holidays this year, we at Keller Fay looked at word of mouth during the 2011 holiday season and compared it to the other eleven months of 2011. The largest increase was seen for the electronics stores, which saw their word of mouth double in the month of December – an increase of 108%, to be precise.

Toy products saw the next largest increase, with a 94% gain. These two categories are far and away the biggest WOM gainers.

Rounding out the top five are three additional types of retailers: e-commerce sites (think Amazon), department stores (think Kohls) and discount stores (think Walmart or Target).

The remainder of the top ten is where we see products such as consumer electronics, video game consoles and games, and alcoholic beverage products such as liquor, wine or champagne, all of which saw gains of between 20% and 30% during the 2011 holidays.

Happy holidays to all, and all the best for a peaceful New Year in 2013.

For a number of years now, we have had strong evidence that word of mouth is highly valued by consumers and that it is ubiquitous. McKinsey has gone so far as to call word of mouth “the most disruptive force in marketing.” CMO surveys by firms like IBM suggest that the overwhelming majority plan to increase their investment in social media, but ROI metrics have been hard to come by and CMOs say increasingly those will be the metrics by which they will measure success of their marketing efforts. According to IBM, “even among the most successful enterprises, half of all CMOs feel insufficiently prepared to provide hard numbers [for return on marketing investment].”

A new white paper by marketing analytics expert MarketShare and the Keller Fay Group, called “Quantifying the Role of Social Voice in Marketing Effectiveness” , provides new and compelling evidence that word of mouth (offline and online) drives sales to a considerable degree – providing both a direct and an indirect impact on sales, amplifying the impact of marketing as people talk about the marketing or share it via social media. And, it demonstrates that the impact can be measured. (For a free copy of the Executive Summary, contact me.)

The analysis looks at brands in four categories – beverages, auto, investments and brokerage – and seeks to determine how much impact “Social Voice” (defined as both online and offline word of mouth) has on marketing and on sales when compared with a range of other variables that might drive marketing effectiveness. (See below for more detail on what else was measured in this study.)

Among the key findings from the modeling are:

• Social Voice has a measurable direct impact on sales. It’s not just a nice to have, but it directly moves the needle on sales. More specifically, a 10% increase in Social Voice resulted in sales lift of 0.2% – 1.5% directly in the cases that were studied. Further, offline WOM was seen to have a more significant impact on outcomes than online social media, suggesting that, “even in a highly connected world, old-fashioned word of mouth contributes more than social media in certain categories.”
• Social Voice drives marketing effectiveness. A significant percentage of marketing’s impact is delivered through Social Voice – in the cases examined, this ranged between 10% and 54%. According to MarketShare, this suggests “that Social Voice is a key element of the consumer decision journey. Social Voice helps bridge the distance between awareness, interest (driven by media), consideration, and, ultimately, sales.”
• Social Voice is a driver of online search activities. Analysis has shown that search activity is closely correlated with sales, as people engage in search as they get closer to a purchase activity. The MarketShare study observed “both Online and Offline Social Voice driving organic online search activity, and that combined Online and Offline Social Voice can drive nearly as much organic search as traditional marketing activities on their own, when marketing activities are also present.” Once again, the analysis finds that offline WOM drives more search activity than online social media.

How the model was built: Once the four product categories were selected (see above), MarketShare incorporated Social Voice data into several multi-year modeling data sets that incorporated a large number of potential drivers of sales, including:

Media ad spend

Non-media marketing spend (e.g., event sponsorships, PR, etc.)

Offline WOM mentions (from Keller Fay’s TalkTrack® solution)

Online WOM mentions and sentiment

Facebook metrics

Google Search query volume

Website traffic

MarketShare analyzed the data and developed multivariate and multi-equation econometric models to estimate short-and long-term advertising effectiveness through a series of interrelated equations. The importance of this analysis is that it helps to move word of mouth from a nice to have activity – who wouldn’t want people to say nice things about their brands? – to one that is understood to be a central driver of marketing effectiveness and sales. It acts as an amplifier of all types of marketing. Only when the role of offline and online word of mouth is understood and treated as a vital strategic asset can brands in today’s consumer marketplace expect to achieve industry-leading return on investment from their marketing investment. Further, the analysis supports the notion – frequently proffered by Keller Fay, including in our recent book The Face-to-Face Book – that when it comes to social influence, offline WOM can play a bigger and more impactful role than online social media. The central importance of offline, face-to-face conversations and the forces that drive them must be understood and planned for by every marketer interested in maximizing their return on marketing investment.