On May 22, Brad Fay’s and my new book, THE FACE-TO-FACE BOOK:  Why Real Relationships Rule in a Digital Marketplace, will be published.   You can download a free excerpt from the book here or buy it online here.

As part of our research we looked at the history of word of mouth and social influence, and were reminded that the past is indeed prologue.  My first blog on this topic, reviewed the seminal work of Columbia Professors Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz – Personal Influence. Part two discussed the origins of word-of-mouth advertising in the 1960s and its relevance to today. In this third and final look back I turn to the Cluetrain Manifesto published in 1999.

We live in the social media age of Facebook, Twitter, and their brethren.  Who foretold the current new age?

In 1999, The Cluetrain Manifesto went live.   It laid out a vision of how people will live and why business must change in the Internet age.  It began with these words:  “A powerful global conversation has begun.  Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed.  As a result, markets are getting smarter and faster than most companies.”

The message for business was that as networked markets learn to speak in a natural and genuine voice that “can’t be faked,” respect is being lost “for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.”  Cluetrain argued for a shift toward more authentic communications, and away from marketing hype. Companies should talk with consumers, not at them, and they should nurture consumer-to-consumer conversation about their brands as well.

Was Cluetrain correct that we had entered a new era?  And was it mainly attributable to the rise of the Internet?

Thesis #1 of The Cluetrain Manifesto set the stage:  “Markets are conversations.” For most of human history, it declared, people did business face to face, in open markets, where conversation between buyers and sellers was valued and motivating:  “The first markets were filled with people, not abstractions or statistical aggregates; they were the places where supply met demand with a firm handshake. Buyers and sellers looked each other in the eye, met and connected. The first markets were places for exchange, where people came to buy what others had to sell — and to talk.”

With the rise of the industrial revolution and then the age of mass media, Cluetrain argued, person-to-person connection was lost, to the detriment of consumers and of business.  But with the rise of the Internet, said Cluetrain, people are returning to the “era of conversation.”  Businesses that seize the opportunity and change will thrive, it argued; those that fight it will struggle.  The keys to business success in this new era:  “Loosen up. Lighten up. And shut up for a while. Listen for a change. . . .By listening, marketing will re-learn how to talk.”

The Cluetrain Manifesto was prescient in many ways, even if it took many businesses almost another decade to become comfortable with the idea of being “open” and “social.”

At the same time, Cluetrain was incorrect in one important way.  While the internet is making consumer conversations more visible to companies, we actually never left the era of conversation. Consumers have always made their decisions in a social context, and have sought authentic communications with brands. The reason is that people are social animals, whose survival depends on our being not merely the strongest or most aggressive, but on being collaborative.  Recent advances in neuroscience, evolutionary biology, psychology and related fields have made it increasingly clear that we are hardwired to be social, and always have been.

For all the impressive growth of online social networks, they are not the Holy Grail of marketing.  When looked at in the context of the “total social” opportunity, they are one very small part of the overall picture and needs to be seen as such.  And true to John Naisbitt’s “high tech, high touch” megatrend, online social networking is no substitute for the power and impact of face-to-face communications.  Real world conversations – most of which take place face-to-face – are still the dominant mode of communication by a very wide margin, and they are the most trusted and persuasive.

Today’s consumer marketplace is highly social, but not because of particular platforms or technologies.  The businesses that will be most successful in the future are the ones that embrace a model that puts people first – rather than technology – at the center of products, campaigns and market strategies.   The great social wave we are experiencing today is an opportunity that no business can afford to ignore or look at myopically. It’s happening all around us – and much to the continuing surprise of many, it’s mostly happening face-to-face, in the real world, with all forms of media and marketing having the opportunity to contribute.

By Ed Keller

On May 22, Brad Fay’s and my new book, THE FACE-TO-FACE BOOK:  Why Real Relationships Rule in a Digital Marketplace, will be published.   You can download a free excerpt from the book here or find it online here.

As part of our research we looked at the history of word of mouth and social influence, and were reminded that the past is indeed prologue.  My first blog on this topic, reviewed the seminal work of Columbia Professors Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz – Personal Influence .  Here I discuss the origins of word of mouth advertising and its relevance to today.

The Advent of Word-of-Mouth Advertising

As far as we have been able to determine, the phrase “Word-of-Mouth Advertising” was coined by Ernest Dichter who, in 1966, published an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled, “How Word-of-Mouth Advertising Works”

Dichter was a psychologist by training.  His firm focused on consumer behavior and the motivations that drive them, including the role of persuasion in advertising.  He is generally considered to be “the father of motivational research,” and the first to coin the term “focus group,” a technique that helped him understand “why,” why people were motivated to buy or do or think something.  His work helped advertisers to shift their focus from straightforward product information and statistics, to image and persuasion.

Dichter brought this perspective to his HBR article, which began with the observation  that whenever his firm would ask consumers “what made you buy this brand or particular product?” the answer invariably came back, a friend, expert or relative who told me about it.  To Dichter, this prompted the important question, “Why in a time of increasing advertising volume does Word-of-Mouth recommendation loom so high?”

To provide answers, Dichter launched a large scale research project to investigate the ways in which word-of-mouth recommendations affect advertising, and the flip side – the ways advertising affects word-of-mouth.  Dichter’s goal was to help advertisers refine their techniques such that they could embrace word of mouth and use it to their advantage, rather than seeing it as a force that was at odds with their advertising.

In many regards, it was a precursor to the desire many marketers have today to integrate three major communications assets – paid, owned and earned media.  Rather than treating them as independent silos, or worse, forces that work in opposition to each other, Dichter sought to understand how these assets should work together.

How Can Advertisers Earn Word-of-Mouth?

Dichter provided concrete ideas to advertisers about ways to “earn” word of mouth and thereby earn a bigger return on their investment in “paid” media.  Although Dichter’s advice was given almost 50 years ago, many of his ideas are similar to the guiding principles that social media and word of mouth practitioners deploy today.  Some of these include:

1. Advertisers should provide “proof of friendship” to the consumer, in order to separate themselves from their role as “sales channel” and become a trusted friend of the consumer.  Examples include providing small, but thoughtful “gift packages” to say thanks; helping your customer to feel that they are being initiated into an ‘exclusive’ group by using your product; or “establish audience kinship” through the messages and style of your advertising to illustrate that you have things in common with the customers and truly understand them.
2. Trace “the company myth” – i.e., convey the back story of the product’s founding or the way early consumers used it – in order to personalize the product and create authenticity.
3. Provide “customer testimonials” to simulate word of mouth, which if done properly will allow the viewers or readers to believe that the third party endorser is truly speaking spontaneously and truthfully, and not as a “hired hand.”
4. Design the advertising itself to provoke, stimulate or produce word of mouth.

Dichter’s underlying messages to the advertising community stands the test of time and is as relevant today as it was a half century ago:

• Advertising cannot sell against personal influence;
• Advertising must change from its traditional role of “a salesman who tries to get rid of merchandise,” to a new role of “advertiser as that of a friend who recommends a tried and trusted product”;
• Advertisers should do so by understanding the steps that make person-to-person interaction powerful, and modify mass media approaches accordingly; and
• There is a ready-made market of “influencers, experts, or afficionados” that can be reached and, in turn, influenced by advertising in the right media and with the appropriate creative approach.

The Golden Age of Advertising, or a Missed Opportunity?

Dichter , together with Katz and Lazarsfeld (whom I wrote about previously) and leading thinkers at that time were (for example, Everett Rogers) were not the only ones to extol the importance of word of mouth and influencers during these “early years,” but they were the leading lights and their insights are enduring.  The stage was set, and advertisers were challenged to act and behave differently in order to maximize the impact of their marketing efforts by embracing, rather than ignoring the power of personal influence and word of mouth in the buying process.

Sadly, this didn’t happen.  Instead marketing was overtaken by the era of the “Mad Men.”  It was an era during which the great ad man David Ogilvy felt it necessary to say to his colleagues: “The consumer isn’t a moron; she’s your wife.”  His quote reminds us that it was a male dominated business, and that the consumer certainly wasn’t at the center. Advertising executives were enamored with their own brilliant creativity and their ability to persuade the mass market through the power of their ideas, delivered primarily through TV advertising.  It was a top-down, “father knows best” world, despite the reality that decisions then (as now) were being made “horizontally and socially.”

Many call this time period “the Golden Age of Advertising”; and if you were in the ad business it undoubtedly was. We would call it a three decades long “missed opportunity” for Madison Avenue’s clients.  During those years, the power of word of mouth advertising, influencer marketing, and the like not only failed to take hold, it began to recede from the marketer’s consciousness.  There was relatively little focus throughout the rest of the 60’s right up through the late 1990’s.

In my next and last post on the history of word of mouth, I’ll pick things up in the late 1990s with the publication of the Cluetrain Manifesto and it’s exhortation that “markets are conversations.”

On May 22, my new book, The Face-to-Face Book:  Why Real Relationships Rule in a Digital Marketplace will be published.   Coauthored by Brad Fay, it is a book about the hugely important social wave that is rolling across the world of business today.  But unlike many books and articles argue that online social networks are creating this social wave, we argue that the largest and most important part of social influence is that which happens when conversations happen in the real world, face to face.  There is a vast array of tools and approaches that can be tapped by marketers to drive these real world conversations. You can download a free excerpt from the book here.

While researching the book, I reviewed the history of word of mouth and social influence.  It was a clear reminder that past is prologue.  From a marketing perspective, focus on the role of word of mouth was quite robust in the 1940s, ‘50s and into the ‘60s, before marketing was overtaken by the era of the Mad Men and “the Golden Age of Advertising” and long before the Internet or online social networking.

The ‘40s and ‘50s, we were the dawn of the mass media era, and many people ascribed vast power of the radio and the emerging medium of television.  A prevailing theory of the time, known as the “hypodermic needle model” or “magic bullet theory,” held that powerful mass media could “inject” ideas into people who would directly (and passively) accept and act on those messages.  One incident often cited in support of this theory was the 1938 radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds, and the subsequent nationwide panic that ensued.

To those who advocated the hypodermic needle model, this “cause/effect” was proof that people would hear what the media reported, and take immediate action. But soon thereafter, this theory about how mass communications works was discredited by the eminent Columbia University researchers Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz.

Their argument was based on research – known as “the Decatur study” — the purpose of which was to ascertain how average women in a typical American town (Decatur, Illinois) made decisions about everyday products and services.  The results of the Decatur study were published in 1955 in a seminal book called Personal Influence by Katz and Lazarsfeld.  Among the many findings from Personal Influence were two that are particularly relevant to today’s social era.

People Persuade, not Advertising

The first was that the mass media do not “cause” people to do things or make purchase decisions in isolation, as the “hyperdermic theory” held.  Rather, it identified an important relationship between advertising and word of mouth.  The study noted, “The traditional image of mass media must make room for ‘people’ as intervening factors between the stimuli of the media and resultant opinions, decisions, and actions.”  Katz and Lazarsfeld went so far as to say that mass media, generally, don’t do a very good job at persuasion, but rather tend to reinforce pre-existing views.  Persuasion, they said, happens best when mass media connect with everyday consumer influencers who pass along the message to others, and in so doing are better able to generate new customers.  They called this the two step-flow of the mass media.

Which brings us to a second important, and lasting finding.  In their discussion of these “everyday consumer influencers,” Katz and Lazarsfeld were the first to document the impact of influencers – not people in official positions of power but a group of everyday people, be they family, friends, or neighbors, to whom people look for advice and recommendations because they find them to be trustworthy and knowledgeable.  They observed that influencers are heavy users of media, who tend to learn about and share with others things that are new, interesting, and important.  “Leadership at its simplest, “ they called it:  “It is casually exercised, sometimes unwitting and unbeknown, within the smallest grouping of friends, family members and neighbors. . . it is the almost invisible, certainly inconspicuous, form of leadership at the person-to-person level of ordinary, intimate, informal, everyday contact. . .”

Remarkably, many of the fundamental truths noted by Katz and Lazarsfeld still pertain today, despite massive changes in the media and marketing landscape.  Their findings are an important reminder that people are the force that drives social influence; and that media and technology are enablers of rather than cause people’s desire to share and learn from each other.

In my next post I’ll continue this historical review, focusing on the first advice to advertisers to embrace word of mouth advertising from a 1966 Harvard Business Review article – it is also quite fresh and relevant to today’s times.

UK consumers are talking more and more with their friends and relatives about the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympic games, but the rise in buzz about the games is very gradual.  To date, football remains a much bigger talking point, particularly among men and many traditional sport fans.  Buzz is also much weaker outside of London and the South-East.

These are the findings of the latest consumer research on word of mouth by the Keller Fay Group.  They are based on new, just released information from Keller Fay’s TalkTrack Britain^® study, an ongoing research programme which tracks word of mouth in the UK on a continuous basis.  It is the only such research that looks at both offline as well as online conversation and was launched in the UK in July 2011.

During April 2012, 20% of  UK consumers said they had discussed the Games over the previous 24 hours, which is up slightly on the March figure (18%) and considerably above the levels recorded in the latter half of 2011 (8-10%).  As the Games approach, buzz will of course increase, but at this stage we are some way off from the Games capturing the attention of the entire nation.

The 20% buzz figure compares with 25-30% who typically discuss Premier League football in a 24-hour period.  More broadly, issues such as holidays, shopping, food/diet and money/economic issues are generally more widely discussed.

Encouragingly for London 2012, those discussing the games are not necessarily hardcore sports fans, with women almost as likely to discuss the Games as men.  But the downside is that many of the traditional sporting audience – football and rugby fans in particular – are currently more focussed on their own teams and leagues.  So perhaps attention will shift to the Olympics once the football and rugby seasons finally close.

The other challenge facing LOCOG is how to engage those living far away from London and other Olympic venues.  People living in London itself are around three times more likely to discuss the Games than those in Scotland or NE England.

In summarising the research results, Steve Thomson, Managing Director of Keller Fay UK, said “It’s clear that excitement about London 2012 is building, but at the moment traditional sports – football especially – are hard to dislodge from getting the main attention around the nation’s kitchen and pub tables.  In England, this week has started with the focus on Roy Hodgson, and it seems that until the summer itself the Olympics aren’t yet top of the agenda.”

MIT Professor Sherry Turkle wrote a powerful opinion piece in this past Sunday’s New York Times Sunday Review in which she draws a sharp distinction between conversations that take place face-to-face, in the real world, and connections that get made online through social networking sites.

“We are tempted to think that our little ‘sips’ of online connections add up to a big gulp of real conversation,” she writes.  “But they don’t.  E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all have their places – in politics, commerce, romance and friendship.  But no matter how valuable, they do not substitute for conversation.”

Texting, emailing and online posting, she says, allow us “to present the self we want to be.  This means we can edit.  And if we wish, we can delete. Or retouch:  the voice, the flesh, the face, the body.  Not too much, not too little – just right.”

Meanwhile, she says, “human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding.  We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology.  And the move from conversation to connection is a part of this.”

And then Turkle makes clear her view that technology is neither the same as nor a substitute for human interaction:  “[I]t’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. It seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.”

We forget there is a difference.  That’s a fundamentally important point.  My colleagues and I talk regularly to clients and audiences about the significant differences between offline and online word of mouth, and routinely people ask whether what happens online isn’t merely a reflection of what people do and say offline.  The answer is a resounding no, as we argue in our forthcoming book, The Face-to-Face Book.

The differences between online chatter and that which takes place in the real world have important implications for brand marketers, for whom it is a very big mistake to think they are the same, or that online social media is a substitute for offline word of mouth.   The evidence is increasingly clear that people use offline and online communication channels for very different reasons.

According to recently released academic research, the primary drivers of online word of mouth are (in order):  social signaling, functional, and emotional.  The primary drivers of offline word of mouth are the reverse:  emotional, functional and social.  According to the researchers, “Offline conversations, which are mostly in one-on-one settings, are more personal and intimate by nature and thus allow people to share emotions such as excitement and satisfaction. Online WOM, which usually involves ‘broadcasting’ to many people (e.g. twitter), is more appropriate for social signaling (e.g., uniqueness).”

In other words, offline and online conversations are not mirror reflections of each other, but serve different needs with different implications for brands.  Marketers should not choose a “social strategy” without first understanding the motivations of consumers to share.  Online social media will be most effective if you have a new product or a new message for which social currency will be gained by sharing. But if you are seeking to tap the emotions that come with strong brand satisfaction and excitement that comes as a result of a recent purchase or exposure to an advertisement, then look for ways to help consumer share those stories offline where they will have their best chance for success.

Successful social marketing requires marketers to take a holistic view that considers all the ways that people gather and share information. To tap the full potential of social marketing you need a people-centric strategy, not a channel-centric strategy.  Remember, there is a difference between connections through technology, and conversation in real life.

In his latest blog, UK ad legend Dave Trott bemoans the trend for ads which are “beautifully made, but dull and invisible to anyone outside advertising”.  Trott’s frustrated with risk-averse clients settling for easy-to-like campaigns which have little of any substance to say.

Crucially, Trott feels that the expensive, vapid ads he refers to have weak viral properties, and fail to realise the potential of increasing advertising ROI by “getting noticed, getting word of mouth, and getting repeated”.  But here we’re not talking about assessing viral property in terms of Facebook likes or shares, it’s about what he calls ‘real viral’ (not ‘internet viral’) – getting people to spread your ideas and brand propositions and not just a 30-second piece of entertainment.  Crucially, Trott feels that Opinion Formers (as opposed to Opinion Followers) are more receptive to challenging, less predictable ads that really have something to say (and not just something to show).

As it happens, we’re often asked to outline ‘the best way’ for a brand to generate word of mouth in the real world.  We’re at pains to point out that there is no magic formula – any type of advertising or promotional activity has the potential to do the job if it’s done well.  In other words, there’s no substitute for a strong creative, and most of all you have to leave the consumer with something they can and want to talk about. There has to be a story worth sharing.  You need, as Trott says, ‘‘’ideas’ and ‘words’, not just executions”.

And if you want your brand messages to resonate (as Dave Trott puts it) “at the pub, at Starbucks, on the train, in the street”, you really do need people to talk about your brand, not just quickly click a ‘share’ button.

When people consume media together, either in-home or out-of-home, does it help or hurt advertising effectiveness?

The argument that it hurts the advertiser is the “distraction” model, which argues that the presence of other people distracts people from on-screen content, reducing value to the advertiser. This is an argument put forth by Steven Bellman et al. in their 2011 paper “How Coviewing Reduces the Effectiveness of TV Advertising”.

The argument that it helps the advertiser is the “social influence” model, which posits that the presence of other people leads to more emotional engagement and the sharing of advertising content, leading to higher ad effectiveness.  This is an argument that Brad Fay and I put forth in The Face-to-Face Book, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster/Free Press in May 2012.  It was also the topic of a recent paper presented by Brad Fay and Gregg Liebman, Senior VP at Turner Broadcasting, at the recent ARF Re:think 2012 conference.

The Liebman/Fay paper reported on the results of research that the Keller Fay Group conducted for Turner during the 2011 NBA Eastern Conference Finals, a six game series between the Chicago Bulls and the Miami Heat.  The purpose was to test the “social model” summarized above.  The primary focus was on the top 12 advertisers for this series, comparing word of mouth among people who watched in social settings compared with those who watched alone.  And more specifically, those who watched in social settings out-of-home vs. those who watched in social settings at home.  The 12 advertisers included: T-Mobile, Adidas, Miller Lite, State Farm, McDonald’s, Hyundai, E-Trade, Disney Studios (Cars 2 & Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides), Microsoft (Microsoft Windows & Windows Phone), Chrysler/Dodge, Sprint, and Progressive.

A representative sample of more than 2,220 males aged 18-54 were studied during the NBA finals, in which they kept track of their word of mouth conversations about brands including the advertised brands.  We compared these results with word of mouth levels about the same brands during the off season, the NBA regular season, and the early playoff rounds.

The study showed that co-viewing delivers a clear word of mouth benefit for advertisers by increasing engagement with the ad content.   This can be seen in two key sets of data.  First, when we looked at the levels of conversation about these top advertisers among men who watched the Eastern Conference Finals in out-of-home settings (work, other people’s homes, restaurants/bars, etc – which collectively represented 43% of the total viewership) we found that they are far more likely to talk about the advertised brands – between 1 ½ and 2 times the level of conversation compared to the norm. And when we looked at those who watched in social settings (with friends or acquaintances, whether in-home or out-of home) we found conversations levels about advertised brands were approximately 1 ½ times the norm.  So far from being a distraction, co-viewing was associated with greater levels of word of mouth.

Co-Viewers Talk More about Advertisers

Source: Gregg Liebman and Brad Fay, “Social TV Viewing, Word of Mouth and Ad Effectiveness:  Co-Viewing and Out-of-Home Viewing,” Presentation to ARF Re:think, March 2012.

There are a number of important implications from this research.  For media buyers, it suggests that co-viewed formats may have higher value than solo-viewed formats.  For creative development it suggests the need to design content that will be shared offline as well as online, especially for ads which will be seen in social settings.  For programmers, it suggests a new reason to work on developing programs that will appeal to the whole family in order to spur more co-viewing.   From a research perspective, we look forward to finding the right opportunity to test these findings further with non-sports programming to see if the same trends hold.

Pursway’s patent-pending technology enables companies to identify, measure, and impact how opinion leaders shape their followers’ purchasing decisions.  Using Pursway’s big data analytical solutions, leading global organizations in telecommunications, retail, and financial services are realizing 5-10x improvement in the ROI of customer acquisition, cross-sell, and churn prevention efforts.

Pursway is profiled in Ed Keller and Brad Fay’s forthcoming book, The Face-to-Face Book as an example of a technology platform that allows for the identification and activation of real world influencers on a large scale basis with impressive and measurable performance outcomes.

And thanks to Chuck Porter of Crispen Porter  + Bogusky for his very kind blurb:  “Everyone whose on the social-media-is-the-future bandwagon should get off for a minute and read this book.”

The publication date is May 22, and preorders are now being accepted wherever books are sold online.

I have heard it said on a number of occasions that social media is word of mouth on steroids.  The argument goes like this:  Whereas face-to-face conversations only reach people one-on-one or one-on-several, social media allows people to reach hundreds and often thousands of people with a single post.  As a result, it has a far greater reach than word of mouth.

I have been skeptical of this view, arguing that while social media is certainly a piece of the social influence puzzle for brands that deserves to be leveraged, it is just one piece among many.  And the premise that social media is word of mouth on steroids ignores the facts.  A singular focus on social media is misguided, in my view, as it can blind brands to the full array of opportunities available to them to drive brand advocacy.  This is the subject of my forthcoming book, The Face-to-Face Book:  Why Real Relationships Rule in a Digital Marketplace, co-authored with Brad Fay and coming in May.

A few months ago I wrote a blog under the headline, “Social Media is Word of Mouth on Steroids, or is It?” In the piece I shared research that shows for brands with tens of millions of Facebook fans, active engagement by those fans is quite small.  In fact just 0.45% are active fans.  In a similar vein, research was released last month from the prestigious Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science in Australia showing that after the initial click to “like” the brand, consumers rarely interact again with the brand on Facebook.  Here too, less than 1 percent of people remained active on Facebook after the initial engagement.  Ehrenberg-Bass summarized its results as follows:  “Big Brands Snubbed by Fans on Facebook.”  The message here is that the large numbers associated with social media can be seductive, but they are not always exactly as they appear to be.

Now comes a very different type of study that further debunks the “social media is word of mouth on steroids” argument.  This research, conducted by BuzzFeed and StumbleUpon, looks at the sources of shared content online across their respective networks and comes to this conclusion:  “Put simply, the vast majority of sharing occurs in the normal fashion evidenced in real-world word-of- mouth.”

More specifically, they report that the average Facebook share leads only nine people to visit the story. The median for Twitter was even lower, with each story shared on Twitter leading to five people visiting the story. This reality is far from the “one-to-many” image of social media that many proponents postulate and would be consistent with the “word of mouth on steroid” claim.

The conclusion from BuzzFeed and StumbleUpon:  “What emerges is a picture of social networks where stories go viral when lots of people engage with their normal-sized circles to share content. . . In looking to get content shared, marketers and publishers should focus on content that will resonate and get people talking to their colleagues, friends and families. Social media is about engaging people in conversations that mirror the offline world.”

The research that is emerging helps to separate fact from fiction.  Yes, social media has the potential to reach hundreds or thousands of people at a time, but the reality is that it rarely does.   It should be considered as a part of today’s marketing mix, but it is becoming increasingly clear that for brands which wish to spark the conversations that will move their business forward, it is not a panacea nor is it “word of mouth on steroids.”  Remember, for each conversation people share with their colleagues, friends and families via social media, there are many multiples more that get shared at the dinner table, at the water cooler, on the sidelines at youth sports events, and anywhere else people congregate.   Those conversations collectively generate far more sharing.  Let’s take a holistic perspective on the best and most productive ways to engage today’s social consumer.

Ed Keller, CEO of the Keller Fay Group, has been called “one of the most recognized names in word of mouth.” The publication of Keller’s book, The Influentials, has been called the “seminal moment in the development of word of mouth.”  His new book, The Face-to-Face Book, is coming out in May 2012.  You can follow Ed Keller on Twitter, Facebook and Google+, or contact him directly at ekeller@kellerfay.com.