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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‘It’s good to talk’, Bob Hoskins used to say in TV ads for BT. Well, if it was good then, it’s bloody marvellous now. We have probably never ‘talked’ more in the widest sense of the word. As technology has expanded, so have our means to talk. So the chatter on pillows, at bars, and over watercoolers that we always did has been supplemented by the chatter we now commit to the internet or via the ‘phones that are rarely more than a thumb’s reach away. Our day-to-day tête-à-têtes and heart-to-hearts don’t have to be conducted eye-to-eye or face-to-face anymore (although at least 90% of brand conversations take place offline).

Talking is unique to humans and there are many reasons we practise it: to seduce, to impress, to complain, to insult, to suggest, to warn, to avoid having to talk to someone else who is in the room and whom we don’t like or have made a drunken mistake with. And new research by Data2Decisions, commissioned by us, has examined a very specific subject that we seem to enjoy talking about: brands.

Brands are no shrinking violets; they want to be talked about. Every brand wants to become a household name, a readily accessible linguistic touchpoint that gets used in conversation – ‘it does what it says on the tin’, ‘simples’, the future’s bright’, ‘calm down, dear’. Few people actually start a conversation desperately wanting to talk about brands except lanyarded delegates at marketing conferences or the seriously weird. But brands do enter and enrich our conversation with ease; they are a normal part of our day-to-day discourse, part of the grammar of modern speech.

The research – called ‘POETIC’ (‘Paid, Owned, Earned: TV’s Influence Calculated’) – examined what things brands do that lead to people talking about them – that is, in addition to the heritage, market and seasonal factors which make up an ongoing level of talk which involves brands (some of which will have been influenced by previous brand activity of course – like my Bob Hoskins quote above).

POETIC examined over half a million data points for 36 brands across three of the biggest brand categories – retail, finance, and drink – including data from word of mouth specialists Keller Fay, YouGov’s Brand Index, social media monitor Brandwatch, and data directly from brands.

I won’t rehearse all the findings here – if you want an overview, please visit here, or you can watch it presented by D2D here (you’ll need to register if you haven’t already). But the main finding was that, in the categories the research looked at, paid-for advertising was responsible for driving three quarters (72%) of all the new conversations about brands (TV advertising was behind the majority of this). The rest of the new – or incremental – conversations were generated by PR activity, events, brand news or changes to products or services.

In recent years there has been a fair amount of talk in the ad industry about the power of word of mouth, especially because of the readily accessed and highly visible chat that takes place online. But we shouldn’t confuse where the conversation takes place with what actually caused it; we don’t credit the pillow, bar or watercooler, yet some do seem to think that Facebook makes all the conversations that take place on it happen.

It is true that getting a brand talked about adds sales and profit to a brand (some brand conversation will inevitably be negative from time to time, of course, so brands need to create a big store of positive chat and goodwill first to balance it). What is clear from the research is that conversations about brands don’t just appear out of thin air; brands have to pay for people to say.

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.

Latest research from Thinkbox* underlines the impact of brand word of mouth – and especially offline WOM – on brand health, demonstrating beyond all doubt that WOM is more than a ‘nice-to-have’.

Thinkbox asked big data specialists D2D to undertake a thorough analysis on the drivers of WOM (both on and offline, using our TalkTrack® data for the latter); in turn, D2D looked at WOM’s impact on some key brand metrics – web visits and brand reputation.  A key finding was to confirm Keller Fay’s assertion that to activate brand buzz requires a focus on offline conversation.  Thinkbox noted that “Brandwatch data, which tracks social media comments, validates this [Keller Fay] finding and suggests that the number of online conversations is significantly smaller in comparison to offline”.

The research goes on to show that offline WOM has a significant impact (bigger than online) in driving traffic to brand websites.  Yes, that’s right:  offline WOM drives more web visits than online, a finding which has clearly challenged the thinking of some in the online community.  We like to point out that in categories such as financial services (one of the categories studied) many in the UK prefer to discuss providers with, and seek advice from, those they know personally – people don’t necessarily want a public discussion.  In others, such as drinks (another category covered) products are consumed in social settings, and – guess what – people talk about what they see in front of them…

Thinkbox was obviously keen to understand the role TV plays in stimulating and influencing brand WOM, and they were not disappointed.  Analysis showed that 30% of brand WOM in the categories covered was stimulated by paid media, with TV accounting for by far the largest share of this.  A real breakthrough finding was to show the lasting impact of paid media (especially TV) in driving WOM, with effects seen 2-3 months after campaigns – a reminder that the payoff for social activation is not always about real-time and short-term impact.

So, further evidence to UK advertisers that ‘all media are social’, as we at Keller Fay like to say, and that the impact and efficiency of TV is as strong as ever, thanks in part to its ability to get people talking about brands, on a mass scale.  But most of all, to quote Thinkbox: “word of mouth can help drive business success”.

* Thinkbox is the marketing body for commercial TV in the UK, for the benefit of our readers outside the UK