I attended the annual WOMMA Research Symposium
today in Washington D.C. and had the opportunity to listen to and talk with some of the leading thinkers on word of mouth marketing. What became clear over the course of the day is that there’s a lot of good research on how word of mouth (WOM) works and how to measure individual campaigns, but the industry is looking for more guidance on how to sell WOM to senior management to secure budget, how much budget to put toward WOM in an integrated campaign and how to compare WOM metrics and results to other marketing metrics.

Research from Ed Keller of the The Keller Fay Group reminded us that the majority of WOM is still happening offline (90% if I recall correctly). Still, there’s strong and growing demand to measure what’s happening online. This is partly due to how fast the channel is growing and partly because technology makes the job much easier than it’s been in the past. Forrester’s Peter Kim led a panel to discuss the reasons why. It included six of the seven vendors from his Brand Monitoring report - Maxine Friedman (Brandimensions), Max Kalehoff (BuzzMetrics), Howard Kaushansky (Umbria), Jim Nail (Cymfony), David Rabjohns (MotiveQuest) and myself.

While not everyone agreed on the importance of measuring traditional media to understand how word of mouth is generated (a position Biz360 supports), we all agreed that technology is an important enabler for making sense of social media - the millions of thoughts, ideas and creations posted to the Internet everyday. Human analysis remains an important component, however, for understanding the finer nuances of language (Biz360 uses machine-learning techniques that rely on regular human analysis and input to take technology as far as it will go). The session ended with vendor recommendations on what questions companies should ask themselves before investing in a brand monitoring solution. A few of the top questions were:

• What are my program goals?
• What resources do I have internally to support a monitoring/measurement program?
• What level of service (involvement) do I expect from the vendor?
• How confident am I in the vendor’s ability to deliver insight, not just data?
• How frequently do I need information and to what depth?

There were several great presentations over the course of the day. Jim Nail presented research on the word of mouth of cereal brands, which he confessed was not an exciting topic and didn’t generate a lot of content. What I found interesting though were the motivational categories he used to break out the WOM - health & wellness (Wheaties), parental (Cheerios), nostalgic (Count Chocula), etc. Biz360 conducted similar research on yogurt brands and also found a relatively low level of social media content (yogurt isn’t nearly as exciting as Paris Hilton or Nintendo Wii, so we weren’t surprised). What we did find was that the health-based messages appearing in social media were coming from the health & wellness publications. This is a good example of how traditional media can drive word of mouth. Companies looking for word-of-mouth influencers only among consumers are stopping short of their ultimate goal.

For the full list of today’s presentations, check out WOMMA’s Web site. I believe you can also order audio recordings of the presentations after the event.

On July 13, 2006, Unilever launched their Sunsilk hair care brand in the U.S. with a twist – it’s using three gay men to sell the idea of “Hairapy” (three hair products that act as therapy) to women in a $200 million marketing campaign. According to AdWeek, as much as 15 percent or $30 million of the ad budget is going to non-traditional media, such as mall displays with audio, a MySpace profile and 3-D displays in bars.

Unilever is no stranger to out-of-the-box thinking, its Dove brand “Real Beauty” campaign generated buzz in June 2006 with ads featuring “real” women instead of traditional models. What’s interesting is that the Real Beauty campaign is getting more media attention today, a year later, than the Sunsilk launch.

Media Coverage (% of Marketplace)
7/1/2006-8/23/2006

NOTE: This chart shows media coverage for Dove’s Real Beauty campaign (total = 48), Sunsilk (total = 42) and specific mentions of “Hairapy” (total = 10) from July 1, 2006 through August 23, 2006. The coverage is shown as a percentage of overall coverage for Dove, Pantene and Sunsilk combined and does not include mentions of the Sunsilk launch in recent Unilever earnings coverage.

Is the implication here that using real women to sell products to women gets a bigger reaction than using gay men? Not necessarily. The Dove press release is much more explicit about its approach than the Hairapy press release, which doesn’t outright say the spokesmen are gay (it uses phrases like “coming out party” to make the suggestion). In fact, words like “gay,” “queer” and “homosexual” appear in less than 20 percent of Sunsilk’s launch coverage, which suggests an equal amount of reluctance on the part of the media to state the obvious.

Sunsilk’s messaging was slightly different on its MySpace profile created for the launch – “Three gay guy girlfriends who give it to you straight.” Did Sunsilk lack the conviction to give it to the media “straight”? Maybe, but leaving the message open to interpretation for the broader media on a potentially hot-button issue, some of whom might disagree with the tactic, and delivering the overt message directly to your target audience through MySpace might just be smart marketing.

The MySpace crowd seems to agree. GetHairapy had 5,569 friends when I checked today. There’s also a higher percentage of discussion about Sunsilk among bloggers.

Blog Coverage (% of Marketplace)
7/1/2006-8/23/2006

NOTE: This chart shows blog posts for Sunsilk (total = 781), Dove’s Real Beauty campaign (total = 160) and specific mentions of “Hairapy” (total = 57) from July 1, 2006 through August 23, 2006. The posts are shown as a percentage of overall posts for Dove, Pantene and Sunsilk combined and does not include mentions of the Sunsilk launch in Unilever earnings discussions.

The branding of “Hairapy” on the other hand still needs a little work, but the message is clear - tailor your message to your audience. And then take that message directly to them.