We initially got involved in conversational marketing through our work with an Australian Rules Football team. No lack of passion and emotional involvement with the product there! Customers almost pushed us out of the way to participate and contribute to the buzz of the online community.

A popular way of constructing social media / Word of Mouth marketing campaigns is to first seek out and recruit consumers with large social networks. The implicit assumption seems to be that someone with 500 Facebook friends will spread your marketing message more effectively than someone with 100.

If you are interested in generating more sales through word of mouth programs, there is a research paper that is a MUST read.

"Firm Generated Word-of-Mouth Communication: Evidence from a Field Test" by David Godes and Dina Mayzlin. Marketing Science, 2009, Vol. 28, No. 4. 19 pages.

I found this paper when I was referred to a peer review on the Web Analytics Association website, written by Jim Novo, who also blogged about this fascinating piece.

We occasionally (and happily) hear exponents of social media remind us that marketing cannot actually make up for poor products and services - (for any length of time of course), customers eventually and inevitably wake up to shonkey products. In the past, the lag between marketing claim and customers voting in mass with their wallet was often long enough for snake oil salesmen to make a good living - as long as they kept moving, negative communication was inefficient and they kept finding new customers. They don't make markets like that anymore.

I sometimes wonder why you would want to work anywhere else in marketing other than social media. It's new, it's exciting, it is online so you have lots of quick data and it's growing in rigour. And as the effectiveness of other channels declines, social media is attracting the attention of sharp research brains. Good stuff!

When we first started managing online communities for our clients we were often confronted with the question; "But how many customers will want to come online and have a conversation about _____ (insert your category here)?" mmmmm.... 'There must be some, you have customers right?"

[caption id="attachment_807" align="alignnone" width="98" caption="NOT the P&G Tremor"][/caption]

You have to take your hat off to the marketers at P&G - I have just finished looking over a presentation by their Janelle Zurek called "Leveraging Cognitive Science to Create Word-of-Mouth (2009) published by MSI in a conference summary.

[caption id="attachment_603" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Mr Natural: the original Key Opinion Leader (KOL)"][/caption]

The debate about the effectiveness of marketing through opinion leaders is an important one for us.

Setting Objectives for Customer Communities

Embarking on customer engagement online seems overwhelming at first – there are just so many possible ways of proceeding.

The addition of new places to market online - blogs, forums, social networking sites - has re-focused us on the fact that people talk to each other about the products/services we are marketing.

These conversations are not just another communication channel, the interaction shapes the message and you are not in control. This qualifies as the 5th "P" in our mash-up of Kotler's Marketing Mix.