When we first speak with a brand manager or a PR person they normally ask us these questions:

“What are people saying about my brand in blogs?”

“Can you help me monitor that?”

We say: we can help you monitor blogs, but first you need to do to help us define the questions you want answered. Monitoring blogs, review sites and messageboards on its own gives you large quantities of information, but few answers that can help your business. It is easier to make a business case for spending on online research and analysis if you can be pretty specific about the question that you need to have answered and about the relationship between that question and the business’s bottom line.  These are the questions that we suggest the client starts with: Question 1: “Why do people choose my product?”

Question 2: “Why do people choose my competitor’s product?”

Question 3: “Why do people recommend my product to their friends?”

Question 4: “Why do people recommend my competitor’s product to their friends?”

Questions 1 and 2 may seem at first blush to resemble questions 3 and 4. But actually they are dissimilar. When someone recommends a product they will often choose a reason that says something about themselves. People will rarely say: “I chose this product because it’s cheapest”, but they may often say: “I chose this product because I care about the environment”. Conversely, why people actually buy a product is often around a combination of product features, reputation and price.

(Reputation and price are in some measure inversely related. Products with good reputations generally achieve that reputation by good service. Good service costs money and although consumers are tempted by cheap offers, they know that “free broadband” generally carries a cost in poor customer support. We recently completed some detailed research in this area which shows that brands with good customer support can keep their prices higher for longer than their competitors. )

All these questions are answerable from online research, and we can put numbers against the characterisitics of a product which are most likely to drive adoption. Those numbers have direct benefit to a key hiearchy of stakeholders within the company:

a) the product managers suddenly know which aspects of the product are key to marketing success (and which need most attention);

b) the marketing managers know what is the key product strength to push in relation to the corresponding weakness of a rival’s product;

c) the word-of-mouth marketers and PRs know which messages are most likely to drive viral adoption amongst users and can devise appropriate campaigns.

How do you measure word of mouth? The increasing importance of social networks to brands and advertisers has raised this problem very sharply in the last few weeks. Media owners, pharmaceutical companies, automotive manufacturers all need to know the same thing: how am I doing?

If a brand can establish how it is doing in “word of mouth” in relation to other brands this information can drive decisions about the allocation its marketing or campaign spend.

We would need to agree what a ranking in the word of mouth market means.

In the Market Sentinel methodology there are three possible ways of ranking in word of mouth:

• Buzz (numbers of citations)
  
• Approval (sentiment compared to benchmarked competition)
  
• Authority
  

“Buzz” is chat, pure and simple. Measuring it gives you an indication as to whether something is worth mentioning. Britney Spears has buzz. It ebbs and flows. The weakness of buzz as a measure is that you can be talked about without your product necessarily being purchased, or your value endorsed. Key to consumer brands is the central flaw that not all brands have talk-about-ability. Some products and brands are worthwhile, and do their job well (like car insurance) but they are just kind of boring. That doesn’t mean that they are bad products, or that they aren’t relied on, but it means that using “buzz” to track them is bound to fail.

Approval is better, as it equates to the likelihood of customers to recommend your products. We measure it using the “Net Promoters’ Index” - that is a simple index of how many people promote and how many detract from a product or brand in relation to industry benchmarks.

Authority is best of all, it equates to trust, which means that your marketing messages are more likely to be believed, and it corresponds approximately to Google ranking, since it relies on authorities citing you and linking to you. We measure this using a “Stakeholder Analysis” - an index of all the stakeholders in a topic as to who they view as authoritative.

Here is how we would address the problem of benchmarking a brand in relation to word of mouth:

• Identify the topic in which the brand seeks greater authority
  
• Benchmark its existing authority (conduct a stakeholder analysis)
  
• Identify the key authorities to whom the brand would need to communicate its broader proposition
  
• Profile those authorities in terms of their ego-net (who they link to and by whom they themselves are cited), and in terms of the statistically improbable words they use (i.e. their idiolect or individual language)
  
• Assess the brand’s own “Clarity” (consistency of message on the topic) and “Resonance” (the extent to which the brand’s language is picked up - or ignored - by stakeholders). I will return to these concepts later and examine them in more detail
  
• Then we work with the brand’s communications people to produce high value content designed to appeal to those authorities. This communication material could often be contained in a blog, but could form the kernel of a buzz marketing campaign, or a strategy for offline communications.
  

Two recent U.S. marketing campaigns have used social media to connect with a mass audience. First came Philips Norelco Bodygroom with their shaveeverywhere.com campaign. This jokey video as well as being hosted on its own domain was posted at youtube.com and at heavy.com and has allegedly been downloaded one billion times.

Now Gillette have launched a campaign, which parodies an online grassroots campaign in format. According to Advertising Age: “The Noscruf campaign includes paid search ads on Google and other search engines, promotional placement on Heavy.com and a posting on YouTube.com for two viral videos from a fictional advocacy group - National Organization of Social Crusaders Repulsed by Unshaven Faces - and its Web site, Noscruf.org.”

In this case the campaigners are women who want their menfolk to shave and have created the noscruf website as part of their campaign. The site (above) is being visited 60m times a day, say Ad Age, citing Alexa. It is the work of Digitas, a Boston-based agency.

What is intriguing about both of these campaigns is that:

1) they are online in inspiration and execution; 2) the off-line element is limited to PR - the Bodygroom campaign benefited from a plug on Howard Stern’s syndicated radio show; 3) they make use of existing places of debate and traffic - youtube.com and heavy.com and have not depended solely on destination urls.

Imaginative pieces of buzz marketing, both.