Our ongoing online research reveals what players in the CM industry think about Prediction 5: Managing and avoiding negative word of mouth (WOM), online and offline, will be an increasingly important area in connected marketing.

This prediction refers not to controlling WOM but rather to monitoring it in order to manage business response rapidly if necessary.

Many marketers believe, mistakenly, that WOM cannot be created. Hence this prediction elicited a lot of feedback saying that marketers can neither create nor manage (as in control) WOM.

Firsly, one only has to look at the worlds of political spin and religious dogma to realise that stories can be created, believed and spread far and wide regardless of their factual accuracy. So there’s a difference between being able to create WOM and whether or not WOM should be created by marketers - although it’s fair to say that trying to create WOM out of thin air is likely to be counterproductive, particularly in the long term.

Secondly, as far as managing and avoiding negative WOM is concerned, the online monitoring of consumer conversations is definitely becoming an increasingly important part of reputation management and crisis PR. This ‘buzz monitoring’ enables businesses and their communication partners to identify escalating negative WOM quickly and respond rapidly. Response often involves simply getting the business’ side of the story out to key online influencers that they have both identified and developed relationships with, pouring waters on the flames of negative rumour, which would have otherwise been fanned by an information vacuum.

There are signs that buzz monitoring is moving beyond reputation management and crisis PR. Examples include online conversation analysis being used in order to measure a brand’s online prominence, connectedness, reach, clarity, resonance, authority and approval; and to benchmark a brand or campaign against what’s being said about competitive brands. There are also a lot more holistic and proactive – rather than simply reactive – uses of buzz monitoring and analysis within a wider CM remit. It’s all part of an ongoing process to safeguard and build both brand and customer assets through mutually beneficial relationships with customers and consumers.

Doug Grisaffe, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Texas, puts it in a nutshell: “The best protection from a company perspective is to fulfill the brand promise, to serve customers with excellence, minimally meeting and ideally exceeding customer expectations with competitively differentiated and value-producing experiences. The huge threats of not doing so are (a) negative word of mouth, from (b) customers who are likely to end the relationship, who (c) also create negative downstream impact on other customers and prospects, (d) driving them away from your offering both psychologically and behaviorally.”

Fundamentally, CM is charged with helping businesses to deliver on their promises, to deliver experiences that exceed expectations.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 5:30 am and is filed under news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.