Ballad in Plain E

Deborah Aho Williamson is a senior analyst at eMarketer, and she presented a session on Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM). The main types of WOMM are:

1. Brand monitoring (e.g., Yelp.com)
2. Viral marketing (esp. YouTube)
3. Influencer marketing (e.g., Proctor & Gamble Vocalpoint: a “community of influential moms, created by P&G”)
4. Brand blogging (e.g., Nuts about Southwest blog)

WOMM is all about conversation creation, about learning and using the language that people use when talking about products.

There are varying trust levels for different types of ads: Consumers have only a 13% level of trust for mobile text ads, 63% for newspaper ads, and 78% for recommendations by other consumers. An interesting point is that in the travel market, user-generated content is more influential than brand.

In the end it’s all a bit touchy feely: we are urged to “Start a conversation” rather than “advertise on social networks”. I wanted to ask about the speaker’s thoughts on companies posing as consumers and posting to sites like Amazon, etc., with favourable reviews, but we ran out of time.

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