Professor Walter Carl Sets NPR Straight on How Word of Mouth Marketing Really Works

I must confess that I've been outside so much enjoying Oregon's beautiful summer weather that I've neglected this blog over the past few weeks. Well, time to get back to it...

Last week, I met a woman at a networking event who smiled knowingly when I told her that I helped companies sell more through word of our mouth marketing. "That's interesting. Do you help companies figure out how much they should pay people to talk about their product?"

I'm always surprised when I hear people say that word of mouth marketing is about paying people to talk about a product or service. A big part of this misunderstanding has to do with how journalists portray word of mouth marketing. A July 3 story on NPR's Bryant Park Project, a radio show which targets a younger audience than typical NPR news program, on "word of mouth advertising" began with a skit of people shilling products as an example of how companies use word of mouth to market their products and services. Fortunately, Walter Carl, a professor at Northeastern University and word of mouth marketing, was featured in the story and set the host straight telling him that effective word of mouth marketing does not involve paying people to recommend a product or service. He also mentioned an interesting statistic that I haven't heard before: his research indicates that approximately 15% of all converesations involve people talking about a specific brand, company, product or service.

Comments

[Josh Carr Superstar]

Patrick,

I love that you brought it back to the conversation with buzz marketing. We have a small agency and that is our greatest struggle is trying to get people to realize that if we are doing it right we aren't the ones who will eventually be building buzz around them it will be their customers.

We are actually working on some software right now that will help people/companies find the conversations that are happening online so they can get involved easily and efficiently. What we noticed is that most people want to do the right thing and the authentic thing but really have no idea what that is or how to get started. I guess we can give them a break after all with old media this was almost impossible and the internet is only about 5000 days old.

In the next couple days i will be adding a beta signup for our website. I think this software could really be useful for you and your clients to kind of lower the barrier to entry of getting involved in the online conversations. Send me an email and I will get you an invite. We are super early stage so any feedback would be appreciated and if there are some features you would like to see in the software there is still time to make that happen.

http://buzz.io