Friending Your Consumer? Think Offline Too - Ed Keller - MediaBizBlogger

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, ended his Commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania last week by exhorting the graduates to “turn off your computers and phones and discover all that is human around you.” That’s the only way, he said, to discover the true meaning of life.

There is wisdom in this advice, not only for college graduates but for marketers as well. Is your social media strategy owned exclusively by a digital marketing team? If so, you could be missing out on 90% of the social media opportunity – namely, that which takes place offline, where people interact one on one and in groups as humans and where people’s conversations are quite different than they are online.

With Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter reporting startling growth statistics, it’s easy to assume that the action is online, and a good deal of it is. But don’t miss out on the opportunity to reinvent your entire marketing organization to adopt a “conversational” approach to marketing, with the consumer your equal partner.

Each and every day, we are reminded that the consumer is in control. They wield that power through their ability to talk, or write, or make videos, or post online ratings about the things they like and don’t like in the marketplace, and the products they recommend and recommend against.

Technology enables and emboldens the consumer to speak out. Whether through blogs, Facebook, Twitter, or online ratings and reviews, it’s easier and easier to share how you feel, know what your friends are thinking and doing, and make decisions based on this new flow of easily accessible information.

Each new technology that comes along affords marketers the ability to organize and track what consumers are saying. Google Trends, Lexicon (to analyze Facebook Wall Posts), or Twitter Search, as well as commercial services that crawl the web to monitor blog posts, all provide quick and rich listening posts for marketers.

But are they a true reflection of what America is really talking about? As a marketer, can you listen to these voices and extrapolate to the wider marketplace that you serve? Surprisingly to many who are becoming enamored of these new listening posts, the answer is no. According to estimates by our firm, there are 3.3 billion brand impressions created via word of mouth every single day in America, and the overwhelming majority of them – 90% – take place either face to face or by phone. So while there are hundreds of millions of conversations each day that take place online, there are billions that take place offline.

Recently an online monitoring firm – Vitrue – published a list of the top 10 brands discussed via social media in 2008. Our firm conducts ongoing monitoring of word of mouth as well, using an approach that takes into consideration both offline as well as online conversation.

For the first time, we can now compare and contrast the two. What the analysis tells us is that it’s more a matter of contrast that comparability.

Of the ten most talked about via social media, only two (Sony and Dell) are also the most talked about when we look at “all” word of mouth – offline as well as online – as measured in our service (called TalkTrack®). The five most talked about brands in social media – iPhone, CNN, Apple, Disney and Xbox – drop much further down the list of “all WOM.” Meanwhile, the brands that top the “all WOM” list – Coke, AT&T, Verizon, Wal-Mart and Pepsi – are less prevalent brands when it comes to online buzz.

And if we go further, we find that of the top 50 on each list, only half overlap.

Why the difference? One reason may well be that online conversation is heavily dominated by young people. Half of the word of mouth conversations that take place via blogs and chatrooms involve teenagers, and two thirds involve people 13- 29. While the percentage of adults joining the online conversation is rising, the volume of conversation is still dominated by younger people.

This may well explain why MTV – the 8^th most talked about brand as measured via social media – falls all the way down to #190 in our measure of all word of mouth.

What’s the implication here? First, make sure that your “listening” posts encompass more than web 2.0: Utilize your call centers, in-bound email, retail locations, and survey data of all kinds that capture offline as well as online conversation.

Second, make sure all of your marketing teams are changing their communication styles—from one-way broadcasting, to two-way engagement. Advertising, promotion, public relations, retail environments, and even package labels should be designed to start and to fuel consumer conversation, whether those discussions happen online or offline.

Engaging brands are like engaging friends—they are good listeners, and have something interesting to say and worth repeating to other friends, whether or not they happen to be Facebook friends as well.

Ed Keller is the CEO of the Keller Fay Group, a market research firm that specializes in word of mouth marketing. He is the co-author ofThe Influentials: One American in Ten Tells the Other Nine How to Vote, Where to Eat, and What to Buy(Free Press: 2003). Keller is past President, and current Treasurer, of the Board of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), a board member of the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), and past president of the Market Research Council.