Should Friends Be Marketers?
(Promo) It started like an urban myth. Someone discovered that if you drop a Mentos mint into a bottle of soda you produce a geyser that can shoot 20 or 30 feet into the air.
The result was an outbreak of carbonated combustion as hundreds of people posted online videos of their exploits. The most famous one, “Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments,” appears on Eepybird.com and has been viewed 6 million times.
Another marketer might not have appreciated the joke. But Mentos maker Perfetti Van Melle USA did. And in July, though its marketing budget already had been spent for the year, it launched its own Mentos Geyser video contest.
The venue? YouTube.com, a social networking site.
The price? Very little. “It costs nothing to do a contest on YouTube,” says consultant Tom Baer, who worked with agency Launch Marketing to create the campaign.
The results? The contest has pulled 1,000 YouTube members and 500 entries so far. And those included brands using the contest to further their own viral marketing strategies.
For example, Breckenridge Ski Resort sent a video featuring snowboarder Ryan Thompson. And software maker Cambrian House asked consumers to support its mission to shoot Diet Coke into space using Mentos as fuel.
YouTube members were still chuckling about that when they noticed another contest on the site: the Satisfaction Sing-Off from Masterfoods USA. This one is dangling $25,000 for the best original tribute song to Snickers.
The three finalists will be flown to Los Angeles next month to play for the judges, including singer Nick Lachey. Until then, all entrants will get 15 nanoseconds of fame singing on the site.
Move over, members: Promotion has come to social networking.
Brands are rushing to YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook to put contests, offers and ads in front of millions of consumers who join the sites to socialize. Marketers will spend about $280 million on advertising and marketing on U.S. networking sites this year, and another $70 million outside the U.S., according to marketing research firm eMarketer. That will balloon to nearly $1.9 billion by 2010, eMarketer projects.
One benefit for marketers is that consumers help with the branding, as they do in viral marketing and word of mouth.
Then there’s the reach. Hitwise reported in July that traffic to the MySpace site had increased 132% from the year before, making it the most popular single Website in the country.
But it raises the question of how much is too much. Will consumers get fed up with the intrusion of brands onto their sites?
Meanwhile, the sites are retooling to handle this sudden rush of commerce.
In August, YouTube began selling “brand channels” that let marketers showcase videos that support a brand’s image. MySpace has begun testing a service that lets independent bands post songs on their profile page for members to buy. Musicians — there are about 3 million among MySpace’s 106 million members — set their own prices; buyers pay via credit card or PayPal. Video posting site Revver attaches ads to the end of members’ videos, then pays the member each time a viewer clicks through the ad, encouraging members to post their videos (and the ads) far and wide across the Internet. (Revver doesn’t host contests or other promotions, though.)
At the same time, a handful of new “social shopping” sites let consumers post reviews and photos of their shopping finds. Sites like Kaboodle, StyleHive, ThisNext, and Wists are good for niche brands that can’t afford to buy visibility online or on store shelves.
Sales pitches, so far, are mostly organic: Indy bands that post their songs on MySpace, or niche retailers and manufacturers helping shoppers share their finds with like-minded consumers. The growth of this social network-cum-sales venue runs parallel to social networking sites as a marketing medium, with one big difference: In marketing, the brands still set mouths in motion.
Social networking sites are fast becoming a playground for marketers eager to stage promotions in unexpected territory. It’s just the latest in the eternal chase of marketers to become part of what’s organically going on between consumers — just like word of mouth, which captured marketers’ imagination three years ago and has mushroomed since then.
What started as in-home parties and bar conversations (not always on the up and up) is growing into an industry with ethics guidelines, measurement tools and the kind of formality that threatens to crush spontaneity of conversation between friends that made word of mouth an appealing marketing venue in the first place.
It begs the questions: How long until word-of-mouth marketing consumes itself, by making consumers as jaded about conversations as they are about ads? And what can marketers learn from the word-of-mouth explosion to tread lightly into social networking?
Consumers already suspect marketers. Last month, when the YouTube hit Lonelygirl15 was discovered to be a hoax, viewers first suspected the video diary of 16-year-old Bree was a wily marketing campaign from a movie studio. (Turns out it was an aspiring filmmaker, a surgical resident and an attorney who hired a 19-year-old actress to star in their fictitious blog.)
The appeal of social networking and word of mouth is obvious: Word of mouth influences two-thirds of U.S. economic activity, according to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). Fully 43% of marketers are weaving word-of-mouth into their campaigns this year, per BzzAgent.
And consumers like it, too: It helps them make choices in a really crowded marketplace. When Sarah McCracken wanted mascara, she asked her friend Heather to recommend one. “What was I going to do, buy 15 tubes of mascara and try them all? Heather likes cosmetics; she told me about all the ones she’s tried.”
From push-pull to ‘pass’ marketing
Word of mouth could be promotion nirvana: Sampling with a ripple effect that builds brand image and trial, with the research bonus of consumer feedback.
“Word of mouth uses traditional disciplines like sampling and advertising, but the objective is ‘pass’ marketing, not push/pull marketing. You want people to pass information and opinions along,” says Rich Scarle, senior vice president, account service at Chicago agency Upshot. “It’s just another medium; it’s about going where people are. It’s not insidious; we just have to figure out how to get our message out there.”
But even the chattiest consumers worry about how far word of mouth should go. McCracken is a brand-new BzzAgent and an enthusiastic blogger — within weeks of joining BzzAgent’s panel, she set up her own site to chew over items sent by BzzAgent and other products she likes. But she sees the pitfall: “How long is it going to take before people wonder if every time someone is talking about a product, it’s a marketing campaign? How long before people wonder about others’ motives?”
Procter & Gamble worries about overkill too. Its Tremor division limits activity to two campaigns a month for members of its Tremor panel of 250,000 teens and Vocalpoint panel of 450,000 moms.
“We’re testing that level, but as a rule we keep it to two campaigns a month,” says Tremor CEO Steve Knox. “We put a stake in the ground, then asked [panel members] if that level of activity felt right to them. Some want more; others prefer less.”
Panel members — P&G calls them connectors — get information and, occasionally, samples on P&G and outside brands (think Gillette, Kashi, WD-40) to share with friends. P&G offers each member a mix of brands to keep it interesting. “That’s a core reason we opened Tremor to outside brands, to meet connectors’ interests,” Knox says. “Hard to believe, but people don’t want to talk only about the categories we’re in.” (About half of the activity at Vocalpoint is for outside brands; it’s 80% for Tremor, because P&G has fewer teen-targeted brands, Knox says.)
No one is yet working on a measuring stick that tells marketers they’ve overdone it. WOMMA and others are working on tools to measure the impact of word of mouth on sales, brand awareness and image. (More on that later.) And practitioners are working their way towards a consensus on ethics of disclosure, turning away from the kind of stealth marketing that drew consumers’ ire in the late 1990s, when a cell phone company was outed for hiring sexy models to chat up its phone service in public.
WOMMA was formed in 2004 to set guidelines to keep marketers’ stealth from poisoning word of mouth. Tremor’s internal code is “Don’t tell people what to say,” Knox says, but panel members decide for themselves whether to disclose their involvement in Tremor.
BzzAgent has done a 180 on its own disclosure guidelines: Members now must tell folks that they’re BzzAgents, an about-face from its 2002 don’t-tell mantra. (Sometimes listeners are more interested in BzzAgent’s setup than the brands it’s serving — more on that later, too.)
It’s tough to estimate how much marketers spend on word of mouth; only about 25% of it goes through specialty shops as a budget line item, says WOMMA CEO Andy Sernovitz. Most goes through PR, promotion, and Web-marketing agencies.
“It’s b-to-c-to-c marketing: Business talks to the first consumers to trigger a consumer-to-consumer conversation,” Sernovitz says.
Does the process of setting that trigger change the conversations between friends? If you court consumers to talk up your brand, won’t they think differently about it than if they had simply discovered it themselves? “Yes, but that’s not dirty,” says Sernovitz. “It’s still marketing; it’s not wrong to put your product in people’s hands. We’re not asking for a huge change in consumer behavior; we’re just earning their attention.”
Harnessing the chat
P&G seeks out “trendspreaders,” who are more likely to share new finds with friends than trendsetters are. About 10% to 12% of consumers are this kind of “connector,” with social networks five to six times bigger than the average, and a propensity to chat. Tremor applicants answer a questionnaire that measures eight attributes; the big three are inquisitiveness, connectedness and persuasiveness, Knox says. (P&G will also use its questionnaire to pinpoint the “connectors” in marketers’ own databases.)
Tremor applicants with all eight features are invited to join, “with two brand promises,” Knox says. “We tell teens, ‘We’ll give you cool new information before your friends have it, and we’ll give you a voice to be heard.’ We tell moms, ‘We’ll provide information that helps you nurture your friendships, and we’ll give you a voice [with marketers].’”
Tremor also offers early access to products and samples, but Knox downplays the use of samples: “Samples aren’t generally sufficient to create word of mouth. Most [of what we send] is information that members find very interesting and want to share with friends.”
Like Tremor, BzzAgent wants social butterflies too. The service averages 2,000 new sign-ups a week — folks who like to know about new stuff first. For some, it doesn’t much matter what the product is.
“I’m usually interested in doing a campaign, even if I don’t know the product. It’s worth my while to try it out,” says Chris Wallace, who joined BzzAgent in 2004 after a friend hosted a cookout to tout chicken sausage. (“She said, ‘You get free products,’ so I figured I’d try it out.”) Getting a campaign kit “is like getting a CARE package at camp. You get really excited about having this package waiting for you in the mail,” he says.
Wallace, whose day job is with a search-engine marketing firm, has “bzzed” about books, batteries, men’s toiletries, even an automatic tape measure. He has signed up several friends, his fiancée and his whole family as agents. “I’m not sure my mom totally grasps it, but she does the campaigns and enjoys it,” he says.
McCracken, too, got involved in BzzAgent through a friend and, like Wallace, works in search-engine marketing. She says her marketing job makes her a low-key buzzer: “I stay away from saying ‘best’ or ‘greatest’ so my friends don’t think I’m trying to sell them something. And I only tell people who would be interested in a specific product.”
Engineering conversation
That’s one of the best things about word of mouth, says Knox: Avid talkers pick the right audience for each message. “Connectors are all about nurturing their friendships, so they won’t share information their friends don’t want,” he says. “Connectors do the segmentation process almost automatically, so the people they choose to tell are more receptive to the message.”
A spring push for Gillette Fusion, timed to Father’s Day, positioned the razor as a gift, touting its up-to-date technology and modest cost (“only a few more dollars a year than the old razor he’s using every day”). A push for the launch of WD-40’s No-Mess Pen gives moms 300 uses for it — and asks them to add their own, now 62 and counting.
P&G doesn’t track what members say about brands. “They’re free to advocate in any direction; that purity must be in place. If I track it, that could inhibit them. But if we’ve done our background work correctly, the information we’re providing is what they want to tell their friends.”
BzzAgent does track what members say — that feedback helps marketers tweak their products and messages. But it doesn’t frame conversations, says BzzAgent director of public relations Joe Chernov: “If we required a specific number of interactions per campaign or we scripted our agents, that would risk [alienating agents’ friends]. We ask only that they bring it up when appropriate, and that they talk like themselves, not like a sales person.”
Eradicating pests
Some consumers, clearly, get carried away. By the end of the year BzzAgent will have expelled 10,000 “pests,” members who have broken the rules by opening multiple accounts with different profiles, filing false reports, or selling their samples on eBay. BzzAgent also is revamping, possibly eliminating, its perks program to downplay the rewards that agents earn for reporting their conversations. (Agents get up to 30 points per report, based on “how thorough the report is, not how great the buzz is,” Chernov says.) That should discourage freebie-seekers.
“We have a vast community of volunteer consumers. A subset … thinks it’s about accumulating as much free stuff as possible,” Chernov says. Most — the volunteers BzzAgent wants to keep — like to know what’s new and tell their friends.
Practitioners agree that brands can’t script word-of-mouth messages, or limit what consumers say. But there are at least three approaches to influencing conversation:
Using p.r. events to stir a specific audience or the general public. Traditional p.r. shops build chatter through stunts, fan clubs, viral e-mail and blogs. “Edelman is probably the biggest word-of-mouth agency right now,” says Sernovitz.
Giving samples, even clothes and coffeemakers, to panelists. BzzAgent has caught flak for lavishing clients’ goods on its members: Critics say it borders on compensation, a no-no in word of mouth. But Chernov defends the practice. “We give samples to enable agents to share honest opinions,” he says. “The ethics of the industry would be called into question if consumers were asked to buzz about a perfume they never smelled. They need the product to speak honestly about it; otherwise, they’re just shills.” High-end samples don’t unduly influence a conversation between pals, he adds: “If we send a pair of shoes, we hope it isn’t enough to adulterate a healthy friendship.”
Letting panelists set the message. “We’ve found that the message consumers want to share with friends is always different than the marketing message,” Knox says. P&G researchers poll Tremor and Vocalpoint panelists to find “a unique insight the brand hasn’t heard before,” then give it a creative framework and ask 500 or so panelists to score a handful of talking points about the product. Those that score well for advocacy and amplification — what Knox calls “Why do I care, and why should I share” — get the nod. That way, consumers tell P&G what to say, not vice versa. The process is “a catalyst that makes it easy for them to discuss a product they already want to talk about,” Knox says. “It brings [a campaign] structure, but also makes it predictable.”
