By Chris Lee

Word of mouth marketing is nothing new, but the Web 2.0 era of social networks, blogs and microblogging have made word of mouth marketing irresistible to marketers, as well as being simple to measure.

To understand more about creating brand advocates and measuring the impact of word of mouth marketing campaigns, NMK’s Chris Lee caught up with Cathy Pittham, managing director Europe of communications consultancy, Racepoint Group.

What’s your description of ‘Word of Mouth Marketing’?

We see social media in its entirety as ‘word of mouth marketing’; I don’t think there’s much delineation between those categories. Social media has blurred the traditional categorisation in new media marketing terms. It’s a broad opportunity for organisations to engage in dialogue with their target stakeholders and benefit from organic referral, which effectively defines word of mouth marketing.

There is also the research opportunity. When social media is treated correctly it can become one large focus group in its ability to provide honest feedback.

What are the main tenets of word of mouth marketing?

From our point of view there is grassroots or ‘evangelist’ marketing, which is about building momentum and ensuring that your consumers, influencers and stakeholders in your key market care so much about what you’re doing that they become effectively your most vocal supporters.

There’s also ‘stealth marketing’, where people don’t realise that they’re being marketed to, and ‘viral marketing’ where your marketing is passed around and begin to take on a life of its own. There’s also ‘buzz marketing’, the high profile approach to entertainment or news to get people talking about your brand. This is traditionally achieved by creating products and services that generate conversations in a fairly natural way. Apple’s recently-launched iPad would be a great example of that.

Who tend to be the most engaged in word of mouth marketing?

It doesn’t seem to fall into either small or large firms, both seen to be taking it up. Our own experience is that larger firms typically benefit from the resources to manage programmes or employ agencies to do it for them internally, but often smaller firms are prepared to experiment more.

Viral or word of mouth is not a cheap way to promote your brand and you cannot underestimate the planning and investment that’s required.

What’s the most effective form of word of mouth marketing?

We see most take up and the best long-term return on investment in evangelist marketing. Measurement becomes much more straightforward, especially among senior management. It’s possible to chart their conversion to brand champions. One example is something we did for chip manufacturer ARM. We identified top 25 global influencers and their brand-supportive behaviour.

What are your top tips for firms looking to start out in word of mouth marketing?

Planning is the most important aspect, involving audience segmentation – do they use social media (if so, what sites?), mobile etcetera. Check the legality of the campaign; you don’t want to offend anyone. Look at influencers.

Then there’s content, it must be engaging and motivate recipients to share. Content seeding has to be highly researched. It’s important to profile and map your targets’ social media activity. It’s important to figure out what the motivation of that target group is.

Resourcing is something that’s often overlooked – who’s going to own the campaign internally? Keep it simple - the more complex you make it for your target recipients to access the content the harder it is for them to interact with it and pass it on.

Campaign timing is important – you need to consider is it during a Friday afternoon, a weekend or a holiday? What will work best for your target audience? Geography – remember that online conversations don’t have national borders.

Monitor and measure according to your business goals and channels.

To hear the full interview listen to the author’s word of mouth marketing podcast.