Church of the Customer Blog
« Word of mouth mostly untracked | Main | Why I'm a fan »
January 27, 2009
Word of mouth mostly untracked
A new survey of 400 senior marketers conducted by the CMO Council has found that most companies are not tracking what's being said about them.
Of the survey participants:
- 56% said their companies have no programs to track or propagate positive word of mouth
- 59% don't compensate employees based on improvements in customer loyalty or satisfaction
- only 16% said their companies have a routine system in place for monitoring what people are saying about them or their brands online.
Despite the slow adoption of systems to monitor word of mouth, here's a list of 40 brands using Twitter to listen and engage customers online, including four notables:
Other blogs that reference Word of mouth mostly untracked:
To me this is an embarrassment. How can brand marketers truly call themselves marketers if they aren't listening and participating in the online conversation around their brand? It's easy to do, the tools are mostly free, and you have the opportunity to interact with your most engaged customers (angry or not). To ignore this opportunity is untenable. If you're in the 84% that's not routinely listening you should be worried about your job.
It for sure is strange that brandmanagers ignore the social media space. Especially as a previous survey of McCann concluded that 32% of the people that read blogs and comments trust the blogger. So think of the impact of publications on brand, products and services.
As Morgan and Hans already indicated, all companies need to be monitoring their company names and key product names online. At the very least, set up a Google Blog Alerts. But, with comprehensive services like Techrigy's Social Media Manager (which I use) and Radian6, you gleam a lot of information.
Hey, you don't have to participate/engage, but you at least have to listen.
-Mike
Morgan, remember this is still all very new in the grand scheme of things. Most of those people probably don't even really know what social media is. It's going to take time.
I work in a medium sized company that is lost in 40 years ago. I keep trying to bring them into the 21st century, but they just don't want to move. In these hard economic times this is the perfect way to go, little or no cost to start. The only real cost would be my time, but no go. My managers insist on being involved in the smallest details. It took us four months to agree on a layout for landing pages. We just can't operate like that and I fear not only for my job but for the company as a whole. Excellent article.
It's such a slippery slope as far as word of mouth goes...and tracking isn't exact since we listen to many different mouths and in many different formats...creating a scenario where you don't know who listened how, and what was just a remnant from a traditional advertising campaign.
I am amazed that companies and brands are not being more proactive about tracking word of mouth or other forms of marketing. If you aren't doing metrics on your brand's appeal or promotion success, how do you tweak your strategy?
With open forums such as Twitter or Facebook, I really amazed that brands are not listening more..
Most brand managers are still behind on Web 2.0
Here is the truth:
These managers are spending big corporate's money - these are not their own money.
Small business owners and entrepreneur are most conscious about tracking and ROI.
Traditional "push marketing" methods no longer work. People want the freedom to choose and feel comfortable when purchasing any product or service. The combination of internet network marketing and social media is a perfect attraction marketing strategy to boost your mlm profits on autopilot. You can even build your downline from other states or other countries. Just imagine the social media profits you can have in being able to recruit people from different places. Social media marketing helps you build stronger relationships and, as a result of those relationships, build bigger businesses. Social media sites such as FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter and Digg are helpful in getting qualified fresh MLM leads and paid signups MLM for your network marketing online business, increasing your odds to build your downline fast.
