I haven’t written about marketing in a long while. Know why? Nothing, and I mean nothing new is being said.
But there has always been one guy who has consistently thought differently about “word of mouth marketing” in general and social media marketing in particular. His name is Jim Novo, formerly of Home Shopping Network, and his blog, Marketing Productivity, has long been my sekret weapon.
In his latest post Jim talks about some recently released research he reviewed for the Web Analytics Association. The paper in question is titled Firm-Created Word-of-Mouth Communication: Evidence from a Field Test. It was published in Marketing Science, Vol. 28.
His takeaways from the research are powerful and counter intuitive. In his review he asks and answers two important questions any winery marketer needs to consider before she can conduct a successful paid social media campaign:
1. What kind of WOM maximizes incremental Sales?
and
2. Which people are most effective at creating the WOM above?
Head on over to his blog to find the answers to these important questions.
They’re probably not what you think.
UPDATE. See also: 84% of social media programs don’t measure ROI
Ed Thralls
11 months ago
Josh,
Thanks for sharing… I forwarded this to my product marketing manager, because it supports some things I was trying to tell him a few months ago… glad to see an opinion and review on a real research study on the topic… I also think this applies across industries and products,as Jim replied to one of his commenters.
Cheers!
Jim Novo
11 months ago
Josh, thanks for the kind words.
I’m not sure why the echochamber tends to ignore real scientific research by 3rd parties as opposed to the vendors (um, maybe ’cause it actually costs money to subscribe to it?) but hopefully we can crack open some of this stuff for people and shine a light on it.
John Marzolla
11 months ago
I saw something about Pardonthatvine.com on here. I’ll tell you if you, like wine it is an incredible website. Extremely unique, he is also very knowledgeable.