How do brands best leverage the power of Word of Mouth?

Faris Yakob, Co-founder of Genius Steals, has written a post on the Warc blog in which he envisages a future of brute force creative, where specialized bots can generate the perfect tagline from a million different combinations. However, that future may already be here, but applied to tweets and posts not taglines.

A couple of weeks ago I presented at the Annual Marketing Congress of Peru where I had the pleasure of hearing Joe Stradinger, Founder and CEO of Edge Theory speak on the topic of “The art of conversation”. There was only one small problem, I could not figure out how the content of his presentation related to the title.

Stradinger correctly identifies that Word of Mouth is the holy grail of advertising. Millward Brown’s CrossMedia research finds that Word of Mouth has more impact on a per reach point basis than TV advertising. But Word of Mouth typically lacks reach compared to TV. So Edge Theory seeks to boost the reach of Word of Mouth by automating the creation and broadcasting of social content. Content is created using a blend of human ‘conversation engineers‘ and algorithms and then pushed out through people’s Twitter or Facebook account.

My instinctive reaction to this approach was negative. Would I let a brand push automatically-generated content through my own social media feeds? No way. But like any good entrepreneur, Stradinger has honed his pitch and knows the best arguments to overcome negativity. Given they cheerfully wear their team’s logo on their chests, would soccer fans allow their club to tweet through their Twitter account once a month? Maybe they would. Might a company utilize its employees’ feeds to promote its brand while avoiding possible litigation? Maybe it would.

However, the idea of mass customizing content and broadcasting it through people’s feeds, even with their permission and control of the process, still sits badly with me. At first, my concern focused on the issue of authenticity. But then is choosing to tweet content created automatically by an algorithm any more inauthentic than retweeting something created to support #Likeagirl? I believe that #Likeagirl will have far more emotional impact than a more general tweet, but we all know that simply making your brand salient is the first step to marketing success.

Ultimately, I think what sits so badly with me is positioning third party content and dissemination through people’s social feeds as conversation. This is not conversation. It is good, old-fashioned broadcast advertising. And as such, I believe it is underutilizing the power of social media to deepen brand engagement. But what do you think? Please share your thoughts.

posted by Nigel Hollis | July 13, 2016@ http://www.millwardbrown.com/global-navigation/blogs/post/mb-blog/2016/07/13/how-do-brands-best-leverage-the-power-of-word-of-mouth

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How do brands best leverage the power of Word of Mouth?