by cafers

What Is Customer 2.0?

Customer 2.0 is essentially a reflection of the shift in consumer consciousness being experienced across Generation X and Y. New media and the digital revolution has resulted in the extreme globalisation of everything, and as such consumerism is evolving.

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What is customer 2.0? – That is the very question I found myself asking when I first came across the expression early this year. It took quite a lot of searching the interwebz to actually find and deduce the answer, and despite it being a ‘buzz’ word (laced with pejorative and ephemeral connotation) it actually made a lot of sense that this new paradigm had surfaced.

At the same time, it’s always a bit of an uneasy process when you de-personalise a noun, such as ‘customer’, and breed it to have cybernetic implants.

Customer 2.0 is essentially a reflection of the shift in consumer consciousness being experienced across Generation X and Y. New media and the digital revolution has resulted in the extreme globalisation of everything, and as such consumerism is evolving. We, as consumers, are responding to this changing environment in an interesting way. It is interesting because, for the most part, we’re not aware of what’s going on. Those in the marketing and advertising industry are no doubt more attuned to these shifts in the hive mind – it’s their jobs to exploit these direction changes as best they can. From the consumer perspective, however, its harder to see. Let me give you an example.

Customer 1.0 loves to read magazines and papers. They are inclined to make brand choices on the back of traditional advertising, and they don’t quite understand what this digital nonsense is all about. Tweeting is what birds do! Customer 1.0 expects to have to resolve product issues through the traditional avenues of phone and face-to-face customer support. Customer 1.0 does make decisions on the back of word of mouth endorsements.

Customer 2.0 will tweet what they had for breakfast! papers are growing ever-more defunkt as the boom of online news and RSS functionality reaches epic proportions. They LOVE viral, and probably spend more time online than watching tv. Customer 2.0 expects companies to have an online presence, they prefer to shop online (for the vast majority of purchases), and the ecommerce sites they do this on better be quick or they’re going elsewhere. Customer 2.0 seeks user-reviews to inform brand choices, and is likely to put a significant amount of time into researching potential purchases. Customer 2.0 is starting to expect a social media presence too, and they love innovation (and reward brands for being innovative). Customer 2.0 prefers email to phones.

The point I’m trying to make here is that Customer 2.0 expects these technological advances to become a part of their consumer experience. They aren’t treated as novel or new, they are just expected to be there. Furthermore Customer 2.0 is tied to Web 2.0 (an oft-disputed term its self) – in that the evolution of the internet and the customer are moving in the same direction.

In a bid to avoid the vague ambiguity that some articles on Customer 2.0 have dished up, I shall define what I think Customer 2.0 is…  (you may obviously have a different opinion – comments always welcome)

Customer 2.0

  • Tech savvy > competent to fluent on many websites/programs/operating systems
  • Discerning > un-trusting of traditional advertising and marketing methods, they look to fellow consumers for product endorsement and will research key purchases in depth
  • Tiny Attention Span > websites need to be super quick, information moves through the brain very fast, ‘viral’ media peaks then fades quickly
  • Dual Personality > often managing several social media and community profiles as well as the ‘offline’ world, Customer 2.0 has different persona’s across the spectrum
  • Loves Email > Customer 2.0 generally prefers to sort customer service problems over digital media (seeing the start of social media integration)
  • Flexible > Customer 2.0 is more flexible than Customer 1.0, up for trying new services, prepared to consider a different method of achieving something (e.g. customer service via Facebook)

I think the above list is probably a bit elementary, but it gets the key message across; Customer 2.0 is technologically savvy and expects more from their brands. For the brands to survive, or at least keep ahead, they much change too and they must do so in the same direction their customers are headed.

But that’s for another time.

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by cafers

‘Ping’ Pongs

Today Apple released its groundbreaking new injection into the social media market in the form of Ping, their flagship social media platform. Ping, as Apple would describe it, is a social network for music where you can ‘follow your favorite artists and friends to discover the music they’re talking about, listening to and downloading’. Now without considering its various merits (or lack thereof), that just sounds like some tired old social media line, hovering around the subject of conversation. Lackluster, boring and frankly dated. They could have at least got someone with a certain degree of lexical creativity to sparkle it up a bit. Social media is about conversation, yes, but its also about innovation, creativity and excitement.

You missed out on this one, Jobs.

The story doesn’t get much better after that, as we learn that Ping is going to be primarily centred in iTunes 10 (which was also launched today), with no web support and limited device support.

iTunes.

Are. You. Serious?

iTunes has risen to disgusting ubiquity as the only fully supported music library (and online store) that will sync with an iPod or iPhone, products that are also more or less ubiquitous in todays western world. The iPod I like, but the software for it is terrible. iTunes is a RAM-hungry, slow, often times buggy (on both PC’s and Mac’s), poor excuse (or choice for that matter) for a music content management system. Frankly I cannot believe that Apple have chosen to launch Ping inside it.

Thankfully, not everyone likes Ping, and I’m happy in the knowledge that I am not along in my dislike of iTunes. An excellent article by @jemimakiss on the Guardian website pretty much says everything I was already thinking in a far more eloquent way (she was paid to do it, I’m trying to write this before bed!). Others have dubbed Ping as ‘interesting’ but ‘noting to get excited about’, and another excellent post by Nick Oneil breaks down the 10 reasons why Ping isn’t going anywhere very fast.

This story could have had a different tone to it, had Facebook  been on board, but due to ‘onerous’ terms the partnership was cut short before it even started. Jobs has said its no big deal, I think he’s saving face.

I don’t like Jobs, which is weird for me as I have been an extreme apple advocate in the past, bordering on a crazed evangelist, and I wouldn’t go back to using a PC if you paid me. Honestly I find him to be arrogant, bigoted and completely frustrating (I’m fighting the desire to use obscenity here!). His war with Adobe is a perfect example of this, and is frankly ridiculous. I have also recently begun to move more and more into the open source culture, or at least look for cross over programs which I can use, which of course is the antithesis of the Apple organisation.

I am particularly excited about Diaspora, the open source social networking project, but I’m digressing and that is for another time.

If you want to check Ping out then follow this link to update your iTunes to version 10, followed by selling your soul to Jobs, and getting ‘involved’ with the Ping ‘community’. Before long your pocket will be a little bit lighter, your music collection slightly augmented, and a smug Jobs with that irksome grin will be patting himself on the back, laughing at the criticism that Ping received on launch, and counting his dollar.

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by cafers

Social Media & Social CRM

Part of my day to day activities at the moment, a large part in fact, is researching the digital marketing industry in the search of companies who might want to employ me who I’d like to work for, either now or further down the line (the list is large and growing at an alarming rate). Something that I’ve been considering for a while as an aside to this is the distinction that some are making between social media strategies and social CRM. One such company who place the emphasis on social CRM is Neoco, ‘The Social CRM Agency’, who are based in London.

I’m not going to use this post to talk about neoco, their (snazzy) website and blog are a lot better at doing that, and as such you can go check them out if you fancy a look (comes highly recommended), but I thought I’d use this instead to add my thoughts on the distinction, and see if any of you (the few that read this!) agree or disagree with me.

Social media marketing is taking off like a rocket. As the world at large becomes more ‘social’ (as if we weren’t before!) the attraction of social media marketing is ever increasing, and investment into the sector is on the up. But social media marketing has a tinge of pejorative connotation. Marketing has been considered in the past to be an aggressive process of convincing people to part with their hard earned cash for products that they don’t want or need. The addition of social media to that equation doesn’t necessarily negate that potential for no good, but it is a fresh permutation of the marketing machine, and it adds the element of conversation to the mix.

From a physiological perspective we are social beings. Humans are predisposed to communicate, to arrange themselves into social units, to coexist with each other. We are, as Marx suggested, ‘gregarious creatures’ (yes, that is wikipedia, I’m not pretending to be a well versed authority on Karl Marx’s literature). ‘Social’ and ‘Conversation’ are intrinsically linked; the person in the corner of the room chatting to his shadow is dubbed ‘antisocial’ due to their lack of involvement with others, and a ‘social life’ is something that involves plenty of conversation with other people that you enjoy seeing. ‘Social media’, therefore, is ultimately the facilitation of conversations using digital platforms, albeit without the physical element of normal human interaction. Social media marketing, therefore, could be conceived to be the use of digital conversations to market products and services. In reality there is a world of complexity which spans from this expression, but from a lexical perspective this is the (my) root meaning.

Conversations, of course, are not necessarily the use of simple text. Platforms like Foursquare and Flickr give the option of using geo-location and photography as elements in the conversation, or can be the core of the conversation text being the periphery. The combination of these different platforms can and have resulted in a world of both intricate and simple digital campaigns, some of which were incredibly effective.

Social media marketing, however, falls short of the full monty. While the emphasis is on conversation, it isn’t necessarily a lasting or quality one. The conversation can be short lived and can lack longevity. Some campaigns only use social media for the duration of the campaign, or tail off when it is over. This is where Social CRM comes in.

Just as social media marketing was a new permutation of the classical marketing model (in response to advances in technology), social CRM is the fresh paradigm of social media marketing which is borne not of technological advances (although there is still an element of this), but of advances in understanding what consumers want from the companies and products they purchase / buy into. With classical marketing there was a one way flow of information, with social media marketing there was a conversation, and with social CRM there is a relationship between the brand and the consumer.

Social CRM places the consumer at the heart of the business, and ultimately focuses on the wants and desires of the customer. Grievances, suggestions, criticisms are all seen as an opportunity to increase the quality of a product. Criticisms in particular are a unique opportunity for a brand to reach out to those unhappy customers and address their problems, listen to their criticism and give them an opportunity to have a voice on the matter. Confronting negative WOM is so incredibly important in a modern business strategy – what often starts out as a whisper can turn into a roar, so it pays dividends to give those voices something good to say.

The knowledge that a brand is listening and acting upon the opinions of its customers makes that brand more attractive. It makes it seem less like one way traffic, and more like an exchange. I’ll bet a large proportion of people would choose a brand that listened over one that didn’t. In this respect social media and subsequently social CRM has given brands an avenue in which they can prove that they care about their customers, that they are committed to improving their business, and that the users of the products can have a say on how they develop over time.

Reasons such as this are why I’m so excited by this industry, and why for me this isn’t just a fad. Social media, it could be argued, has had the makings of ‘fad’ culture, but when you get past all that superfluous nonsense, you see how social CRM is giving switched on brands an avenue for organic and sustainable business which will last far into the future. If you listen, you will be listened to.

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by cafers

The Social Network The Twit Network

‘The Social Network’, released October 1 is a new movie which covers the story of the early days of Facebook, while Zuckerberg (as played by the immensely talented Jesse Eisenberg) was at Harvard University College.

Being a Eisenberg fan, and interested to see how the story has been woven this is certainly on my ‘to see’ list, but I thought I’d draw your attention to a new parody video by the Indymogul crew at Youtube. It works better if you watch the trailer for the real movie, and follow it up with the parody:

Aside from the **insane funny** of the twitter vid, it’s a pretty perceptive commentary on the platform – on paper Twitter made no sense, but the evidence shows that it was a brilliantly thought up idea (or a gamble) which has paid huge dividends…

…but it wouldn’t work in real life:

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by cafers

Youtube, Footlocker and More Viral Campaigns

Before I start, I understand that it is a little rich labeling any video on youtube as automatically ‘viral’. Linking Youtube and ‘viral’ video culture is more a meta-commentary on the format of youtube and the history of viral videos, which have often been originally hosted on or have ended up at Youtube (remember some of the first viral videos were decidedly ‘gonzo’ in style, which Youtube with its largely amateur videographer user base lends its self perfectly to). Initially ‘Viral’ was a term used to highlight the ‘virus-like’ spread of a video (or other media form), but now there is a clear ‘viral’ element to some videos and campaigns, especially considering that there are marketing and communication companies who are purposely attempting to exploit the phenomenon of viral media. This is no secret, they make no attempt to hide it, and so in this respect a video can have ‘viral’ elements just as a documentary has certain documentary elements. Whether these videos do in fact become ‘viral’ or not is another question all together, and one that is hard to answer considering the various and wildly varying ideas on what constitutes ‘viral’ exposure.

Now, unless you have been living under a rock for the past 3 months, you will probably know about the Old Spice Guy (hereafter OSG) in some form or another. The basic premise was an interactive ‘conversation’ between the old spice guy and the youtube audience at large. The result? a gargantuan beast of a social media campaign which resulted in around 1.4bn campaign impressions and 40m video views within one week of the original ad going live. Not only that but Old Spice sales are up 27% since the campaign launched, and 107% in the last month alone. Considering the cost of filming a good-looking, ripped & half naked black guy in-front of a green screen can’t be that huge, we’re talking serious ROI for Old Spice, and the potential for huge investment into the digital and social media marketing world – everyone wants to do what Old Spice did.

Frankly these lofty aspirations are unrealistic. It really is once in a blue moon that seriously good creativity and business acumen meet in the right place, and even if those two are present the market needs to be ready for it. There is a certain ‘decompression’ after a campaign such as that. People simply wont respond in the same way over and over, there needs to be a cooling off period.

Thats not to say there is no point, just don’t go thinking that you have the next Old Spice tucked up your sleeve, or that the digital agency you just went to has either.

Onto Footlocker. ‘It’s a sneaker thing’ is the clever hook attached to the current Footlocker campaign which has been rolling out across the internet and TV screens for some time now. A recent development has seen a collaboration between Footlocker and Youtube celebs ShayCarl, KassemG and Bret the Intern; two teams under Kassem and Shay fight it out in a food fight to the death in an otherwise deserted high school cafeteria.

The Footlocker element is brought in with some clever vary-focal camera shots of a hall full of brand new sneakers and the use of sandwich bags to protect these nice new sneakers from the ensuing mess – all of which are put on AFTER the ‘foodfight’ shout. Check the video’s below:



And the voting video:

Shay Carl and Kassem G alone have a combined subscribership of around 1.6m viewers. Unlike the Old Spice advert, however, these viewers are already invested in the institutions of Shay or Kassem (or like me both). There is a whole community built around them already. With Old Spice we saw a new face who could engage the entire Youtube audience without your having to belong to a subculture first. The interactive element, also, is lacking a certain focus which the Old Spice campaign had (and was arguably the thing which stimulated the most on and offline word of mouth). In this we get to vote for the winner, as opposed to being able to actually interact with OSG. For these reasons, this campaign is unlikely to reach the proportions of Old Spice.

I can’t decide if this is clever marketing or not. The audience is fairly limited, but it still can’t have cost much to do which makes ROI a much easier figure to achieve. As I said, the OSG’s magic was his novelty and fresh faces always make more impact. I’ll be interested to see how this drives sales to Footlocker. It is, however, evidence of companies seriously looking for new ways of promoting their products, which is a good thing for the digital marketing industry. Whether they are all getting it right or not is something we shall have to wait and see.

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by cafers

Social media stats that you can’t ignore

Courtesy of Socialnomics09 on youtube…






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by cafers

Is Foursquare blurring the line between digital and real life?

Geocaching to Geotagging

Following the removal of selective availability from consumer GPS devices in May 2000, a strange new permutation of letterboxing began to develop. This ‘game’ involved placing ‘caches’ in various places and distributing the GPS coordinates via listing sites for other people to find. At these caches would be a log book and perhaps a trinket or ‘treasure’ which the finder was welcome to remove and replace with something of equal worth. Geocaching was born. In a way this was the first type of significant interaction between the internet and the real world, and a whole community of geocachers was born – much like the social networking sites of today. This grown-up treasure hunt was inevitably going to be redefined in the wake of new technology and new media influence. Enter Foursquare.

Foursquare is a social media hub, where people can post status updates much the same as Twitter and Facebook. Foursquare, however, is specialised in that it focuses on geotagging – using GPS and cell networks to triangulate your position, allowing you to ‘check in’ at various places and venues throughout your day (or night). Foursquare also adds achievements into the mix, where by after meeting certain requirements you earn badges which are appended to your profile.

Foursquare in numbers

Foursquare is certainly growing fast; they have increased their user base from around 275,000 users in January 2010 to nearing 2,000,000 as of Jun 29 2010. Not only that, but estimates suggest they are significantly outpacing rival geotagging site, Gowalla, who have around 400,000 users, and are growing their user base 10x slower than Foursquare. The staff numbers at Foursquare have also grown. From the two founders, Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai a year ago they are now 27-strong, and have recently secured $20M in venture capitol to expand the business.

However, it is the break down of the user statistics of Twitter and Foursquare which are so interesting; while Twitter has 50x as many users as foursquare, only 20% of those users have tweeted more than 10 times, and 41% of those users have never tweeted at all. Foursquare, in comparison, has incredibly high levels of interaction: 57.4 % of users have checked in to 50 different venues, and 77.3% of users have checked in more than 30 times in a month. This speaks volumes about the motivations of users at the two different sites;  Foursquare users are clearly more interested/motivated to interact.

The stats all look very rosy, but it is worth mentioning that Foursquare is still dwarfed by the supernova’s of Twitter (100M users) and Facebook (500M users), so lets keep the Veuve Clicquot on ice for the time being.

The marketers catch on

Of course the power of this medium has been recognised and exploited by various organisations and agencies who have successfully (and unsuccessfully) used it as part of the marketing mix.

Non-profit organisation, Earthjustice, have spun a campaign (covered by mashable) to engage the younger demographic in California, and to encourage them to consider, and get involved with ecological issues. As a bit of an eco-warrior (more an eco-peon) myself, this is particularly attractive to me. Without digressing too much, it is important that we look to ways of getting the younger generations interested in looking after the planet, and the use of new media is a clear avenue to consider.

There have, of course been ‘unsuccessful’ (read crude) attempts at utilising Foursquare, one such example is discussed over at aboutfoursquare.com. The Expendables, a movie by Sylvester Stallone involving guns, explosions, death and probably some gratuitous nudity, has been promoted on Foursquare by leaving ‘tips’ at foursquare venue pages in 11 US cities. The author of the post, William Beutler, remarks on the campaign and calls it ‘gimmicky’, recognising that the marketers at Lionsgate haven’t really understood the point of social media marketing – to create conversations. Their approach has been misunderstood, lackluster, and ultimately a good example of how not to use Foursquare and other platforms to engage with consumers.

A host of other organisations have also taken Foursquare’s platform and turned it into a marketing tool for their products and services, but the one campaign which keeps popping up in my mind as an example of both an incredibly creative use of Foursquare and other social media platforms, but also a clear focus on creating conversation through these media is the Jimmy Choo campaign.

The innovative ‘catch-a-choo’ campaign was designed by social media agency, Fresh Networks, and involved the shoes (the new range of Jimmy Choo trainers) taking on a life of their own and checking in to various locations around the city of London. This gave social media users the chance to ‘catch-a-choo’ and win a pair for themselves in a digital meets real life treasure hunt (much like geocaching in a way). This campaign created a heck of a lot of buzz, and some impressive figures too. Over 4000 individuals participated in the hunt, which was covered by outlets such as Reuters, Marketing Magazine, PR Week, Mashable, Vogue, and The Evening Standard, and daily trainer sales went up an impressive 33% during and following the campaign.


Foursquare controversy

It was inevitable that geotagging would throw up some concerns. Questions about how to balance the privacy of the platform arose, questions on how safe it is to use geotagging for fear of home invasion or stalking also came about. Unfortunately, these concerns have been largely justified as one blogger found out when she was stalked by a creepy guy as a result of her Foursquare usage. The man in question actually rang a restaurant she was dining at and spoke to her asking her to go for a bike ride with him.

There have also been concerns around how secure your data is with Foursquare. When the team were approached by a white-hat hacker and were told about a number of exploits and leaks they were subject to, they responded with a message stating they would fix the problem. After 9 days the company responded again and notified the hacker that they had fixed 1 out of 3 ‘privacy leaks’ and were working on the others. Since then, nothing has been said (to my knowledge). Story here.

A system like this is also open to abuse, which blogger Jim Bumgardner of KrazyDad.com found out in his exploration of what could be done to cheat the system. The post (which has a response from co-founder Dennis Crowley) documents Bumgardner’s various exploits of the platform to achieve some lofty achievements, one of which was to become the ‘mayor’ of the North Pole from the comfort of his own home. (somewhat overshadowed by 15 year-old Parker Liautaud who genuinely managed it)


Theory: Connecting analog and digital spaces

As a concept Foursquare is a strange one, but for some reason it works. As people become more and more ‘mobile’ with smartphone’s, netbooks, ipads and other cutting-edge technology then it only seems like a natural progression to mix the two domains somehow. Foursquare is doing that incredibly effectively. I am wondering, however, if there is a limit to the ‘good’ side of this story. While I’m an avid user of social media, and I love the conversations and the interaction that happens with it, I wonder if this is a step too far. Where will it stop? At what point does someone draw the line and say this is where the two worlds stop merging. Ultimately if there was a global blackout, we’d all lose our digital lives, and would be forced back into the physical space that we are increasingly ignoring as technology advances. You can’t see a map for all the satellite navigation units that exist today, it wont be soon (perhaps we’re already there) before you can’t see a street for all the phones attached to their biological appendages. Come to think of it, we really are there already.

I suppose my point is that everyone needs a break from technology occasionally, but increasingly the venue for this seems to be disappearing. Will be ultimately sense a disconnection from what is ‘real’ – perhaps that is a tad nihilist, but a question worth asking all the same.


Conclusion

Foursquare is in its relative infancy, but already there have been some really creative and effective uses of the platform. There does seem to be a large amount of ‘good will’ towards Foursquare also, and a 2 Million strong user base is a good place to build from towards the future.  As a medium Foursquare has the potential to be a nexus between online and offline buzz.

There are some bones of contention, however, what with questionable privacy settings and leaks, and questions over personal and home security still raging, and it is clear that the team have some work left on the drawing board to fix. Overall, though, if they get it right in the coming year, Foursquare will become a very powerful tool both in a marketing sense, and in a just-having-fun kinda way too.

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by cafers

Word Of Mouth in Action

WOM as a concept is an abstraction from what really happens in real life. It’s a buzzy buzz word / expression, a glorified hook for WOM companies to get the attention of their clients

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Until recently my ‘grasp’ of WOM was fairly elementary and in all honesty, it remains so; my knowledge is largely limited to reading case studies and taking people on face value that WOM, is incredibly powerful.  To me WOM was another marketing technique that contrasted against the hundreds of other models that have come before it. It seemed fresh, it seemed organic, but I hadn’t really grasped how it happened or worked.

In a recent blog post @100heads, a recent Mckinsey article on the merits of WOM is discussed. The article boasted, among other statistics, that WOM is behind 20-50% of all purchasing decisions, and that WOM generates more than twice the sales that paid advertising does. The (clever)  folks over at 1000heads call for a prudential perspective in the face of what could be sensationalist representations of ROI. They recognise that there are many factors influencing these outcomes and are working on a platform that will give investors a tangible monetary figure for the buzz that their campaigns create. Every conversation will have a monetary value.

As a concept that is freaking cool.

Now I don’t want to digress into a discussion on ROI where word of mouth is concerned, that perhaps is something for next time, but since I’ve only recently worked it out I want to tell you about MY revelation. It may not be spectacular, but it was an awakening all the same.

I’ve always been a **bit of a geek** as my lovely girlfriend would like to put it, I love technology, I love learning about products, learning how to get the most out of a piece of software. I especially love gadgets. The ‘smartphone revolution’, however, was something that I initially resisted. You see, I like to think about myself as a bit of a trend-setter, but I missed the boat and subsequently spent a significant amount of time berating the people with smart phones and exclaiming things like ‘my w880i lasts on standby for a WHOLE week, and your iPhone is out of battery already and its not even 5pm’. I was clearly, as the Chinese would say, wearing a green hat. I was jealous.

The battery life of the iPhone, admittedly, is / was a bone of contention for me (and why I eventually went for an android handset), but I loved what it was doing, and what you could do with it.

The iPhone more or less marketed its self.

Fast forward to recently. My w880i was feeling the strain, having lost a few buttons and sporting a thick layer of dust between the protector and the LCD. Its time was coming to an end. The battery life, also, had begun to wave to 4 days standby time. I was in the market for a phone, and Android had taken my fancy.

It wasn’t until an acquaintance of mine, James, came over during a surprise party that we were throwing for my sister, that I finally came face to face with an HTC Hero, and while I didn’t play with it, the brief, and essentially positive conversation that we shared was enough. I was sold – I would buy an Android.

The initial excitement from getting my HTC Desire has not yet subsided a whole month on. I have had several conversations about it to friends of mine, TWO of which have gone and purchased the same handset off the back of my endorsement. This was weird for me, to see WOM happening right in front of my eyes, and I didn’t even know I was doing it.

I guess as revelations go its fairly weak, but it still caught me off guard. WOM as a concept is an abstraction from what happens in real life. It’s a buzz expression, a glorified hook for WOM companies to get the attention of their clients. Rightly so, while the phenomenon is effective, there is no reason that everyone would know this. Marketing strategy has for so long concentrated on figures, promotions, advertising etc that it failed to even consider the basic background noise of social life. Ironically WOM agencies need to market the idea of WOM.

My problem was that my head was wrapped up in the abstraction, despite knowing what it was about. Not until I saw it happening infront of me did I see how incredibly salient and powerful WOM is. While I can’t say that this is the case for everyone, people who I have explained it to have often seemed confused or not quite on the same page. The old ‘yeh yeh’ but the vacant expression behind the eyes. Another blog post @1000heads has lamented that while they see the power of WOM, the pockets of the clients are not yet fully open. From my experience, perhaps they would be more flexible with their cash if they could be shown WOM happening in action; examples and such are all well and good, but not until they truly understand the core of WOM, (something they already do and have done for as long as they have been talking), will they see it for its true power and potential.

Perhaps then, there would be more significant investment into the industry.

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