Why is influencer marketing different from WOM? :Business Strategy /Financial Advisors

WOM is an extraordinary mechanism that communicates marketing messages
throughout a community. To paraphrase a popular slogan from the
1970s, WOM reaches the parts other marketing tactics cannot reach.
There are few marketing approaches that can have had as much discussion
in the twenty-first century as WOM. The ideas that underpin word of
mouth are communicated best byWOM tactics, so that WOM is an instance
of itself. This has been aided by numerous books on the subject. The Tipping
Point features connectors, people that know a lot of other people and
communicate ideas.

Seth Godin’s Unleashing the Ideavirus explores how
and why ideas spread. The Anatomy of Buzz by Emanuel Rosen charted
the mechanics of how to create and sustain WOM. Justin Kirby and
Paul Marsden edited Connected Marketing, a collection of solutions and
approaches based on practitioner experience. And Naked Conversations by
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel noted the migration of WOM from the real
world to the internet through blogs. The definitive guide to implementing
WOM is Andy Sernovitz’s Word of Mouth Marketing.1
WOMis immensely powerful. Arguably it has created the most powerful
brands of today, that of Google. Starbucks, Ikea, Nokia, Prada, Skype and
Tamagotchi were all built predominantly or exclusively on WOM. In many
ways it sits next door to, but is different from, influencer marketing.

Some problems with WOM
Much of the common perception of WOM is that it is spread evenly. The
question that marketers usually ask is, how to get their ideas or messages to
spread to their targetmarket. Emphasis in the answer focuses on the substance
of the message. The perceived wisdom is: create a viral message and watch it
spread.Themajority of activity, therefore, inWOMis inthecreation ofmessages
that are intentionally viral in nature. The big problem here is that it is difficult to
predict which messages eventually do become viral.Whowould have thought
that Linerider would spread like wildfire? Or a yeti clubbing a penguin across a
snowy landscape? (If you have to ask, you should be more connected . . . .)
There is another aspect toWOMthat is regarded universally as a positive
attribute – that it’s good for messages to spread. Spread like what? Oil
spreads on water until the layer of oil is a molecule thick (given enough
space). WD40 spreads everywhere, into every nook and cranny, but that
includes places you don’t want it. Why do you want your message everywhere?
This is traditional marketing mindset. Surely it’s better to target
your WOM efforts at an appropriate audience.

It strikes us that today’s marketers want to useWOMin the next 50 years
like traditional marketers used advertising in the previous 50.WOM, they
think, hits the mass market and is the ideal replacement medium to combat
the diminishing impact of TV and print ads. Those that think this way have
missed the point of WOM.

Consider spam e-mail – you receive something irrelevant from someone
you don’t know. Whoosh – it’s deleted without you even reading it.
We even use automated tools to filter the spam out before we see it.
Much of the generated WOM is the same as spam. It goes from the wrong
people to the wrong people. Most marketers don’t mind this, because
WOMis free at the point of distribution, just like spam and advertising. So
just keep sending it out and some of it will stick.

What most marketers actually want is a message that spreads like
crunchy peanut butter – it spreads, just, but it stays within a defined
boundary (the slice of bread). You don’t want it running down your arm.
Importantly, there are small areas with more impact (the crunchy bits) that
influence the surrounding larger smooth parts. It’s the crunchy bits that
give the whole experience texture and flavour. Smooth peanut butter is
bland, suitable only for the youngest of kids.

It matters whose mouth the words come from
This chapter is all about the inter-relationship between WOM and influencer
marketing. It is influenced by a single idea that appeared in Seth Godin’s
Purple Cow. Seth’s idea was that it is useless to advertise to anyone except
interested sneezers (connectors) with influence. As we say in Chapter 2,
advertising doesn’t work anymore. Actually, that’s not quite true: it does
work on interested people, those that happen to be (a) interested in what
you’re selling, and (b) likely to spread your message to others in their WOM
community. Unfortunately, the likelihood that you find someone with both of
these attributes is tiny, which is why advertising on the whole doesn’t work.
But imagine if you targeted only those people that were both listening
and interested. More, that they would sneeze the message to tell other
people, their friends or work colleagues or associates. This group doesn’t
listen to you, but they listen to the person that’s initially interested.
Most marketing messages are blocked by a wall of indifference
They receive too many messages, they all sound the same,
and even if they were heard and different, they wouldn’t be believed. People
rarely buy just because they are marketed to. The marketing message is
carried, corroborated, enhanced and personalised through influential WOM.
WOM needs sneezers with influence. WOM carried by people other than
influencers is just noise.

People that try to carry WOM inappropriately,
because they don’t have sufficient influence, end up shouting at or boring
their audience. In other words, it matters whose mouth the words come from.
Blogs are an archetype of this sort of WOM. Most blogs are just background
noise. Others try to gain attention by shouting, making controversial,
aggressive or offensive remarks just to get noticed. Only a few blogs carry
influence in any market, and in some markets there are zero influential blogs.
Influencer marketing takes Seth Godin’s idea of advertising to influential
sneezers, and extends it to all forms of marketing. Influencer marketing
is about changing a scatter-shot approach into a rifle-shot one. You
target specific influencers, not generic prospect customers.
WOM, by its nature is difficult to control. Once the message is out there,
there is no stopping it. It can die quickly, pervade the market or go where it
shouldn’t.

Dangers of WOM – the talker can get it wrong
Sometime WOM gets it wrong. Often these end up as harmless urban
myths. But not always, with serious consequences. 3Com is a case in point.
In 2000, suffering from fierce competition with Cisco, 3Com exited its
high-end router business, leaving many of its larger corporate customers
high and dry. Seven years later, 3Com is a different company. There are
new people in charge, the product set is strong and focused, and few
within the company remember the bad old days of 2000. Unfortunately,
negative WOM still exists. 3Com’s biggest sales objection today is: ‘You
screwed us in 2000 and we won’t let you do it again!’
The problem with WOM is that the combination of it being wrong and
out of control is explosive. You have a ton of clearing up to do, with the
prospect that you’ll never quite scrub the whole market clean. Unless you
use influencers. Because influencers have the inside track to decisionmakers
they can carry a corrective message. ‘It’s okay to buy 3Com’.
If you are using WOM as a marketing tactic you must identify the
relevant influencers. There are two main reasons for this:
& Influencers optimise the message. Influencers talk to decision-makers –
that’s what our definition of influencers means. So, again by definition,
influencers take messages to decision-makers. You therefore have an
optimised route to your target market.

& Influencers amplify the message. A message carried by an influencer is
reinforced just by the fact that it’s an influencer doing the communicating.
If the influencer says so, it must be true. So any WOM that
traces its origins back to an influencer carries more weight and impact
than one that can’t be traced (or is traced to someone with little
influence).

WOM is ideally suited to the world of influence. This is because WOM
is a primary mechanism for exerting influence. Recommendations,
experiences, gossip and stories from the field are all types of WOM,
and all related by various influencer types. Some of this communication
is formal and overt, published in books, analyst reports, journalistic
articles and blogs. But much of it, up to 80 per cent we estimate, happens
in closed circles. These can be private meetings, invitation-only events,
on the golf course, in lifts, over lunch and so on. Much of the influence of
consultants and third party advisors to decision-makers comes not in the
form of specific strategic or project recommendations, but by WOM,
whispered in the ear of the decision-maker. It is never published but
sways the decision totally. The WOM mantra ‘Nobody ever got fired for
buying IBM’ is the classic example of this, however out-of-date. It’s
informal, unprovable and possibly never even accurate. But it carried
enormous weight in the 1970s and 1980s.