As marketers, we are trained to go through a series of “steps” when measuring the ROI of our client’s programs. These steps are included in various forms, like the AIDA model (Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action), to help us understand what buyers go through before the actual purchase. They are well- defined and easily followed. But lately, I’ve been reading about a new way to create and measure buzz: word-of-mouth marketing.

Measuring word of mouth? I wasn’t sure how that worked. I had heard the adage that people tend to tell two people if they like something and 10 people if they don’t, but how do you measure something so elusive and subjective?

Apparently very effectively. According to author Seth Godin, the oldest forms of communication can bypass the expensive and diverse media we know today. Not only can marketers succeed way beyond their wildest dreams, but they can do it rather cheaply and without flashy products.

A small but vigilant group of former CEOs, ad execs, writers and consultants have formed what is now known as the Word of Mouth Marketing Association or WOMMA. WOMMA is developing a code of ethics to protect itself from the onslaught of attacks from consumer advocacy groups that call word-of-mouth marketing – stealth marketing. Planting ideas could lead to deceptive practices, if not carefully monitored. But WOMMA’s definition of what it does is “to give people a reason to talk about your products and services, and make it easier for that conversation to take place.” Included in its dictionary are terms like ‘product seeding’ and ‘viral marketing’, defining just how a marketer initiates or accelerates the word-of-mouth marketing.

So as a marketer, how do you measure the buzz you’ve started? Through what is called a WOMUnit – a single unit of marketing-relevant information shared by a consumer. Marketers do this by garnering online feedback (blogs, social networks, e-mail forwards) – a tool most WOMMA researchers believe is crucial. Although offline focus groups tend to give an easier-to-read reaction to the marketing, online communities and blogs can point marketers in unconsidered directions.

As a good marketer, one must take word-of-mouth marketing with a grain of salt.  Jim Poh, director of creative content distribution at the Crispin Porter + Bogusky agency, notes that while the end goal is to drive sales, “the more you measure it, the more you find ways to manufacture buzz. And manufactured buzz starts to feel like that.”

I wonder…if you really look at it, couldn’t ‘manufactured buzz’ just be the new industry term for the already-existing ad campaign?
If you’d like to learn more about word-of-mouth marketing, check out the following website and draw your own conclusions: http://www.womma.org