Consumers trust others' opinions more than ads
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Word-of-mouth media is coming of age. Social content, as a rival to professional content, has two key implications for media and advertisers. Not only does it provide competition to professional content for the eyes and ears of consumers, but crucially it provides an alternative and unadulterated point of view.
It's not just how much is being said, but what is being said. At the time of writing, there are currently over 63m English-language blogs globally, according to BlogPulse. The last 24 hours have seen 93,000 new blogs and almost 830,000 new posts. That's an awful lot of opinion the professionals aren't in control of.
A recent Nielsen survey on the attitudes of online consumers around the world towards advertising, showed the most trusted form of advertising was recommendations from other consumers - cited by 78% of respondents. Furthermore, the third most trusted form of advertising (behind ads in newspapers at 63%) was consumer opinions posted online, trusted by 61%.
This, in effect, means that six out of every ten of your potential consumers will trust the recommendation of someone they don't know when it comes to deciding which of your products or services to buy. They're more likely to trust these than your brand website, ads in magazines, on TV or radio or before movies, more than emails or texts they receive from you, sponsorships you engage in, or search engine ads or banner ads that you place. Brand association maps, which plot language, attributes and issues around a topic, show that, for advertising, attributes like 'false', 'deceptive' and 'misleading' are highly associated.
What people are saying about you can have more effect than all of your marketing activities, so it's vital to understand what's being said and the sentiment behind it - the 'buzz'. Our studies in the US have shown that monitoring buzz can be like a digital version of a crystal ball when it comes to sales. For example, a well-known pet-food manufacturer in the US was consistently cited in the same percentage of blogs until early March this year when suddenly its share of buzz increased 20-fold in just two weeks due to a contaminant scare.
This increase in negative buzz preceded by one week a drop in sales, and the buzz spike coincided with a 50% drop in sales. So while it's difficult to control what people are saying about you, by monitoring the buzz it can give you a fighting chance, a window, in which to develop appropriate counter-strategies.
Word of mouth continues to grow unabated but so does your chance to improve from it.
Alex Burmaster is European internet analyst at Nielsen Online
