American Marketing Association Q&A

A few months back I was asked some questions by Piet Levy at the American Marketing Association about Social Media and Digital Word of Mouth marketing, where it has been and where it is going.  Here is what I told him:

10 MINUTES WITH...LARRY WEINTRAUB; CEO AND CO-FOUNDER, FANSCAPE INC.
BY PIET LEVY, STAFF WRITER

IN 2009, SOCIAL media was the word, and for many marketers, it was good. Facebook's audience increased by 170% from September 2008 to September 2009 compared with the previous year, according to Nielsen Co. data. Twitter's audience increased by 1,009% in that time frame, also according to Nielsen.

At Fanscape Inc., a Los Angeles-based digital word-of-mouth marketing agency serving MasterCard, Sports Illustrated, GameStop and other brands, business grew by more than 30% in 2009, according to the company.

Fanscape CEO and co-founder Larry Weintraub talked with Marketing News about what a big year it was for online word-of-mouth marketing and what he expects in 2010.

Q: How, from your perspective, did word-of-mouth marketing change in 2009?

A: The brands in the corporate world finally are starting to understand social media and digital word of mouth. In the history of Fanscape, and we've been doing this for 11 years, there was this huge education process trying to get the companies we work with to understand that this is the way marketing is going to be done. It's going to be very social and very interactive with your customers, allowing them to have a voice and to comment on what you're going to do. It was a lot of dabbling and a lot of education, a lot of 'I don't know if we're comfortable with that.' What [companies] did in 2009 is they said: 'We have to cut back overall, so let's take some money out of print and television and radio, some of these more traditional areas, and put it into this whole online and social media world because it's more cost-effective. We can see results, it's interactive, we're engaging with our customers.'

The No. 1 reason people buy something or try something is because someone they trust told them to. And that's been a hard thing to kind of figure out, historically, because how do we know that your friend told you? And what's happened in the social media space is you can see it happening. You can see tangibly word of mouth taking off.

Q: Discuss online word-of-mouth marketing milestones this year, both positive and negative.

A: If you actually concentrate on one social media area, Twitter is obviously the big explosion. Twitter became the new customer service outlet. People all of a sudden found that rather than making a phone call and sitting on hold for an hour with their cable company or sending an e-mail and not getting a response for a couple of days, they could send a Tweet, 'My picture sucks on my Comcast cable,' and get a response within minutes. All of a sudden now, you've just opened up the gate for millions of people potentially to solve their problems. You've given people this platform to ask questions and expect a fairly quick response.

There are things that are considered bumbles that I don't believe were bumbles. An example would be Skittles. Skittles' Web site [starting this year] was all done through Twitter and Facebook and YouTube. If you went to Skittles.com, there was a Twitter page, and everybody was just going crazy [with obscenities] on that. To me, I think it was one of the greatest experiments. In this digital word of mouth and social media space, they tried something, and you have to try something. It put Skittles back into the conversation. Who was talking about Skittles before that?

Q: What are some key takeaways and lessons from word-of-mouth marketing this year?

A: The big mantra in digital word of mouth and social media marketing is 'listen first.' Listen to what your customers say. Historically, a big brand has said: 'This is our product. We're going to push it out. We're going to advertise. This is a one-way street.' The new thing is it's a two-way street. You purchase something [on Amazon] because it's highly rated. That's real word of mouth. If you're a company, listen to what people are saying about your products in reviews, in Twitter, in Facebook, in blogs. Find what people are saying and then adjust accordingly.

Q: What predictions and advice do you have for word of mouth in 2010 and beyond?

A: I think you're going to see more real-time search in the coming years and I think that's going to be a great thing for brands. They're going to be able to see who's talking about them immediately.

Something that's happening already but only a handful of companies are doing is almost every company is going to have to create their own social media policies. ... Two years ago you had companies saying, 'Nobody's [allowed] on Facebook, we can't have people doing that,' for fear, obviously, that they're wasting time and also that they could say the wrong thing. Now companies can't do that. So companies have to come up with a policy: 'If you're going to be on Facebook, here it is in writing. You cannot talk about this, you cannot talk about that.'

Right now, [companies] are trying to track and evaluate ROI based on the merging of old-world numbers and new-world numbers, and everybody measures differently. I think in 2010 we'll see more concise, standardized measuring. That will help companies because big brands are trying to figure out how to spend against things and they just don't know how to measure it. They want to put more money toward [online WOM]; they just have to understand what they're getting for their money. I think we're qui