Defining Word of Mouth in a Socially Networked World

March 12th, 2008

Our own Daphne Kwon ran a panel at SXSW this week and the topic was Word of Mouth and Video Advertising. She did a good job (if I say so myself) drawing the crowd into the conversation. A friend noted afterward that the audience’s participation had the consequence of exposing that everyone has their own “rat hole” issue about what is a horrific violation of the rules of engagement on Word of Mouth. And that to me is the point of the presentation. So when some media source jumps all over a marketer, or blogger, for violating word of mouth ethics, let’s all remember that these rules are being developed every day, and nothing is black and white.

Why is there so much uncertainty? Because only now is the web actually impacting word of mouth. Word of mouth for decades before the internet had been limited to only people you actually knew. That’s why online text reviews were actually separated by Nielsen from “recommendations from other consumers” in a survey on sources of product information. Online text reviews are structurally anonymous, and with that there is little incentive to disclose a reviewer’s potential bias or any outside motive (a notable exception would be epinions, which tried hard to get you to know their reviewers). Therefore, online text reviewers were quite distinct from any traditional conception of the more personal “word of mouth”. See slides from the powerpoint presentation here. But the new “socially networked Facebook world” now lets you make those personal connections, and word of mouth has exploded online.

In an attempt to help define attributes that should guide whether or not something can be an authentic word of mouth piece, the audience helped develop four key questions to ask yourself as a content contributor, from bloggers to community members:
1) What is the level of personal familiarity your audience has with you? This is what makes anonymous text reviews so ineffective. A personal knowledge of who you are will go a long way in building trust of your point of view on the world.
2) are there incentives structurally that might bias you? Even disclosure doesn’t overcome certain structures like being paid by marketers to say something. Is your content affected by something other than your true opinion?
3) Is the publishing platform one where other opinions could be heard? Is it built to be open and honest? Or is it built to publish only one opinion (yours) and no other voices?
4) Was everything disclosed? Any relationships, and bias, any incentives?

This last point seems more like a desperate request than an actual attribute of word of mouth. (For example, just because you disclosed being paid and scripted by marketers obviously doesn’t turn it into word of mouth.) I think by listing “disclosure”, users just want to be able to judge individually whether there’s anything that, in their personal judgement, might affect the authenticity of your opinion. Not everyone agreed where that boundary was in the audience on each of those points. One person said that you had to have bought and paid for a product to be an authentic review, another said a review of a gift from mom was perfectly fine. The beauty is, upon full disclosure, we can each judge for ourselves.

Entry Filed under: Collison of Media & Commerce