The document discusses the evolution of word-of-mouth marketing in the age of social media, highlighting its increased importance as trust in advertisements declines. It presents statistics showing that personal recommendations are more trusted than ads and emphasizes the need for brands to monitor online conversations and engage with their customers effectively. Case studies illustrate both successful and negative approaches to leveraging social media, underscoring the significance of treating customers with care and attention.

1. “ How SOCIAL MEDIA has changed WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING” Using the Internet to build long-lasting, positive buzz about your brand… PRESENTED BY

2. “ Word of Mouth” has always been the most effective form of marketing. People have always trusted their friends opinions…

3. Hey Maximus, you need a new deodorant buddy… Try Lynxona, it never lets me down…

4. Word of mouth never stopped being important, but when mass media became popular last century, brands could rely on advertising to broadcast their message at the world and word of mouth didn’t seem as important to some marketers anymore…

5. TV got people’s attention. And trust.

6. You could tell people whatever you wanted, because you knew they were paying attention… Image © Aaron Escobar @ Flickr

7. No matter how blatant or irrelevant your message was, people used to listen…

8. But the landscape has changed…

9. Ads are everywhere. In fact, people see and hear between 1,000 and 3,000 advertising messages every day… 87,600,000 throughout their lives…

10. People still watch TV, but they flick through the ads. They read the news online instead of on paper. Recommendations and opinions for every product and service are now available on the Internet.

11. We have reached a point where: 14% of people trust ads 78% of people trust consumer recommendations (Source: Neilsen Global Trust In Advertising Survey, 2007)

12. McKinsey and Co. estimate that 2/3 of the economy is now influenced by personal recommendations…

13. People obviously still talk to each other face to face, but the INTERNET has allowed conversations to spread at light speed around the globe and be heard by millions within minutes. And the Internet is now the largest mass-communication medium, by far…

14. 74% of Australians are Internet users and 75% of those use social networks (like MySpace and Facebook ) to communicate with friends (Source: Internet World Stats)

15. 13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute

16. There are more than 400,000 blogs in Australia and more than 130 million blogs in the world (Source: Technorati)

17. Facebook has 3,000,000 Australian users and 100 more join every hour (Source: News.com.au and Neilsen)

18. There are thousands of special interested forums in Australia. Vogue Magazine’s forum is one of the biggest. It has 93,000 active Australian members. And they talk about almost anything but fashion. (Source: Vogue Forums)

19. Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corp , and MySpace summed it up like this: “ Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it’s the people who are taking control…”

20. OK, I get it. How can Social Media help me?

21. There are four reasons people have conversations about you Because they love you Because they hate you Because they were asked their opinion about you Because their community is talking about you

22. There are three ways to leverage these conversations: Avoiding issues (and crises) Category and consumer research Identifying and Engaging Influencers

23. Lesson One: Avoiding Issues (and Crises)

24. WHAT NOT TO DO…

25. Word starts circulating in blogs and forums that AOL’s customer service people make it impossible to cancel your account. A YouTube video is published by an account holder trying to cancel his service. He shows the conversation taking place and shows how rude the customer service rep is. The video is seen by 350,000+ people. The story is picked up by The NBC Today show. 800,000 other people cancel their accounts in protest The rep is fired AOL withdraws its product from the market. The US attorney General investigates and AOL has to pay $1.25 million to the state of New York in fines. If they’d been listening to what was being said about them in blogs and forums, it never would have happened.

26. WHAT TO DO…

27. Dell Hell : influential blogger complains. Company reacts, engages him, engages the social media sphere, starts monitoring 1500 blogs a day, talks to people about their issues, gives out personal email addresses for customer service, the influential blogger becomes a fan again, tells everyone. Complaints fall by 16% in the first 6 months.

28. Lesson Two: Category and Consumer Research

29. WHAT TO DO…

30. Wine Library Son of Russian Immigrants starts reading blogs and forums to find out what wines people want to know about. Answers common questions, tells people to check out his site. Turns small New York bottle shop into the world’s biggest online wine store with a $48 million a year turnover .

31. WHAT NOT TO DO…

32. Tourism Queensland Advertised “The Best Job in The World”, asked people to apply with videos about why they love the Reef and why they’d be great for the job. Faked applications. Copped flack from the media, accessibility lobby AND the Qld Government.

33. Lesson Three: Engaging Influencers

34. WHAT NOT TO DO…

35. NAB spammed blogs to spruik a new SMS banking system. Anonymous messages were posted to the comments section of football blog ‘AFL Player Spectator’. Hi guys, NAB is giving away free tickets to the Collingwood v Carlton game on Saturday afternoon @ the MCG. Hop on down to Fed Square tomorrow… this is all to launch the new NAB SMS Banking! Thank you The comments had nothing to do with the blogs content and readers get angry . Crikey picked up on it. 1,600 websites now reference the issue as an example of how to make people hate you by abusing social media. People hate NAB as a result.

36. But NAB don’t learn their lesson… A few months ago they decided to start “Ubank” – a new sort of bank with 24/7 customer service. They got their own employees to blog about how great it was, and leave comments about how it’s such a good idea. They then started telling off people who made negative comments. And then lied about who was doing the talking. They get caught out. Again. And looked stupid. Again. Not a great way to win trust and build long term relationships. Ooops.

37. WHAT TO DO…

38. Tiger Woods EA Glitch A fan of the Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 video game finds a ‘glitch’ where Tiger Woods can walk on water. He makes a YouTube video about it which gets over 600,000 views… EA pick up on the buzz and shoot a video with the real Tiger Woods walking on water, saying it’s not a glitch, he’s just that good. Their video receives more than 2.7 million views. By engaging a fan they made a massive impact.

39. Barack Obama Raised more than three times as much money as McCain through his own social network, My.BarackOBama.com. It had more than 1 million members. He was the most popular celebrity on YouTube in 2008 with more than 19,000,000 views. He used social media like YouTube and Twitter to treat people like friends, mobilise support and win the Presidency.

40. But what if no one is talking about you?

41. Give them a reason to talk…

42. Makers Mark Bourbon – has 500,000 VIP club members who have their name on a barrel and are invited to be the first one to taste it when it matures. They are made to feel loved and special and tell all their friends. It’s not always about the brand or the product The Drury Inn - gave customers free long distance calls after 6pm. Everyone who stayed there became a walking, talking telemarketer for the brand. They’d call people and tell them where they were because didn’t cost anything. It was so successful they’ve now given people free internet and their sales continue to soar.

43. Whether it’s on line or off line, the bottom line is, People are talking about your brand right now .

44. Some people like you…

45. Some people don’t…

46. But if you monitor what people are saying…

47. And treat your customers the same way you’d treat your friends, opinions will start to change…

48. The people that don’t like you will start to love you; the people that love you will become your most powerful brand ambassadors…

49. As a few wise people have been saying lately: “ Telling and selling is dead.” — Jim Stengal, Chief Global Marketing Officer, Proctor and Gamble “ We’re shifting significant ad dollars to digital media. This is the era of customer participation. The old model was ‘informing, persuading, and reminding’, the new model is ‘demonstrating, involving and empowering.’” — Mitch Mathews, Head of Marketing, Microsoft.

50. How do you get involved? All you have to do is pay attention to what is being said about you, and make people feel loved…

51. This presentation brought to you by [dp dialogue is the only social media marketing agency in Australia with proprietary software and proven strategies to locate, identify and rank what people are saying about your company, your brand and your industry. For more information on our professional social media monitoring and word of mouth consulting services please visit our website] www.dpdialogue.com.au

52. IMAGE CREDITS [All photos were sourced from Flickr with thanks to Compfight. All images are used under the terms of a Creative Commons licence . Slide 3: hans s; Slide 6: Aaron Escobar; Slide 7: MsBlueSky; Slide 8: Falling Heavens; Slide 10: Jay Dugger; Slide 16: Jacob Bøtter; Slide 18: Vincent Boiteau; Slide 19: World Economic Forum; Slide 29: teamstickergiant; Slide 44: Libertinus; Slide 45: Jeb Ro; Slide 47: kalandrakas; Slide 48: K.Coles; Slide 50: erin MC hammer]