February 2007 Lawlor Focus

Monitoring Word of Mouth

Word-of-mouth recommendations have always been a powerful determinant in buying decisions. Yet it was only in 2004 that the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) was formed to promote and improve techniques for "amplifying genuine customer enthusiasm." What changed in recent years? Word of mouth's reach. With the advent of online social networking, blogs, and consumer-generated media, a recommendation is no longer confined to a one-on-one exchange. Now that web forums are proliferating to give them a voice, more and more people are sharing their opinions. A recent BIGresearch study found that 94 percent of consumers give advice to others about products or services, and 91 percent of consumers seek such advice.

The expanding influence of word of mouth—along with the rise of a stealth marketplace of prospective students who seek information outside of traditional communication channels—is necessitating a parallel increase in the attention that colleges and universities must pay to reputation management, which begins with asking, "What are people saying about us?" Two months ago the mainstream media reported that Southern Methodist University is poised to become home to George W. Bush's presidential library, and a Technorati search of blogs turns up more than 1,000 postings on the subject since that time as people speculate on what it could mean for the academic culture at SMU. But it doesn't take a media event to trigger chatter in the blogosphere. One person's posting of photos of students wearing racially insensitive costumes to a Halloween party at Trinity College in Connecticut caused countless other people to wonder whether the campus culture encourages intolerance. The school responded promptly with a "Conversations on Community" initiative.

Such responsiveness is the key to word-of-mouth marketing. Word of mouth is a pre-existing phenomenon; good buzz can't be invented, and bad buzz can't be silenced. But as WOMMA points out, what companies can do is harness and amplify the voice of the consumer for the good of the brand: "Companies can work hard to make people happier, they can listen to consumers, they can make it easier for them to tell their friends, and they can make certain that influential individuals know about the good qualities of a product or service." The essence of reputation management is monitoring how, where, and when opinions are being shared, then listening and responding to supporters and detractors alike.

Lawlor Recommends

Advice seekers routinely discover recommendations via Internet searches, so monitoring online forums is a logical step in reputation management. At a minimum, the assigned person at a college or university should employ these techniques:

• Create a Google Alert and Yahoo! Alert to receive an e-mail whenever the search engine finds a new mention of your school name.
• Use search engines like Technorati for blogs and IceRocket for MySpace pages to monitor instances of your school name.
• Look for images/videos and groups tagged with your school name on services like YouTube, Flickr, Google Video, and Yahoo Video.
• Check social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia to see if your school name is being used as a tag.

In the news

Inside Higher Ed reported the viral life of a five-minute video produced by Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. "The Machine is Us/ing Us" depicts the non-linear quality of digital text and the linking that Web 2.0 technology enables. Although Wesch only posted it on Jan. 31, the video has already been viewed more than a million times on YouTube, proving through its spread exactly what its content describes.

Look for an interview with Michael Wesch in the upcoming Spring 2007 issue of The Lawlor Review.

Did you know?

Of the 55 colleges participating in the "Survey of College Marketing Programs, 2007 Edition," 17.65 percent report making payments to search engines for higher placement on search engine results pages. More than a quarter of private colleges engage in search engine advertising, while slightly more than one in ten public colleges do.

Source: Primary Research Group