Urban Legends: Word-of-Mouth Myths, Madvocates and Champions
Debunking Myths About Brand Conversations and Word-of-Mouth in Social Media

A remarkable synergy links urban legends and word-of-mouth (a term used whether the form of communication is conversation, email, social media or any other tale-teller’s mechanism of choice). Urban legends are tall tales reported as truths, because they’re heard from a “reliable” friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, and they’re spread by word-of-mouth. In turn, a number of urban legends about word-of-mouth marketing are being spread from the colleague-of-a-colleague-of-a-colleague.

Based upon the findings of COLLOQUY’s 2011 Word-of-Mouth study, now is the time to debunk some popular word-of-mouth marketing urban legends. And this white paper seeks to spread the word.

Two and a half years ago, COLLOQUY conducted our first general consumer survey of North American households on the topic of word-of-mouth sharing practices — the results were published as the New Champion Customers: Measuring Word-of-Mouth Activity Among Reward Program Members. Interest in this style of marketing has accelerated exponentially since our COLLOQUY 2009 Word-of-Mouth study. We are, after all, in the middle of a perfect storm of factors that emphasizes the importance of customer conversations.

• At the time of our first study, we were on the threshold of the economic meltdown, and have since tripped over that threshold, increasing the pressure to maintain best customers and the positive buzz they can create.
  
  
• Consumers are absolutely deluged by marketing messages – some 3,500 per day versus a mere 500 daily in the 1960s – and they are faced with a slew of information sources, both those they chose and those that are imposed upon them. At the same time, people continue to lose the trust they once held in government, businesses and the media. As a result, consumers increas­ingly rely on friends, family, neighbors, and an informal network of virtual strangers to help guide their everyday choices.
  
  
• Meanwhile, both the number and the popularity of the web 2.0 vehicles for facilitating the customer conversations we term “word-of-mouth” have almost literally exploded since our first study, providing additional platforms for vast increases in consumer dialogue — or the three-part company-to-consumer-to-consumer-network trialogue — in the marketplace. There’s no shortage of ways with which people can now connect to each other in passing along comments and opinions: face-to-face conversations, landlines, cell phones, email, instant messaging, texting, blogs . . . and now micro blogs like Twitter, product review sites like TripAdvisor, social network­ing communities like Facebook, and the most-recent wunderkinds of location-based social connections, such as Foursquare.

Recognizing the impact of the Great Recession and the coincident rise in consumers’ use of social media, COLLOQUY’s 2011 Word-of-Mouth study sets out to better understand the shifting reality of today’s word-of-mouth (frequently abbreviated as WOM): What it is, how it works, who’s responsible for it, and why it matters. Fielded late in 2010, this follow-up study was designed to explore the triggers of WOM advocacy and negative WOM for the specific categories consumers are most involved in. In addition to the groups of active promoters (called WOM Champions) profiled in the 2009 study, the 2011 study investigates the size and influence of groups of their opposite counterparts: consumers who are ready, willing and able to spread negative stories about brands and services.

Finally, our new study also focuses on the role that the new social media plays in enabling and empowering WOM in an age of economic uncertainty.

The results of this 2011 update to our 2009 survey turn conventional wisdom upside-down. In other words, it’s time to debunk some urban legends.