Word of Mouth Labs

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On Serendipity: A Network Perspective

By Alex Erster Chung

I was once involved in a project where we interviewed a group of scientists about collaboration, cooperation and isolation. Among the traditional scholars (especially in the social sciences) collaboration was avoided at all costs. They tinkered away on their masterpieces in isolation. To them, it was romantic to be alone. Not unlike Dr. Frankenstein, these lone rangers weren’t about to consult the Rolodex for partnership opportunities on their latest monster (project).

To others, collaboration was magical. It was something that happened in the corridors of an obscure conference. A chance introduction; a random email. These scientists painted a story of luck and serendipity. Their narratives were littered with crucial pivot points, often following this pattern: if it weren’t for x, y wouldn’t have happened.

But between this group of serendipitous collaborators and lone rangers, was a class of scientist that stripped any romance from their ‘work relationships’. In rational tone, they would explain how they actively sought out people and resources that they needed to execute their goals. Nothing happened by chance. They did the background checks, made calls and lured in talent. You couldn’t convince this group that luck was involved. Connections were either probable or unlikely.

So, where one scientist would have considered bumping into someone serendipitous, another would see it as a bunch of probable factors converging on an event. The point here is that serendipity is subjective. Moreover, if you choose to, it doesn’t ever have to exist. The rational scientists have a point. Serendipity is the answer we use when where not aware of all the factors that led up to an event. People are not great at departing from their personal perspectives.  

Serendipity is something we retrofit to experiences that we thought were unlikely but, in reality, could have been very probable. People do not think universally. We don’t see things from a bird’s eye perspective. We don’t have the bigger picture at our disposal.

When people describe serendipity online, they are not describing how the Internet works. All they are talking about is their own experience. There are rules to what information lands on your browser. They are more specific and descriptive than vague arguments about serendipity. (Read “Linked” or Google “Mark Granovetter”, for a start.)

Power is Not Entirely To The People

A rolling theme in many discussions among WOM enthusiasts is that the consumer is in control of what is said. I agree with this, but with reservations. One of the things we have to increasingly realise about social networks is that although consumers are making the decisions regarding with whom and what to communicate, with enough understanding of the situation we can influence those choices.

While it is completely true that we cant inject ourselves into some one’s private conversions (and I think we can all agree we shouldn’t try) we can exert influence over the context in which a WOM exchange can occur. These forms of influence can be obvious, such as ensuring a satisfactory consumption experience, to the much more subtle, such as creating a media environment that forms a specific emotional response. Some people are even going so far as to provide a medium through which exchange can occur.

Our choices regarding how to shape the context have the potential to directly impact on consumers’ choices regarding what to communicate. By carefully mapping how WOM changes as a result of our decisions it is possible to feel out the nature of the relationship between the small changes in the context that you can make, and the larger changes in WOM behavior. Some interesting things to consider:

1) Some communication mediums can only communicate some types of information - for example, online forums are bad at communicating tacit information

2) Consumers are only able to communicate information that they have either been given, have experienced, or been EDUCATED on by a marketer.

3) The nature of the relationship between the sender and receiver in WOM exchanges influences the content - understand who you want them to talk to and what they will say.

4) Sometimes communicating to sub-groups, such as that by an opinion leader, can be given different weighting by different receivers.

These are just some of the ways we can start to map this all out.

All Praise to NWOM

By Luke Greenacre

Negative WOM (or NWOM as it has become popularised) is a particularly interesting topic in WOM research and practice. Not because of the idea itself, but because of its implications for how we are, and indeed should be, defining information in WOM exchanges.

This has been a tricky problem for us all for quite a long time, and its a problem we all try to ignore as much as possible. Often the language we use is specifically designed to obscure the problem. For example, we often are trying to get ‘referrals’ but what is the actual form a referral takes - is it just a consumer walking up to another and saying “Brand good…must buy brand”. Obviously not! So… where does this leave us.

One of the new areas of interest (that is only just starting to get some quiet momentum) is research specifically into the actual form of conversations, especially with regard to what people are saying to each other. This work has mostly been done for academic interest - the semiotics researchers are loving this work, and a few of us are also developing other methods of understanding what people are saying and how we can predict/influence it.

For a practitioner though there is a growing need for a focus on this particualr problem. It is just like doing ad testing to see the effects of different information inputs on intention to purchase. We need to see the effects of different information inputs on the intention to talks about different things. A consumer may see our ad and talk voraciously about a particular dimension of our product, but if we are trying to differentiate on a different dimension this talk isnt necessarily all that helpful. By testing the effect of the information we put out there on what people will then go on to talk about we can get a feel for how we can exert some influence over what people are saying - be it positive, negative or the much more realistic something in between. Once we know what people will be saying about our product it gives us a chance to try and change their minds about what is important to be talking about!!

Time for religion to get social.

Time for religion to get social.

The Second Step of Community Building 

By Luke Greenacre

I’m going to start by thanking Aramique for inspiring this post. Check out the interesting comment on Why ‘Guys Starts Dance Party’ Isn’t an Example of ‘Viral’.

We often hear that one of the most important functions of social tools is to build a community of loyal followers for your product, brand or issue. I couldn’t agree more.  Social tools likeFacebook , branded websites, action clubs/groups and the hot of other tools are an excellent way to bring the right people together to support you. As Alex pointed out earlier, it is an opportunity to put the right people side by side so as to maximise generate the greatest peer influence. Bringing people together in this way is the first step to community building - and one that a lot of marketers are getting quite good at.

The second step to community building, and one that we don’t discuss enough, is researching the communicative messages that will have the greatest effect on this community. Often we simply talk about making a message enticing, such that the community will pick up and pass along the message. But a message that is passed along is notnecessarily the most effective message (as anyone working with commercial rumours knows).

Those of us working in modeling consumer decision making, particularly within Information Acceleration (IA) effects, know that framing and other slight changes to information content can drastically alter decision outcomes. Small wording changes can dramatically shift attribute preference, and even increase or decrease preference variances. Both of which can be very good or very bad for us marketers. By spending time on researching the type of information that has the potential to be communicated to the desired consumer group, and then identifying the sub-set of that information that produces the greatest purchase outcomes in the desired consumer group we greatly improve the power of our social tools.

This type of research can and has been done, but largely only in academic circles. Examples of this research includes qualitative analysis of communication motives and their impact on information exchange, semantic analysis of presentcommunications , analysis of WOM information effects in Discrete Choice Experiments, agent based analysis, along with some others. Each of these has its individual advantages and can glean important insights in different contexts. They are too underutilised at the moment.

With this research done we can then work with our communities to bring about the marketing outcomes we really want, and brings us a whole new set of better metrics to gauge success. Like an advertising campaign that increases sales (or awareness or….) but not in line with expectations, thus making it a ‘failure’. We can now begin to properly develop these expectations of social media so we can better understand success and failure. Some people tend to argue that it is impossible to manipulate the information flowing within a WOM network - and I agree. We can’t manipulate it, because people in the community control information flows.

However, if our research shows information X and Y will flow through the WOM network, and we prefer Y to flow, our ads should show Y and not X. It creates an environment conducive to marketing outcomes while still satisfying the community’s information needs.

8 Questions To Ask Before Saying The Word 'Viral' 

By Alex Erster Chung

1. Do we want to encourage conversations that lead to purchase or to more conversations?

2. How do people use my product or service in advice situations?

3. Are conversations going to happen in a public or private forum?

4. Are people declaring an affliation or are they stating a belief?

5. What do we want people talking about, and what will happen in the 30 seconds leading up to that instance of communication?

6. What happens in the 30 seconds after that instance of communication?

7. Will exponential attention really benefit my sales agenda?

8. What kind of beliefs are we trying to create around my product or service and does this match up to the social norms of the communication platform?

Eight answers to follow.

Why 'Guy Starts Dance Party' Isn't an Example of 'Viral' 

By Luke Greenacre

In case you haven’t seen it, I’ve posted Sasquatch Music Festival 2009 - Guy Starts Dance Party above. I love this video. It’s a great example of social proof behavior.

Marketers are jumping onto the video, using it as a metaphor for their campaigns: A dancer who has gone ‘viral’.

But does the video demonstrate ‘viral’ behavior?

Confusion arises from poor definitions of the term ‘viral’. Viral can refer to a really large number of things, and can easily be sourced back to epidemiology. Drawing on this origin, the idea of going ‘viral’ is that a near consistent behavior is transmitted from one person to another. This can be seen in this video but the virus in this case is ‘dancing’, a relatively simple behavior. The virus most of us are interested in is the decision to communicate information, a much more complex phenomenon. The reason that we need to make the distinction here is because the theories and psychology that drives these two different viruses will also be different.

For dancing an individual will use social proof to guide their own behavior. This is simple enough: the first dancer gave social permission for the second dancer to start, with them both then giving permission to the third and so on. One thing that is essential to this working is the visibility of the behavior to the rest of the group.

WOM is a much more complex. The most stark difference here is that WOM is near invisible to the group. Although instances can be visible to individuals there is no visible collective demonstration of conversations. This means that those that are ‘followers’ much further down the line are much less likely to be activated.

Also, the virus is much more complex. Retaining the form of a piece of information so that it is consistently communicated is a much taller order, as anyone that played the whisper game in junior school knows (its the ‘purple monkey dishwasher’ problem).

Did anyone notice that people weren’t all dancing the same - the virus mutated!

This is then complicated by the structural nature of the communication. In this video there are no structural imperfections that can prevent communication of ‘dancing’ - it is equally visible to everyone. But the more covert communication of information is not as visible and thussusceptible to structural imperfections that can trap information due to a lack of social links to continue the spread of the infection.

All in all this video is a great example of the power of social forces in shaping individual behavior. I am definitely going to be using in classes. But as researchers and practitioners we should carefully select the social behaviour we are striving for, so that our efforts (and dollars) are spent in the most effective way.

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