As the author himself says, he thought of social media as a platform to directly scale up word of mouth (WOM) marketing. But the synergy that looks so obvious doesn’t happen. In fact, says Glassman, compared to the effectiveness of what takes place offline, surprisingly little WOM is generated on social media.

My sense is that while there is plenty of talk being pushed into the media, that content is then not, for the most part, being transmitted-on (or more specifically picked up) in the way that it is when WOM is in full flight.

Glassman himself hints at why. People, he says, participate in social media to interact with friends and like-minded strangers about things that interest them. Social media marketers, on the other hand, engage with their customers hoping to encourage them to spread the word. The first interaction pivots on “us” – about the things that “we” share, which means ownership exists. The second is about turning “mine” into “yours”. It’s about encouraging people to take ownership.

Glassman continues, “It appears that as much as social media has changed our networked world, it hosts only a small bit of the conversations about brands, products and companies. Not what social media marketers talking amongst themselves would expect.”

One observation on the difference between WOM and social media did surprise me. While 20% of WOM conversations are triggered by media/marketing, half of all conversations about brands have references to media/marketing, and positive experiences trigger more WOM than negative.

We share what we enjoy – no surprises there. But we share what we enjoy most effectively when it has affected us personally. In other words, we convert mere talk into active endorsement when we have emotional skin in the game. By contrast, Glassman observes, most people on social media networks are passive. They’re talking, passing time.

The key aim for people engaged in social media is bonding and the subject matters they discuss are just part of the conversation. This may make them less inclined to endorse a product or an idea. By contrast, WOM focuses on shared subject matters because people talk about they have in common, so they are much more likely to recommend something that they think the other person would like.

Key message for brands: until people see your brand as part of their world, they may talk about you but they are less likely to recommend you than most marketers would like to imagine.

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Advertising has traditionally been the closest marketers have come to WOM. Teaser campaigns attempted to stimulate it, while classic executions for products like WeightWatchers have tried to simulate WOM on the screen.

Research suggests, however, that advertising’s brush may be too broad to create successful WOM impact. According to Renee Dye from consulting firm McKinsey & Co, 67% of consumer sales are influenced by WOM. However, she points out that to truly harness the power of WOM marketers must reach a vanguard of consumers who inhabit the first fringe of the adoption curve.

Marketers must stop thinking of their communication efforts as a single transaction (ad impacts market) and attempt instead to create waves of communication that spread from a small number of lead users through consumer-to-consumer interaction.

The process is tricky, but agencies are springing up to help clients.

Wildfire, a London based WOM agency has developed a three-stage methodology: discovering the target groups, developing the key ‘stories’, then deploying these stories using events and direct marketing.

Another agency, Comment, was set up in South Africa for the millions of black workers who had little access to TV or radio and were largely illiterate.

When employers, unions or health organizations wanted to communicate with them, they used Industrial Theater: song-and-dance based productions performed on the factory floor. Soon Comment was putting on live ads in cinemas and shopping malls for a variety of clients – a campaign for Organics shampoo saw handsome men serenading women in supermarkets.

There is of course a downside to all of this. The ultimate form of WOM stimulation is never revealed to be stimulation. Rather, hired protagonists engage in artificial behaviors and conversations in order to initiate the first wave. Glamorous students in London, for example, were paid to smoke and distribute Gauloises cigarettes to their peers. Even more infamous, Sony Ericsson paid people in the US to masquerade as tourists and ask people to take their picture with the then new T68i camera/phone. Unfortunately the campaign was rumbled by the US press and spawned a PR backlash against the brand.

Like all forms of marketing communication, WOM has advantages and limitations.

But for the first time the marketing industry is actively attempting to engage WOM as a strategic vehicle. In the cluttered communications world we all inhabit, there is a certain purity in returning to the oldest method of communications around.

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