March 2nd, 2007 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer
I'm speaking at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association's "Word of Mouth Basic Training" event on April 18 in New Orleans. I will speak on aquiring, amplifying and measuring online word of mouth. Brett, Brant and myself have attended and spoken at WOMMA's events for the past year and they always have a great turnout. If you're interested in learning more about where marketing is heading, hearing some forward-thinking case studies, come see me at the event. Drop me a note if you're coming! Cost is $795, but that's a bargain compared to most conferences…especially for the network of people you will meet and content you get. Register here.
May 12th, 2006 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer
DMNews recently published an article I wrote that discusses the larger strategic impact of inviting the customer voice to your site…
There’s a lot of buzz about word of mouth. It’s not surprising. Customers are exposed to thousands of marketing messages and trust each one less and less. Customers also are paralyzed by product choice: Search “Stapler” on Froogle.com and you’ll find 25,000 results. Naturally, we’re turning to each other to make wiser purchase decisions.
Marketing executives have noticed. CMO magazine reported that 43 percent of U.S. executives cite word of mouth as a top strategy for the coming year. But that doesn’t mean they know what to do about it. And it doesn’t mean that once they find something to do, it will stick.
Ironically, very few marketers actually are focused on word of mouth. Though the Word of Mouth Marketing Association has seen tremendous growth this year, the ideas and strategies of word of mouth have not seen the light of day across the entire marketing department.
How can something so important to a company’s success fail to get the attention of multiple functions? The problem is in the nature of a corporation and the nature of the topic.
Picture two cliffs and a gorge between them. On one cliff is the ostensibly right-brain ambiguity of “word of mouth.” We live this instinctively every day as customers, spending roughly 30 percent of our conversations spreading word of mouth and always seeking it out. On the other cliff is the left-brained, financially grounded operational process and systems that are the corporation. And we live on this cliff every day at work with our colleagues.
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April 28th, 2006 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO
I am really excited about the potential of our partnerships with Coremetrics, Omniture, WebSideStory, and WebTrends. Marrying word-of-mouth and clickstream data will enable us to pioneer analyses that have never before been possible. Ultimately, it will increase our clients' customer IQ.
Ever since I took my first marketing class at the University of Texas at Austin, I have been fascinated by customer behavior. It has been the driving theme of my career. What has been most exciting to me is being there when a company finds out how their customers really behave and the lightbulb goes on. When their customer IQ is increased.
At Coremetrics, I had the good fortune of seeing this transition many times. It was the biggest part of what drew me to start the business in the first place and, especially, with a services model at its core. It is hard for me to believe now, but back in 1999 the acronym "ASP" ("Application Service Provider") didn't exist. I knew from my background in consulting that an outsourced model for Web analytics would ultimately be the best way to deliver real analysis to clients. Because of my background, this was intuitive to me; it just made sense. It was later, in 2000, when someone told me, "you guys are an ASP". The label had been born, although I'm not sure who gave birth. Label or not, the business model works. The ideal ASP is a marriage of services and software to create an ever-evolving solution.
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