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Editor’s Note: This content was originally published in a study released by BoldMouth and Osterman Research. I’ve added a few new tips and observations here to help you implement successful word-of-mouth marketing campaigns. Enjoy — Todd Tweedy

Word-of-mouth (WOM) effectiveness is a function of generating product, service or brand advocacy and amplifying the ability of individuals and groups to make recommendations. In a world where anyone with an internet-connected device can publish, it is important to make it as easy as possible for bloggers or journalist to take your organization’s content and publish it.

Pretty simple right? Well, when we asked organizations what they rated as the most effective tactics for generating word-of-mouth in our study Perceptions, Practices and Ethics in Word-of-Mouth Marketing, here’s what we heard:

Face-to-face communications received the highest WOM effectiveness rating (86% or “extremely effective”) followed by “articles, TV or radio interviews about our company” (62.8%), while “contacting bloggers” generated an effectiveness rating of 42% or “somewhat effective.”

Contacting bloggers, while ranked fairly high among the more important tactics in a WOM campaign for organizations, is also likely to lead to a common misconception about WOM: all you need to do is reach out to a few “influencers” to get conversations started.

Leveraging third parties, like bloggers, to accelerate and amplify WOM can, indeed, be a cost-effective outreach tactic if expenses are managed and the appropriate campaign management expertise is tapped. Here are a few recommendations to help your organization work with bloggers:

1. Start Blogging. Blogging is about communication and participation. I love WordPress, and it’s free.
2. Use Top Tags (categories on your site) that match to category assignments on major search engines that cover blogs.
3. Solicit Feedback Early — 60 days out from your launch should be enough time — and start generating advanced buzz and registrations to your RSS feeds. Translation: that means outreach and that means you’re going to need to provide previews of your product or service.
4. Make Communications Meaningful. Reach out to individuals who review new products and services and industry experts (you’ll be surprised how many respond to your email requests) as well as people that are having the same problems you just solved by creating your service or product and ask them for their honest expert insight, advice and feedback. The key is to be ready to move on these recommendations.
5. Share Your Experience with the World. Education is more powerful than any product or service benefit your communications department will dream up.
6. Thank You Goes a Long Way Online. Be sure to monitor the conversation and recognize folks that are saying great things by visiting their blog and comment on their posts about your organization as well as responding to people that aren’t saying wonderful things. You way even want to add new voices to your list of blogs that are your published favorites or acknowledge contributions on a “thank you” page in the material your are publishing.

Other strategies organizations may want to consider are creating event-focused campaigns to get people talking, building-out content platforms to support viral pass-along and using referral programs to generate buzz. Remember that blogs are the most viral mechanisms for distributing content online that have every been created.

Here are a few additional observations from that study that are worthy of mentioning. Of note is the low effectiveness score for pay-per-click search engine marketing (17%), which ranked lower than direct mail and flyers. There are a number of likely explanations for this, including:

(1) The growing complexities of paid search management and ongoing optimization;
(2) The need to tailor landing page information and desired behavioral objectives based on keyword phrases to achieve ideal conversion rates;
(3) The increasingly competitive landscape of search engine marketing; and,
(4) The costs of implementing pay-per-click programs.

Other WOM marketing tactics, especially those based on traditional outreach methods, rated poorly in the study in terms of effectiveness. New models, tools and metrics that satisfy revenue-generation in both the short and long terms, while also generating positive long-term WOM, must be established.

My firm, BoldMouth, believe the larger implications here are that online WOM isn’t a major player in this chart in terms of a “single number.” Email by itself is not that compelling. Instead, it’s important to view responses in an aggregated online form—such as, emailing customers, pay-per-click search engine marketing, contacting bloggers that cover our industry, and special landing pages on our company website—which are some, but not all, elements of many online WOM campaigns.

When combined, this aggregated category of responses under the heading of Online WOM Marketing Strategies suggest as high, if not a higher, cumulative effectiveness rating than face-to-face communications. Of note is the fact that it is almost impossible to monitor, track and log face-to-face communication effectiveness in terms of generating some desired behavioral objective. Additionally, face-to-face communications are prohibitively expensive to implement on a mass level, widespread individual-to-individual online communications—which are initiated and targeted by a referrer—are comparatively much cheaper and easier to achieve.

TAGS: Blogging, Blogs, Bloggers, Word of Mouth, BoldMouth, Todd Tweedy, Word of mouth research