Limor Schafman: Welcome to Capitol Communicator TV. I'm Limor Schafman and with me is Shaun Quigley. Welcome, Shaun.
Shaun Quigley: Hi, Limor. It’s great to be here.
Limor Schafman: Shaun is from Brunner Digital and it’s a pleasure having you here. So Shaun, we’ve been hearing a lot about Word of Mouth.
Shaun Quigley: We certainly have.
Limor Schafman: It’s powerful, everyone’s talking about, but what is it?
Shaun Quigley: Well, stated simply, Word of Mouth is people sharing information with other people. In the traditional sense, it was information being shared in a physical environment, whether it was at the water cooler or at the ball park or on the subway or at church. In the last few years in particular, that conversation has shifted to a more virtual place. People are getting information from other people online now.
Limor Schafman: When they're talking and when they’re going online to search out that information, where are people going? Where are people gathering?
Shaun Quigley: Well, they're going to all the forms of communication that are known as the social web. They're on blogs, they’re on forums, they're on Wikis. Tools like Twitter we’ve heard a lot of and they're at all these places; anywhere where people are creating and sharing information. There's been a real change in terms of how much time people are spending online. In 1987, people averaged zero hours in an online environment over the course of a year, and today, they are well over 500 hours a year.
Limor Schafman: That’s absolutely astonishing. So if there are so many hours and there are so many people doing this, then what should companies be doing? Where should the companies be going to take part in and to sort of harness the power of Word of Mouth?
Shaun Quigley: A lot of the companies make the mistake of the checklist approach to the social web, which is, “I need a blog, I need to be on a forum, I need a YouTube channel.” We encourage our clients to take a step back, listen to the conversation, see what people are saying about your brand, see what they're saying about your products and your services, see what they’re saying about your competitors. There are a lot of free tools on the market that allow you to do that; there are also paid tools that allow you to get more granular and identify specifically who those individuals are.
Limor Schafman: Okay, so let’s talk about those tools. Can you give us a hint? Let’s say, some of the more freeware, the shareware, the open source stuff. What is out there that we can start taking a look at?
Shaun Quigley: The free stuff; Twitter search, obviously, lets you see what people are saying in the Twitter sphere. There are free tools like Ice Rocket and Technorati which allow people to search the blogosphere and YouTube and all the other areas of the social web, but there are also some paid tools like Gradient Six [ph?], Collective Intellect which allow you to dig really deep, find out exactly who’s saying it, where they're saying it, when they're saying it, whether it’s positive or negative in terms of sentiment.
Limor Schafman: And when you're using these tools, it’s actually important to really be asking the right questions. So what should people be searching for? What questions should they be asking of Twitter?
Shaun Quigley: I think they want to search, at the very 30,000 foot level, their brand name. I think they want to search for leadership within the organization, namely their CEO, to see if they're in the news or being talked about in these places. Specific products or services that are highly popular or might be about to launch that people might be generating some buzz about, and that’s just kind of the starter kit on what to be looking for.
Limor Schafman: So how frequently should people be monitoring? It sounds like it’s actually extremely time-consuming and a bit of a hassle. I mean, are there some easy ways to do this out there?
Shaun Quigley: There are. You can get addicted to this stuff pretty quickly and depending on the size of your staff, you can’t spend half your day monitoring what people are saying about your brand. So what we typically recommend is spending 10 minutes in the morning while you're drinking your coffee, 10 minutes at lunch and 10 minutes at the end of the day, just to see what the conversation has been.
Limor Schafman: And what are people doing? What are you recommending that they do in those 10 minutes?
Shaun Quigley: One of the things you can do is, if you haven’t signed up for Google alerts, for example, that’s something that you might want to hook up with right away and just enter the key phrases that relate specifically to your brand, so that stuff can get served directly to you. RSS feeds for key publications in your industry trade should be fed directly to your iGoogle page. Just simply enter ‘iGoogle’ into Google and that’ll come up and let you customize your own news site for yourself each morning.
Limor Schafman: Wonderful. So quick and easy.
Shaun Quigley: That’s right.
Limor Schafman: Now, one of the issues that people have a lot of with Word of Mouth is, “I feel like I've lost control of my brand, of my message,” and so companies are hesitant, scared, don’t know how to manage it; what should they be doing with this control situation?
Shaun Quigley: Well, the bad news is that you have lost control. The consumer owns the message and the consumer owns your brand, so it’s important for organizations, whether it be a non-profit or an association who needs to engage with its membership or a business selling to the government or a consumer package goods company, to be able to engage with their customers in a more meaningful way, to have a sense of what people are saying about them, and then have an approach for how they should engage with them.
Limor Schafman: Okay, so what is the approach? I mean, what do you recommend? Do they have, again, guidelines or what do you recommend? Some thoughts about that?
Shaun Quigley: There is a conference that I attended a couple of weeks ago where someone threw out the acronym ‘POST’, as in blog post, and it stands for People Objective Strategy Technology. Who is the community that you want to be talking with? Most importantly, what is the business objective driving this approach overall? What's the strategy and what's the approach you should take, and then finally, what technology platform makes the most sense? Are people talking about you on blogs versus forums versus Twitter versus the social networks? And these tools allow you to start to focus your attention in terms of where you participate.
Limor Schafman: So let’s talk about blogs for a second. To take it to that next level, what are some of the questions a company should be asking themselves to make sure that they're choosing the right blogs or the right other sites?
Shaun Quigley: One idea is to start to figure out who the influentials are in that space. I mean, one of the things that we do for our clients is identify those most influential blogs and forums, and when it makes senses to intercept those conversations in a really transparent way, you know, representing ourselves as the organization or the brand that we’re representing and pointing them back to the brand to get the information that they might not be aware of.
Limor Schafman: And well, let’s take another tool that people are using all the time; Facebook. There are all kinds of really creative ways of using Facebook; what are some of your favorites?
Shaun Quigley: For non-profits, there is an entire third party application called Facebook Causes that lets you fundraise directly through the application. I think they’ve raised somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,500,000.00 for 20,000 different charities last year alone. Facebook ads on the other hand, less successful. I think they’re good for building impressions and building brand awareness, but maybe not so good for click-through rates and actual engagement with the brand that you're marketing.
Limor Schafman: Wonderful. As a last suggestion, a last tip, one last question for you; what is the foremost thing that companies should be thinking of when they're thinking about Word of Mouth?
Shaun Quigley: Listen. Listen, listen, listen.
Limor Schafman: Okay, wonderful. Shaun, thank you so much for being with us.
Shaun Quigley: Great to be here.
Limor Schafman: This is Limor from Capital Communicator TV. Thank you so much for joining us.