How To Get People Talking
Posted Jun. 19, 2009 by Casey Flanagan
Filed under: Advertising, Marketing
Social media is great because it gets people talking. And talking is good. We want people to talk. We design our products and plan our events to encourage it. We make sure our website experience is pass-on-able and that our in-store experience is worthy of a recommendation. Anything to get those moms / tweens / boomers talking.
And while each of those is a valuable tool towards generating talk-value, there is a tactic that is often – surprisingly – overlooked.
A new study, co-authored by Ed Keller (who also wrote “The Influentials”) finds that 22% of word-of-mouth conversations were sparked directly by… advertising. Further, the study found an even higher proportion of online buzz – 30% – generated by ads. Important to note: those numbers may in reality be higher, as they do not account for
the indirect influence of advertising.
Of the potentially important implications to walk away with, the big one to me is this: The 22% of conversations sparked directly by advertising were “much more likely” to include brand recommendations than the remaining 78% of brand-related conversations.
So if you want to get people talking about you – in a good way – thereʼs an often overlooked tool you may want to consider. Itʼs called breakthrough advertising creative.
4 Responses to “How To Get People Talking”
Posted on Jun 19, 2009 by Sue Spaight
Cool point. With a link to share the full data/report it would be even cooler.
Posted on Jun 29, 2009 by Casey Flanagan
The full report should be able to be found in the June edition of The Journal of Advertising Research. I got this data from an Advertising Age article that, at the time of the original posting, no longer had a live link.
Hope that helps. Please give me a call or shoot me an email if you have any more questions…
Posted on Mar 30, 2011 by Bill
I find the results of this study very interesting.
With all the “noise” out there, it can be hard to figure out how to make advertising work in terms of getting people to take an action in your favor.
But perhaps we have it all wrong. If advertising was designed more on helping create the buzz, then it becomes more of source of viral inertia versus a strong pitch to a call to action of some sort.
Posted on Mar 31, 2011 by cflanagan
Thanks, Bill. To your last point, there is a great line from the world of propagation planning that I think all marketers need to be considering.
“Plan not for the people you reach, but the people that they reach.”
- Griffin Farley