Value Beyond the Hype of Social Media
Somebody recently remarked that the #1 most important thing they learned at The Marketing Research Event (TMRE) was that online social media account for a tiny fraction of consumer word of mouth (WOM). Keller Fay Group has spent a decade tracking consumer WOM, so here’s some data to expand on that thought.
Keller Fay’s TalkTrack study has sampled consumer WOM in the US for a decade (and has spread beyond the US). In TalkTrack US, 36,000 people per year participate in 24-hour diaries of their conversations about brands, profiling 360,000 conversations in detail. The surprising statistic about the size of social media in Dr. Jonah Berger's presentation at TMRE was based on the mode of conversation from TalkTrack: 73% of consumer conversations occur face-to-face, 13% by telephone, 8% by private online channels (texting and email), leaving only 3% by online social media and 2% in other modes.
This surprises people because of all the attention on social media. This attention is not entirely unfounded, because it is the new mode of communication that grew rapidly in recent years. It also has great potential, which is less than the hype but still big.
There are no take-backs on the Internet. Our words, clicks and uploads leave permanent records for all to see. Thus, a single utterance may be viewed and shared for years to come. It lives beyond the conversation and may be re-used many times.
On the other hand, social media lack the emotional presence of face-to-face and telephone conversations, despite many attempts to produce better emojicons. Telephone conversations transmit tone of voice, which communicates as much as the words. Face-to-face conversations add facial expressions and body gestures that say much more. We are stirred into action by these emotional cues in ways that text cannot deliver.
What people say and how they say it are different in online social media (Lovett, Peres & Shachar, 2013). We need both perspectives, which is why Keller Fay merged with social media analytics company, Engagement Labs to create the Total Social? perspective. For example, USA TODAY has uses Keller Fay’s analysis of consumer conversations to measure the success of new TV shows, expanded by Keller Fay & Engagement Labs’ integrated view of online and offline word-of-mouth.
Offline word-of-mouth has twice the impact of online social media on sales, as demonstrated by marketing mix analysis of six diverse consumer industries. Their combined effect drives 13% of sales (and twice as much in high-consideration purchase decisions), so both modes of communication have huge potential to drive sales. Social media may be less important than you thought, but it’s still big. Moreover, you have greater need to understand what’s being said offline, inaccessible by online searching.