The problem, according to Soup founder Sharyn Smith, is that it’s almost impossible to measure the conversations and recommendations of the real world, so companies rely too heavily on social media.
“There is a huge misconception about the importance of online,” Ms Smith says. “At least 90 per cent of the impact of advocacy and word-of-mouth campaigns happens in face-to-face environments. Online does play a really important role in the ecosystem of word-of-mouth but often it is just the trigger, which is then taken into an offline environment.”
However, because it was near impossible to monitor the volume and tone of such offline consumer conversations and advocacy, many companies wrongly viewed online social media as the only benchmark for whether word-of-mouth marketing had worked.
Ms Smith cited an example with Reckitt Benckiser when it launched a Dettol “hands-free” dispenser in Australia. Online conversations and social media sharing were almost non-existent, but when the dispensers were sent to mums to trial at home they became a hot topic because kids found washing their hands fun. Supermarket sales for Dettol rose 50 per cent in the trial locations.
“When you look at the sales impact, it was all the unrecorded interactions that aren’t measured online that actually created the result,” Ms Smith says.
“So we’re dealing with two issues of bias. The first is that online activity is unique and often it’s not representative to the real world. The second problem is, if you’re taking information and insights from what is happening online for your business, it can be misleading.”
Soup has 110,000 “influencers” on its database. Ms Smith said they were not paid to advocate brands but participated because they were usually among the first to be briefed on new trends, products and services.
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