Assessing ROI from blah…blah….blah….

‘Word of Mouth’ (WoM) is the buzzword today. What and How do our customers think? What are their beliefs? What do they value most? What would they like to have? ….are just a few questions that every business needs to keep track of in order to be out there. Simple as these little questionettes sound, they are the hardest to answer. A customer’s WoM can provide a gist of answers to all of the above. So, let’s go for it! Companies today are effervescent with ways to tack down every WoM that directly/indirectly relates to them. The Idea is to invade the coterie by becoming a part of it, or to just create one, to figure out what people think. Given that consumers are more expressive to a larger audience now, tasks are simpler now than how they were even a decade ago.

Expressions are ON: blogs, social networking sites and groups therein, RSS, chat threads, you name it! So, the catch is to keep track of any conversation that involves the company concerned, assess it, and register it by feeding it back on the relevant ROI measure.

Johnson & Johnson, Nike, Reebok, Horlicks, Sunsilk,…are companies that have taken to hold reins in their own hands. They’ve created interactive sites where consumers can choose their preferred segment (e.g. Reebok – Women – Style – etc.), engage in an activity of their choice, or just chat with fellow consumers. The activities available for consumers in such sites are most often designed to extract information on what they like, or would like, in disguise of a fun-game or an activity that interests. Check the Sunsilk ‘Gang of Girls’, Horlicks Women site (http://www.indianwomenshealth.com/index.aspx), or Reebok site for instances. The purpose is simple and the process runs in cycles: read their minds, reflect and entice them, re-read them, ……and stay on top forever. It is after the re-reading exercise that ROI assessments can be made. There are several ways to gauge ROI from the ‘blabber’.

• # of times your brand was uttered in a thread/forum/…
• - An evaluative assessment of ‘in what light was it uttered’ (+ve, -ve, neutral), and accounting likewise.
• An assessment of where the brand stands vis-à-vis what consumers want from a particular product (class/type)
• What is the spread?
• How many different types of people/communities have shown interest in your brand?
• Consumers’ intention to purchase the brand
• For the 1^st time
• Repeatedly
• Conclusion from a specific discussion (mostly relevant for assessing chat threads)
• Simply tracking the # instances where a particular brand was searched for on Google, Yahoo, and the likes

There can be other ways, or a mix (2 or more) of the above ways (whichever is more relevant for the brand concerned) to assess ROI from discussions on the web.

The bottom-line is: We have known and respected the value of C2C ever since competition crept in and we knew that we had to aim for the customers HEAD and HEART. However, that we are going for it and incorporating it in our performance metrics is a recent phenomenon (though quite sparse till date) and it definitely gives us a more assuring image of where we stand, not just today, but also in the near future. Knowing what consumers are looking for has become a lot easier now, and whoever gives that a miss is going to be missed soon in the rat-race for enticing and befriending the smart info-savvy consumer.