After the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) guidelines on social media ad metrics, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) has come out with a draft paper of its guidebook on measurement and metrics for word of mouth marketing (PDF).
The guidebook seeks to “offer a broad overview of the types of metrics available, key considerations for their use, and specific examples of their application.” WOMMA also cautions that “the guidebook is not intended to offer industry standards or a definitive statement on the one right way to measure word of mouth”.
The first draft of the guidebook looks at seven different types of metrics –
- Advocacy: Measures the intent and/ or behavior of making recommendations using approaches offline surveys or online network and content analysis.
- Conversation Share: Measures the volume and share of conversation using ongoing online buzz monitoring and offline syndicated research, and campaign specific custom research.
- Cost Per Conversion: Measures the cost of getting one person (prospect) to perform the desired action (purchase), after factoring in conversion value, conversion attribution and incremental conversions.
- Conversational Reach: Measures the cumulative penetration of a brand message within a given target audience through conversations, by using a multi-generational approach.
- The Influencer Factor: Identifies influencers and measure their word of mouth activities via self-report surveys, online buzz monitoring and sociometric network analysis.
- Cost Deflection: Measures the decrease in R&D, time to market and customer support costs through customer feedback and peer-to-peer support.
- Value of a Conversation: Measures how much a positive or negative conversation is worth to the brand’s bottom line by using customer lifetime value, WOM referral value and media mix models.
The draft says that sections on Sentiment Analysis, Overall ROI, Media Reference and Ratings & Reviews will be added to the final paper.
Gaurav Mishra, the author of this post, thinks the WOMMA guidebook has the “potential” to become an important resource for word of mouth measurement. He likes that it not only describes a metric but also explains what it means and how to measure it. Also, the focus is more on broad measurement approaches than narrow metrics. Finally, the guidebook includes both online and offline measurement of word of mouth, and sometimes even describes their relative merits and demerits.
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Fuente: Gaurav Mishra
