Picture 40.png
Jessica Kim is the CEO of Shout Communications and is talking about word of mouth marketing in the Web 2.0 era. Shout is doing a large amount of business in blogger relations and building content for distribution.

Key takeaways:

• WOM - consumers providing information to other consumers
  
• WOMM - facilitating conversations between customers
  
• Communities are tight knit and highly influential in Korea and beyond
  
• Offline WOM is converging online, spreads faster and reaches farther
  
• WOM requires content to be created for pass along
  
• Creator -> Sender -> Receiver (consumer)
  
• 4Ps for WOM -- 1) Product (quality of the content has to be high), 2) Place (where content is distributed blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Daum, Naver, etc. influences what content must be created), 3) People (people can see through fake viral content, need to be transparent, hire credible/knowledgeable people who have hands-on experience), 4) Public trust (
  
• The question of trust is key and also is distributed in the online community
  
• In Korea, influencer marketing is strong - often power bloggers or community operators
  
• Social media allows influencers to strengthen their power, build power and connect
  
• In Korea, Facebook and MySpace are very limited because CyWorld has such a big head start
  
• Bloggers have the most influence, a small subset are power users
  
• Influential bloggers (Power bloggers in Korea) (Charisma bloggers in Japan) have trust and are subject matter experts
  
• Obviously, do not try to control, force or exploit bloggers, it's about relationships
  
• Bloggers need to be able to write a natural review, have experience, have interest that allows them to write in line with the content on the blog
  
• Respect the creativity of the bloggers to give their take
  
• Overt influence backfires when the final product comes out
  
• It's all about relationships, building them long term means giving bloggers a voice inside the company (beta testing, etc.), needs to be win-win
  
• Not blog marketing --> Blogger relations
  
• Make sure your interests are aligned with the blogs
  
• Meet the bloggers in person - point of differentiation
  
• Create a long-term relationship roadmap
  
• Use vendor-neutral language
  
• Metrics in blogger relations are different than traditional ad metrics
  
• Look at pass-through from origin point to new outlets (embeds, links, etc.)
  
• Measure each blog with metrics (Technorati, page rank, Yahoo blog rank, Daum widget blog ranking (Korea), BIKO ranking (Korea), etc.)
  
• PR measurement trends are adapting to digital space (x3, x5, x7 depending on space) and will stabilize over time
  

Technorati Tags:
advertising, conversations, IDG, marketing, Matt Dickman, social media, Techno//Marketer, trends, web2.0, WOM, word or mouth