What KPIs Should You Use When Measuring WOM?

August 7th, 2009 • Measurement, Word of Mouth

When developing a word of mouth campaign, being able to measure, track and compare the results is essential for a successful campaign. For organizations wanting to leverage word of mouth — especially those using Web 2.0 tools — it’s obvious that traditional analytics alone are insufficient.

For a successful WOM campaign, engagement and outreach efforts need to be carefully monitored in real-time to ensure that messaging is consistently being received by the target audience. Measurement should encompass KPIs such as sentiment, online engagement, and the successful integration of social media into existing campaigns.

Forrester Research, at their Forrester Research Marketing Forum, proposed a new metric, engagement that includes four components: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. Each of these is built from data collected from online and offline data sources.

• Ivolvement tracks site visitors, time spent, page views and more (old-school stuff)
• Interaction measures the contributions to blogs, photo and video creation and uploads, and purchases
• Intimacy tries to understand consumer attitudes, perception, and feelings about a brand through surveys or monitoring technology as well as applications providing an interactive environment between brand and consumers
• Influence measures the likelihood that consumers will recommend or advocate products or brands

Using engagement as a metric, you get a more holistic appreciation of your customers’ actions, recognizing that value comes not just from transactions but also from actions people take to influence others. Once engagement takes hold of marketing, marketing messages will become conversations, and dollars will shift from media buying to customer understanding.

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