Lipstick on a Tweet - Getting People Listening (not just talking).

Digital Word of Mouth (Digital WOM)  presents one of the most powerful opportunities for brands and agencies to develop short term campaign strategies with a focus on long term brand narrative (my favourite old mantra). But the question is how do we get people listening and not just talking?

Social Media needs to be broken up into two distinct Digital WOM categories:

Retelling - Relating and sharing a brand or product experience through a digitally driven format, re-enforcing the brand and product experience.

Retailing - ‘True' Advertising of the Product; Price, Promotion, etc, through a digitally driven format.

Both are key components and embrace differing Digital WOM strategies although utilizing the same platform. We should be asking ourselves what is the fundamental goal of our Digital WOM campaign, Brand Impact? Brand Awareness? Brand Sales?

The great fallacy of how we have interpreted Social Media is in its application and how these information networks re-act and respond to scenarios of Retelling and Retailing. Knowing the right message to send based on this is going to get your message heard.

One of the other important things that we are forgetting, is that Digital WOM platforms are not only global and international in scope but are driven regionally, i.e. by people in cities, suburbs and towns. By lumping all these geographies together it demonstrates how little we really understanding about the nature of what happens when people engage with each other when using a platform like twitter. By creating campaigns that interact with everyday life, you are more likely to get people to listen.

The other fundamental mistake that seems to be so easily accepted is that twitter is a stand alone medium, twitter is a means of reinforcement not a primary advertising tool. This is best illustrated by the current Levi's campaign. The Twitter element is an acknowledgement of the importance of social media but is only one part in the promotion, Twitter is reinforcing the brand positions as a funky, innovative brand, it is not the answer to their marketing woes..

We also need to think about the way that we are designing metrics to measure the success of campaigns. Attracting followers and measuring the spread is an important quantifier of a digital campaigns success but it is not a qualifier. More importance needs to be placed on the level of penetration of the message, i.e. Did people respond positively, did they act on it positively - not just did they pass it on.

Traditional Word of Mouth often talks about ‘influencers', key people that have an elevated social standing that you trust when they recommend a product or service to you. Digital WOM, both removes and enhances this. Everybody's voice is equal in a partially anonymous platform but it is still the power of the message that at the end of the day will drive sales. Yet, we also see the opposite, where the person with the most tweets or followers is King. We need to make our bets each way, its about ability of the message to cause action but also to get that message spread digitally.

We also need to move away from the dominant trend towards stream of consciousness (something that I myself am guilty of). This is s a very unsound way of brands explaining their product and pitching it to the consumer audience. A better method would be to give staggered, targeted messages, released sporadically that are placed in a deliberate sequence (creating individual arcs of interest that will grow organically), allowing for suspense and creating the need for the consumer to know and their content and genuinely being interested in the conversation.

The whole debacle with Habitat illustrates is that Transparency in these conversations and the path of getting them noticed is important.

Stagnant twitter followings, much like stagnant eCRM marketing lists is a bad thing. Twitter is a medium that is best suited for short term engagement. The needs to given enough stimulus to remain interested but not too much to become apathetic, if you never engage with them, they are never going to care.

What we need to do is strip away the technology to identify and harness the underlying mode of communication and what it can achieve. We are, in fact, diluting and corrupting our brand and sales messages by not understanding these simple truths of Digital WOM. If we continue the way we have been, we might as well be putting lipstick on a tweet.

This article is the second of a ten part series re-evaluating how we think and relate to the digital space as an advertising platform and how we should be populating and shaping that landscape.