Masterclass: Did you hear? - Managing Partner

Feature

posted 25 Aug 2010 in Volume 13 Issue 1

Masterclass: Did you hear?

Molly Flatt, word-of-mouth evangelist for global specialist 1000heads, reveals what law firms can learn from the corporate sector in developing WOM marketing strategies.

Five things you will learn from this Masterclass:

1) How to pull ahead by becoming conversational

2) The ROI and importance of a word-of-mouth approach

3) How to understand market perception of your firm

4) Which resources to use to drive your firm’s reputation

5) How to use WOM monitoring to reach a wider target market

Word-of-mouth (WOM) has always been part of the make-up of modern marketing. It is especially so in professional services, where no products are made and therefore the relationship between the client and the service provider is at the heart of brand loyalty and advocacy. But the advent of social media has amplified, accelerated and globalised WOM, making it the central force determining brand reputation and visibility.

From sub-branded websites such as ‘out-law.com’ to TV adverts like ‘injurylawyers4u’, companies are already trying to provoke WOM. However, true advocacy reaches far beyond advertising and promotional activity. Every service-related decision, from outsourcing a client careline to commenting upon a recent change in legislation, is a potential trigger for conversation.

Social media, by providing a platform for conversation, enables the accurate observation and measurement of WOM for the first time. It is essential that brands track and assess what sparks off this online chatter to identify strengths and weaknesses, and work to improve or address them.

In tough economic times, the shift towards WOM marketing makes even more sense. With marketing budgets slashed and advertising spend feeling the pinch, enabling clients embedded in the social media landscape to catalyse the spread of WOM is a far more cost-effective alternative.

In order to excel in this, law firms need to tap into the huge volume of data generated globally by these online client conversations, from comments on news sites to property scam blogs, as it is here that they can begin to understand what clients and stakeholders really think of them and their services.

Online conversations can be gathered, measured, tracked and analysed, providing a rich source of real-time, unprompted data that can be used to inform and direct all areas of business, from marketing through to direct client care.

It is this data that lies at the heart of WOM’s turbo-charged success. Because, what all this monitoring and analysis produces is that most valuable of marketing commodities: accurate client insight.

Unlocking value

While the straightforward tracking of online communications can provide information on how much buzz is out there, marketers need much more detail if they are to make good use of the data. Conversation is all about human context, after all – the emotions and motivations behind it are what give it value and life. So the key to unlocking this value lies in analysing its meaning in a nuanced, people-focused way, and translating that into appropriate activity.

WOM enables firms to look beyond the volume of data – how much people are talking about them – to more subtle conversational drivers – what are they saying, where, when and how are they saying it? By rating the sentiment of each unit of conversation according to a sliding scale from positive to negative – its polarity – clients can assess how significant it is.

Typically, using a mix of technology and human analysis, firms can tune into relevant conversations on all kinds of social media scapes – from social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, to blogs like ‘Adam Smith, Esq’ and wiki sites like ‘familylawiki’.

Being intangible, WOM relies on people. While technology can be used for simple searches, there is no substitute for human input and analysis. Real clients, competitors and stakeholders are having real conversations online, and it takes real people to understand what they are saying.

Identifying conversation triggers is an important part of this. What gets people talking? What stimulates a conversation? Could it be a contentious case? A controversial court ruling? Understand that and you understand a great deal about how people perceive your brand, and how you can start influencing their perceptions.

Stay ahead

WOM is a great way of spotting trends – good and bad – and ensuring that you stay ahead of the competitor curve. Want to know which of your services is likely to be a runaway hit? Or which is doomed to disappoint? Your clients have the answers, which WOM data analysis will help you interpret and act upon.

What if the online buzz is almost totally negative? As well as being a source of information to help companies improve their services, WOM provides a way of limiting or avoiding a crisis by giving early warning of problems or negative perceptions. The great thing about WOM is that negative responses can be just as helpful as positive ones, driving firms in the right direction to make changes and address issues.

WOM can in fact be used to turn round negativity. One way to convert an online critic is to engage with them head-on, involving them in the consultation process and inviting them to contribute to discussions. Given genuine openness and accessibility, a firm’s fiercest critic can become its most enthusiastic advocate.

It’s worth pointing out here that WOM functions on the basis of honest, genuine opinions, which can be gathered only through ethical activity. Ethics, in fact, is shaping the way the industry advances, helping firms to find the right way to communicate with clients in order to elicit the candid, unprompted information they need.

WOM: The Essentials

DO: Start by listening. Even if you don’t engage for the first few months, learn how to understand what clients are saying and how that insight can be fed into the business.

DON’T: Think it’s all about social media. Encouraging word-of-mouth marketing involves every social interface you have, from customer services to events to billing.

DO: Define business, not social, objectives. Ask how you’re going to increase loyalty or drive revenue, rather than how you’re going to get 50,000 Facebook fans.

DON’T: Forget staff. Becoming conversational and social internally is essential if you are to be nimble and reactive externally.

DO: Look at how you can use existing platforms and communities to build relationships, rather than creating your own sites and forums.

DON’T: Be put off by the illusion of brand control. The conversations about you are already happening; if you ignore them you’re even more powerless.

Interpret the silence

But what if there’s silence on the web? That can speak marketing volumes too. People only talk about firms that are worth talking about, and if you have been recently involved in a headline-grabbing case or deal, you’d expect there to be a conversation out there.

If, however, no-one is talking about you, it means you either have nothing to offer that interests or excites your audience, or your firm itself is too grey and uninspiring to register on the online radar.

In either case, steps need to be taken. In fact, the ability to detect and ‘read’ client silence is one of the great strengths of WOM. Whoever heard of a silent focus group?

As marketers have discovered, whatever the product or service, somewhere on the internet there is likely to be a group of individuals discussing it. Firms have to become adept at audience profiling, searching out and engaging with real people bound by a shared passion, opinion leaders with the power to influence thousands worldwide through their web postings.

It is important to look at the different types of motivations, behaviours and passions behind the WOM. The voices online range from experts, evangelists and newsbreakers to experimenters and detractors, all of which have very different styles and agendas. Tailoring the engagement by evaluating the conversations they generate is key.

Turn clients into evangelists

Getting enthusiastic clients to evangelise online about their favourite firms and issues is a tried-and-tested WOM technique. By building on this process by, for example, offering advocates access to pre-release products to review, or inviting them to attend product launches and other events, firms can maximise their impact.

In the V&A Museum’s London ‘cold war modern’ exhibition, we saw the possibility to use WOM to intrigue and engage new audiences. This manifested as an alternate reality game that unfolded over three weeks, recruiting young art and design fans through a rich mix of mysterious emails, online clues, reverse graffiti in the London streets, stickers and hidden coordinates, culminating in a mysterious event. Key voices started the ripple but, as the campaign progressed, it took on a life of its own.

The resulting event, an exclusive preview of the V&A exhibition, generated hundreds of online conversations which were seen by tens of thousands of people, as well as prominent exposure in the London press, including the Evening Standard newspaper.

The campaign brought the exhibition to the attention of a far wider audience than a traditional exhibition campaign, showing that big institutions can be relevant and playful.

Case Study: STA Travel

Our campaign for STA Travel is a service-related case in point. We worked with the travel company on spreading positive messages about the client experience it offers. However, our initial research revealed that, while STA has a good reputation, online conversations about the brand didn’t reflect this; most consumer-generated travel content was repetitive and dull.

We set about changing this by creating a tribe of STA Explorers, vocal travel fans online willing to talk about their experiences with the company as they traversed the world. We engaged with them through meet-ups, showed them the tools and skills they needed to take their social presence to the next level, and then signposted that content, as well as all the other STA WOM going on across the web, at an aggregating site STAtravelbuzz.

The result was a doubling of conversations about the brand. The real proof of the power of the STA campaign lies in what the consumers felt about the project and brand.

A post from one STA Explorer, George, is typical. It reads: “If honest people like me tell it how it is the chances are you guys out there will think more of my opinions than of any advertisement slogans... that shows everyone they are confident in the services they are providing, surely?”

Join the conversation

WOM is a powerful force that impacts directly on client awareness and company success – both positively and negatively.

Clients and potential clients are already talking about you online. If you don’t join in the conversation, taking the opportunity to engage with them, listen to what they have to say and use that data to shape your future strategies, you could be missing out
on the business opportunity of the decade. Make the connection, and make it conversational.

Case Study: Allen & Overy

Word-of-mouth marketing is still an underused marketing resource at leading law firms. Smaller and boutique firms have been more nimble in engaging with the industry – and their clients – through social platforms. This makes the opportunity for top-100 firms to become pioneers even more exciting.

One example of a leading law firm effectively leveraging WOM is Allen & Overy. The magic-circle firm has adopted an internal WOM approach to boost listening, share knowledge and improve efficiencies between colleagues.

Starting in 2005 with the creation of blog/wiki hybrids designed for knowledge sharing, the firm now has over 30 internal social sites that can be used to talk about practice areas or particular topics, such as a new piece of legislation. They have been a great success, dissolving communication barriers and encouraging dialogue across the firm.

Notes Ruth Ward, Allen & Overy’s head of knowledge systems and development: “If you start a conversation on a blog about a new topic, and you get a broad and detailed set of comments back, then that is a good time for someone to say ‘this is clearly something we should focus on in more detail, let’s transfer this conversation to the wiki where we can all put our ideas together and start to produce some detailed content for a document’.”

– Molly.Flatt@1000heads.com