Thanks to the early WOM adopters
By Molly FlattAs part of our thank you clients birthday week, we’d like to give a special shout-out to those clients who took the leap ten years ago and invested in word of mouth long before Twitter was even a flicker in Jack Dorsey’s eye.
It’s a great reminder that WOM is so much more than Facebook or YouTube.
Everything started with listening.
Our CEO and MD Mike R and Mike D had developed an early version of WOMTrak, our proprietary listening and analysis software, and they built a specialist team of young analysts immersed in social platforms around that. WOMTrak has evolved massively, but from the start it was designed with the belief that conversation is useless without insight.
Any engagement came from those listening insights. There were fledgling forums and communities out there - mainly gamers and niche passion-based fan groups - that we reached out to. But with the online space still taking its first tentative steps into 2.0, much of our work also involved looking at how offline WOM could be mined and harnessed, and how and why it was starting to seep into this new peer-led online space.
As for the early adopters?
Tescos was one of the first, intrigued by what they could learn from customer conversation, as were Red Bull, KFC and Toshiba, for whom we developed a particularly successful reactive strategy for laptop owners with broken machines.
Nokia have been with us from the start - they instantly understood the importance of a WOM approach for a company that makes connecting people its philosophy - and we collaborated on many great early projects such as the Jealous Computers campaign.
Miele have worked with us for several years and really invested in the food, fashion and family communities that rely on their brand; Canon did the same in the creative and photographic communities; STA Travel weren’t far behind, determined to promote the voice of independent travellers. And a couple of years ago The V&A were setting an example to slow-evolving arts organisations with our Cold War Modern campaign.
Over the past ten years we’ve worked with fantastic brands, blue-chip and niche, across all industries - from Lloyds to LocateTV. But it also took real foresight and guts to be one of the first to engage in the raw landscape of on and offline WOM.
Hats off to the early birds. You helped kick-start an incredible industry.
