A comprehensive study of word of mouth requires a lot of background work. There is a great deal of writing on how people share knowledge and change each other's minds, but as well as assimilating all that work we wanted to contribute something new...
We started by examining the wealth of existing research and literature on the subject, and there's quite a lot of that! There's an initial reading list available on this site but as a starting point we looked at Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Ed Keller and Jon Berry's The Influentials and Emmanuel Rosen's The Anatomy of Buzz. We also read a lot of research reports published by organisations like WARC, ESOMAR and the MRS. As if that wasn't enough there were all the blogs and websites to take in...
Through our reading we started to see a lot of similar ideas being discussed. Namely that influence depends on how people are connected both to each other and to sources of information. We felt, however, that from the broad and ever-growing body of word of mouth writing the key ideas could be boiled down to the following:
Influential people tend to have more access to new information. This comes about through a combination of social position (greater access to more diverse people and a higher volume of low-frequency contacts) and personality traits that make them keen and inquisitive. They take information on board in a different way to most people. In other words, they welcome new ideas and opinions and can reconcile conflicting viewpoints and perspectives. They have a greater ability to share information with more people due to both the diverse range of people they interact with and the ways in which they interact with them. And finally, influential people share information in a more persuasive way - they tell it differently.
Having read what lots of experts had to say the next step was for us to talk to some. Word of mouth is a complex topic so we thought it best to get a range of perspectives, taking in academia, marketing and journalism. We spoke to:
Steve Barton: President, Word of Mouth UK. Steve is a successful communications strategy consultant who has worked with brands like Microsoft, Kelloggs and Save the Children.
Jessica Greenwood: Deputy Editor, Contagious Magazine. Jessica helped to set up Contagious in 2005 and as its Deputy Editor she covers innovative marketing and communications campaigns from all over the world.
Ayo Mansaray: Social Researcher. Ayo is a Research Fellow at London Metropolitan University. A highly qualified academic, he is also currently a member of the Social Research Association, and an associate of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Anna Rafferty: Digital Marketing Director at Pearson / Penguin Group. Anna is responsible for the digital and social marketing of all books published by the Penguin Group. An early word of mouth proponent she launched Penguin's social network Spinebreakers.
Fraser Chisholm: Head of Media Propositions, Royal Mail. Fraser has worked in various communications and marketing agencies and heads up the Royal Mail department that oversees marketing insight and innovation.
Ivan Palmer: Founder of word of mouth agency Wildfire Ivan is a pioneer of innovative marketing techniques that enable brands to create, manage and measure word of mouth.
We spoke to them all about their current thinking and theories on word of mouth, the impact the media has on it, what makes people more adept at spreading it, and what role (if any) they thought the Guardian and Observer brands and audience play.
They gave us some great insight; confirming our thinking as to what type of person has a greater level of influence, and also contributing some interesting theories about these people's media choices and the importance of the Guardian and Observer in the process. The key themes that emerged and which supported our learning from the previous phase included:
The importance of Weak Ties in the flow of information The significance of individuals who are able to make new ideas relevant to different groups of people, and ... The ways in which people attribute validity to each other's opinions - in other words what it is about someone that makes other people trust their advice.
The next step was to test our thinking against real incidents of word of mouth through a network audit. We did this by recruiting ten people, half of whom consumed the Guardian or Observer, half of whom consumed other quality and mid-market news brands. We spoke to each of them about what they had been talking about recently and then asked them to recommend some more people we could talk to - friends, colleagues, relations and acquaintances. Given that we wanted to establish a picture of their social network it was important that they gave us a range of people, with whom they had a variety of relationships, to speak to.
Once we had a good list of people we interviewed each of them, asking them the same set of questions, finding out who they spoke to, what they spoke to them about and which people they considered to be good sources of information. We also asked them to give us some more people to get in touch with.
We kept going until we were up to ten steps away from our original recruits. We then re-interviewed through the network twice more, conducting in total around 350 interviews across 10 networks of people. With every interview we got a clearer picture of who was talking about what with whom, and which people in each network were the sources of ideas and influence. We also started to understand what made these people unique and ultimately how they could be identified.
It became clear that generally people were happier to take on board information and advice from people that they knew were likely to give them a balanced opinion, either through having weighed up a lot of different perspectives on a subject, or through having absorbed lots of information from a range of sources, including other people that they know. Also, and perhaps predictably, it was crucial that people had ideas and information explained to them in a comprehensible and compelling way. This means that, relative to those around them, influential people need to have a greater ability to explain and translate new concepts, products or services.
Once we had identified what we felt were the three key traits of an influential person (a wide range of Weak Ties, an abundance of Bridging Capital and a willingness to make Status Bargains) and a set of reliable metrics with which to evidence the presence of these traits (ACTIVE), we conducted a nationally representative survey of over 1,000 people.
The output is the Guardian's Word of Mouth database. With results fused to TGI, it is a practical communications planning tool that can be used to both identify and understand those influential in word of mouth.