Online social signaling versus offline social sharing

As many of you know, I had an amazing experience attending the Uprising, a marketing retreat for industry thought leaders, hosted by Mark Schaefer. For 2.5 days 30 of us from across the US, Canada and around the world, gathered at RT Lodge in Maryville, Tennessee to talk marketing and trends in an immersive social experience.

One of my favorite segments and subsequent discussion, was a presentation by Ed Keller, pretty much the father of word of mouth marketing research.

At the beginning of his presentation, Ed asked for a show of hands from any of us who had shared a conversation in person about a product, brand or experience over the last week. Pretty much a room full of hands shot up. I didn’t do a head count, but I’d hazard a guess at 80-90% of the room.

Then Ed asked the same question, but in the context of having had a conversation in an online environment. Far, far fewer hands went up. There was also significant hesitation to recall those word of mouth online digital conversations.

I was left thinking in the moment… we’re marketers, is this normal? Or are we a skewed sample?

Apparently not.

Ed then went on to explain through research data, that our informal small group of 30 was actually pretty representative of the general population.

80% of word of mouth happens offline

80% of word of mouth happens OFF line, in real life, during face to face conversations.

Another curious research finding: offline word of mouth conversations were mostly positive. Why? The thinking goes that it’s human nature to want to be helpful, and in a face to face setting, we tend to share what will be a positive impact.

Put another way, if word of mouth was an iceberg, social media and online might be the top of the iceberg that we see, but word of mouth conversations offline, beneath the surface and what we don’t see, is far bigger and more important.

Offline and online are two distinct channels for consumers

 Why the difference?

I’ve contrasted the two modes of word of mouth, offline and online, below. But I’ve added some notation behind the offline points to help further understand the differences

The OFFLINE conversation

• Everyone talks (not just a select few who post or comment)
• More intimate and personal (versus the broadcast nature of social media)
• Covers a wide range of opinion (online tends to be dominated by passionate extremes)
• Motivated by emotional sharing (done for the good, versus personal status of online)
• Inclusive to many types of products (online conversations skew to select categories)

The ONLINE conversation

• Only a small % of people post
• Broadcast a message to many
• Dominated by passionate extremes
• Motivated by “social signaling”
• Skewed towards a select few categories

All this begs the observation – social conversations are important, but offline word of mouth could be even MORE important. And I’d argue, in a world where TRUST is quickly becoming the new currency, with the proliferation of AI generated content, perhaps generating offline conversation is really where our efforts should be. Something to think about, as you sip your coffee…

Maybe what was old, is the new NEW. Full circle, back to conversations between humans.