WOM UK

This morning’s WOM UK Espresso Briefing, where The Guardian’s commercial director Chris Pelekanou and ad planner Katherine Miall unveiled their new Word of Mouth database, got our new events programme off to a fantastic start. The fully booked event was crammed with businesses, agencies and individuals buzzing with questions, ideas, challenges – and the sugar high from their coffee and Danish.

The Guardian study combines existing thinking around what makes people influential with a new piece of qualitative and quantitative research – including an expert panel involving WOM UK Council members Steve Barton from Advokator and Ivan Palmer from Wildfire. This mass of data has been used to develop a communications planning tool in the form of a database which helps companies and advertisers to understand the type of people they’ll want to target to ensure their content is rapidly and widely spread. Click through for the presentation on Slideshare below.

Having defined influential people  as those who have greater access to new ideas and who spread them faster and more persuasively than others, Chris and Katherine drilled down into the three basic traits these people display: weak ties (relationships and networks outside close family and friends), bridging capital (an ability to make information contextualised and relevant to others) and status bargain (a willingness to listen and modify their own opinions, making them more trustworthy).

Their study is understandably oriented towards proving that Guardian readers are a particularly influential bunch, but they also hope that it will become integrated into wider media planning, helping advertisers to identify who will carry their message best. The assembled crowd threw out some interesting questions – Might demographics other than Guardian readers behave differently? Do these influential people trust advertisers, or each other? Can they prove that this spread of content actually leads to sales? – and the debate showed just how relevant and engaging the topic is to the WOM industry. Our video and Flickr set of the event are coming very soon.

And if that sort of intelligent social media debate appeals, you’ll love next week’s WOM UK thought leadership event where Emanuel Rosen speaks about his revised edition of Anatomy of Buzz, the best-selling international Bible of WOM, next Wednesday 7th October at 8.3oam. Click through here for more details and to register – we look forward to seeing you there.