Offline Word of Mouth Still More Powerful Than Online Analogue

For quite a while now we’ve been talking about how powerful social media is in that it helps brands and businesses of all types and sizes to promote their goods and services doing virtually nothing but building a community (usually consisting of the beloved and valued existing users or customers) and encouraging the community to spread the word about the company.

The concept of viral marketing where this simple “spreading the word” can send thousands of new customers to a business, is exactly what has made many companies to notice online communities exist and start planning their own expansion to social media, focusing on tools like Twitter or Facebook.

And of course everyone online has been more than happy to come up with more and more new arguments related to better use of all those numerous social media tools by businesses - with bloggers covering new tips on use of this or that tool and numerous social media gurus, experts, and simply consultants emerging to make money off the desire of the traditional businesses to build a good social media image. Of course we just had to persuade the companies they will benefit off use of social media communities and kept explaining how powerful social media and the blogosphere were in terms of influencing purchase decisions.

But now it looks like there are already voices willing to point out that as good and powerful as social media is, it is still less powerful than the traditional tools that people have grown to rely on for ages - after all, word of mouth is called like this because it is spoken with the real mouth instead of typed on a real keyboard. So the latest research published today points to a very simple fact: social media is still less powerful than the traditional word of mouth when it comes to purchase decisions and customers interaction with brands.

The findings of the survey demonstrate that people use a mix of online and offline tools to research for purchase-related information and quite similarly they use both online and offline communication tools to share their experience - good or bad. But most communications regarding actual experience with a brand still happen offline, not online - weather simply to share one’s experience or to explicitly recommend a product or a service - people actually prefer offline communications.

Basically that means that if a health blogger recommends a new kind of milk, you will probably consider trying it out but it is not really necessary. Yet when your own sister tries this very milk and recommends it to you as a tasty and very healthy product, you will most certainly try it and probably consider switching from your current brand as well - simply because even if the blogger is the authority in his or her circle of people, your family is still the most important authority for you personally.

Of course I don’t expect many such surveys will be published in the near future as these statistics is not really favorable to the multitude of social media gurus and owners of social media sites as well. But I guess no matter how enthusiastic one might be about various social media tools, we should keep in mind that nothing will probably replace the traditional communications in the real world - at least not in the near future. And while viral marketing is much easier online, offline recommendations from people’s friends and family are still what we tend to believe the most - and make our buying decisions based on. So this is what we should think about - and this is why marketers need to figure out how to bring online recommendations offline.