Face-to-Face

Fun facts: Did you know that the average person talks about ten different brands per day? It is estimated that people are exposed to about 15 billion brand conversations per week. The typical brand conversation lasts about four minutes, and two-thirds of these brand conversations concern either recommendations or criticisms of the brand. These stats indicate the need for brands to understand the word-of-mouth conversations people are having about them offline. Are people talking negatively or positively about your brand? Are they comparing you to the competition? If so, how do you rank? And most importantly, what drives these offline conversations?

This blog has recently been filled with my thoughts (and some insight from course readings) about the power of social media in our digital world. When I started reading Chapter 1 of Ed Keller and Brad Fay's The Face-to-Face Book, I was surprised to read about the importance of face-to-face offline conversations, because so much of what we've read so far in social media classes has been "social media is the future" themed.

Keller and Fay's TalkTrack research says 90 percent of word-of-mouth conversations happen offline and 8 percent of word-of-mouth conversations happen online. This surprised me, because 8 percent seems like such an insignificant fraction in today's digital world. However, when I think back to the stats I previously mentioned (people are exposed to 15 billion brand conversations offline per week), the 8 percent converts to about 1.2 billion online conversations per week - not so insignificant. "It's not so much that online is small, but rather that offline is enormous" (Keller & Fay, 2012, p. 18).

Taking these numbers into account, the question for brand marketers and social media professionals goes from, "What are people saying about our brand online?" to, "How well do online conversations drive the offline conversations people are having about our brand?"

Humans are social creatures, but even though our social tendencies are way more digital today than they've ever been before, "'social' is more than what happens online in social media" (Keller & Fay, 2012, p.23). In the world of PR, marketing and social media, brands need to shape their strategies around people and word-of-mouth conversations (offline especially) rather than technology.