• by Shankar Gupta , July 12, 2005

In hopes of providing a set of standards for measuring and codifying word of mouth marketing, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association Monday released a draft of what it's calling a "terminology framework." WOMMA co-founder and president Andy Sernovitz likened the effort to the Interactive Advertising Bureau's first attempts to outline standards for banner ads.

"What we did with this new set of standards is create a unified language so that a marketer can work with all sorts of different companies to build a comprehensive picture of what's going on," said Sernovitz. "There was a parallel in '96 when the IAB [Interactive Advertising Bureau] said, 'These are the standard ad banner sizes.' That simple set of standards kicked off the online ad buying."

More than 50 researchers and marketers, from companies including Intelliseek, America Online, Dell and BuzzMetrics, helped develop the new vocabulary for quantifying the basic elements a word-of-mouth campaign.

One new term is "WOMUnit," which describes "a single unit of marketing-relevant shared by a consumer." WOMUnits can be further refined by a variety of other new terms, such as topicality (whether the WOMUnits are consistent with the intended marketing message), polarity (whether they are positive or negative), clarity, and depth (which is defined by WOMMA as how persuasive a particular WOMUnit is).

The WOMMA framework also defines "participants," which are further divided into "creators," "senders," and "receivers." Participants also can be further descrbed by propensity (the likeliness of a consumer to take an action), demographics, credibility and reach.

"Action" is what participants do to create, respond to or pass along WOMUnits. The "venue" is the medium or physical location where the communication takes place.

"We want to pull together all these loose pieces by providing this central unified theory," Sernovitz said. "You take these words and start marrying them on top of existing research, suddenly we can coordinate different kinds of research from different kinds of studies, and create a unified marketing message."

Sernovitz said the 150 WOMMA members will begin to implement this terminology into their advertising products and strategies, but added that the process may not go quickly. "It'll take a while, because it'll take reconfiguring their product lines," he said.