• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, June 7, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO--Michael Cornfeld knows why George W. Bush won last year's presidential election. Bush's camp, said Cornfeld, used the Internet to find volunteers and then gave them information to spread--via any medium at hand--to friends and neighbors. "The Bush campaign married software to Tupperware," Cornfeld, a senior consultant with the Pew Internet & American Life Project, said Monday at OMMA West.

That Tupperware-software model, also known as word-of-mouth, isn't just used by politicians, said OMMA panelists. Established marketers Procter & Gamble also have been turning to word-of-mouth campaigns where consumers, in effect, become the salespeople.

Recently, Procter & Gamble launched its own word-of-mouth campaign for a new cold-water Tide laundry detergent, said eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey, who moderated the panel. The campaign, which starts with an e-mail to people targeted as likely to be interested, relies on those people to tout the new detergent to other interested parties. Such conversations can happen by e-mail, but also occur by telephone or in person, making word-of-mouth one of the more platform agnostic types of marketing.

Other panelists were Pete Blackshaw, CMO of Intelliseek; Daniel Stein, managing director at EVB, Inc.; and Evan Williams, founder and CEO of Odeo.

Panelists agreed that word-of-mouth advertising potentially is powerful, but weren't united about how it could or should be measured. Blackshaw indicated that the industry would have to develop metrics. "You can't manage what you can't measure," he said.

But Cornfeld was skeptical that metrics would be accurate. "Our lives," he said, "are much more complicated than any model can replicate."