WS/Media Monitoring
Almost everyone has at least once looked at his Google ranking (ego-search). The Internet offers a unique opportunity to know in real-time the public’s perception and view of your person/company.
According to the latest Audiweb data (February 2011) in Italy 36,974 users are connected to the Internet.
25.4 million Italians have surfed at least once on a PC. There were 12.8 million active users on an average day in February 2011, a rise of 8.6%. The average number of page views has also risen by 11% with 202 page views per person during 1 hour and 37 minutes of time spent online on an average day.
With people using the Internet on a daily basis and with Web 2.0 and the growth of participation, there has been a really marked rise in so-called Consumer-Generated Media (CGM), informal and characteristically heavily interactive resources, such as forums, blogs, newsgroups, wikis, and social networks. CGM have an incredible ability to create communities on any topic bringing together people who trust each other and exchange opinions and advice.
It is CGM, rather than the traditional digital media and corporate websites that have most influence on public opinion about people, brands or a company's particular products and services, because:
- they are vertical, thus influential in individual areas of interest;
- they are less controllable;
- all content is linked to or derived from a CGM, presented by aggregators, indexed by search engines and quickly spread exponentially from blogs and forums.
Online word of mouth or buzz is an extraordinarily powerful vehicle for information dissemination. We only need to consider that we each have an average of 10 ongoing contacts, 150 frequent ones and up to 1500 occasional ones to imagine the scope of the network of knowledge created.
What's more, the statistics tell us that 92% of people consider word of mouth the most reliable source of information on lifestyle and consumption choices and 67% of all consumer purchases are influenced by buzz.
Positive word of mouth is the best marketing tool in that satisfied users promote it. Similarly, however, negative word of mouth online can have devastating consequences, precisely because it is continually amplified. For example, if one user is unhappy with the product/service on the web and shares his (personal) negative experience, it is ‘amplified’, linked to other sites and indexed by search engines.
