Page 140 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

132 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

adoption, whether in the case of the selection of auto service stations
(Engel, Kegerris, & Blackwell, 1969), or in the diffusion of computers in
clinical practice (Spencer, 1965) and among piano teachers (Brown &
Reingen, 1987).

Today’s “eWOM”
The importance of WOM has been recognized by marketers and sociolo-
gists since the mid-1950s. More recently, with the increase in the influence
of the Internet, the impact and nature of WOM in marketing has changed.
Today, WOM need not be face to face, direct, oral, or even ephemeral
(Buttle, 1998), and with the growth of what has been referred to as “social
media marketing,” “viral marketing,” “buzz,” and “guerilla marketing,” we
have seen the birth of “word-of-mouth marketing” (WOMM), more fondly
called “word of mouse” or “eWOM” (Goldenberg, Libai, & Muller, 2001;
Kozinets, de Valck, Wojnicki, & Wilner, 2010). eWOM has been defined
as “any positive or negative statement made by potential, actual or former
customers about a product or company, which is made available to a mul-
titude of people and institutions via the internet” (Hennig-Thurau,
Gwinner, Walsh, & Gremler, 2004).
Social media has exploded as a category of online exchange and com-
munication where people create content, share it, bookmark it, and net-
work it, all at lightning speed (Asur & Huberman, 2010). Examples of
such social media include online WOM forums such as blogs, company-
sponsored discussion boards, and chat rooms; consumer-to-consumer
email; consumer product or service ratings websites and forums; Internet
discussion boards and forums; “moblogs” (sites containing digital audio,
images, movies, or photographs); and social networking sites such as
Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Tumblr, and Twitter. Whereas an early perspec-
tive on WOM communication focused on how one consumer communi-
cated with another or with a group, in today’s social-media dominated
world, a given consumer can communicate with millions in a relatively
short period of time, resulting in instant fame or shame for an individual
or company—as an example, the case of Oscar Pistorius comes to
mind. This recent change in the nature and “speed of spread” of informa-
tion on the Internet through social media has had dramatic implications
on the traditional view of the underlying factors that facilitate effective
information exchange. Such changes require the marketer to turn the
traditional theory of how information diffuses through a population on
its head. We will discuss this important issue in the next section of the
chapter.