In a recent study, NOP found that Word-of-Mouth Ain't Just Blogging ...:

When asked how they make recommendations, 80% of consumers say they make them in-person, followed by 68% who say they make them over the telephone. This phenomenon is even stronger among the Influentials(SM), (the one in ten Americans who tell the other nine how to vote, where to eat and what to buy, according to over 60 years of NOP World research) with 90% of this group making in-person recommendations and 79% making recommendations by phone. Surprisingly, the study found that less than 40% of consumers use e-mail to make recommendations to others, including via personal e-mail (37%), by e-mail forwarding (32%) or through mass e-mails (12%). While slightly higher percentages of Influentials use e-mail (personal e-mail 53%, e-mail forwarding 39% and mass e-mails 18%), face-to-face communication still far outweighs this medium.

I would be interested in the methodology of the study: did they simply ask people to relate what they had done in the previous year? It has been shown that such recollections are inaccurate.

Still, I am not surprised that most of our recommending goes on F2F, really. F2F is the most powerful social networking mode, after all, and even those of us who are intensely wired still interact with friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues on a F2F basis regularly. My bet is that there would be a larger proportion of digital recommendations with those who spend more time online, and of course, those that blog within a larger community of readers will have their recommendations heard by a larger group of people. Just looking at the proportions of recommendations made won't capture the number of people influenced. Its not just one-to-one communication, there's one-to-many, and many-to-many forms as well.

[pointer from Emergence Marketing]

[tags: Word Of Mouth]