De aanpak van mond tot mond reclame van Tremor

Een interessant artikel op CMOMagazine.com over het online mond tot mond marketing vehicle van Procter and Gamble, Tremor. Het behandelt uitvoerig de aanpak die zij hanteren om Connectors binnen te halen en te selecteren:

A connector, by contrast, is anyone�even the last person to find out about something�who always taps the nearest shoulder to point out a new purchase or a cool song or TV show or movie. They are people with “really broad and deep social networks and a deep propensity to want to talk about ideas,” Knox says.
Because the success of a Tremor campaign ultimately hangs on the lips (or the keystrokes) of these minions, P&G spends a lot of time developing ways to identify them. The first step is to draw teens to Tremor.com. Once on the site, visitors are prompted with questions (such as, “How many people do you talk to on a daily basis?” and “How do you feel about buying new products?) that screen for eight character traits. Knox shares what he calls the three primary characteristics: inquisitiveness, connectedness and persuasiveness. A typical connector, for example, will have 150 to 200 names on her instant messaging buddy list.

At this stage, the door swings open for roughly 15 percent of applicants, who are greeted as new Tremor members. The rest get a polite, “Thank you for your interest in Tremor. Unfortunately, we have enough applicants at this time.” The chosen ones are then put through what Knox refers to, with an insider’s apology, as “boot camp.” Tremor baits the connector candidates with a series of ideas and opportunities: “Think like a Hollywood Heavyweight,” exhorts the subject line of one Tremor e-mail, for instance, which asks for teen input on a new idea for a movie.

Meanwhile, P&G staff watch anonymously, behind the curtain of the Internet, to see whether the teens’ actual behavior matches their claimed behavior. In short, what do they do with their first exclusive morsel? What follows remains part of Tremor’s secret sauce. Between 8 percent and 10 percent of the original applicants will attain connector status (or, typically, 1 percent of a target audience.) After working their way into the inner sanctum, these official Tremor members are unaware that they are still under evaluation. It’s a detail that Knox admits to readily but which casts a small shadow on Tremor’s claims of transparency�perhaps the main point of contention in any word-of-mouth campaign.