Affinitive’s Social Media Playground

Here at Affinitive we strive to find and improve upon metrics for measuring offline conversations about our clients’ brands and products.  Online is easier to quantify with the tracking technologies available, but offline has always been a complex process and often difficult to measure accurately.

One of our current methodologies involves a survey distributed to a randomized sample of a program’s (i.e., community or online consumer panel) members asking questions related to the conversations they’ve had offline in the past month about that brand or product.  One question we recently added to the survey asks, “How likely are you to recommend [product/brand] to a friend or colleague”?

This question probably sounds familiar.  It’s the “Ultimate Question” as defined by Fred Reicheld in his book of the same name.  The Ultimate Question’s purpose is to determine your Net Promoter Score, that is, the ratio of promoters to detractors of your product or brand.  This score is designed to provide the measure of a company’s performance through the customer’s eyes.  It’s a widely accepted, yet controversial metric for determining an organization’s ability to grow.

Here’s how it works.  Consumers are asked, on a scale of 1-10 (with 1 being extremely unlikely and 10 being extremely likely), “How likely are you to recommend an organization to a friend or colleague?”  Those who answer 0-6 are “detractors” and those who answer 9-10 are “promoters”.  You subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters to determine the Net Promoter Score (NPS).

One question we’ve always asked in our WOM surveys has been “How many conversations have you had about [product/brand] in the past month?” with the answer based on a 0-10+ scale.

We decided to dig up 6 months of historical WOM survey results and match the NPS results with our conversation metric to see how they fit together, and were surprised by the results.  Note: All three clients are of different verticals.

Basically, the more conversations a customer has, the more likely they are to recommend the product.  No surprises there.  But what’s most interesting is how conversations mimic the assumed detractor/promoter values of the Net Promoter Score.  According to the historical results of three of our existing clients, those customers who had 0-6 conversations are essentially detractors, unlikely to recommend the product or brand to a friend.  At seven and 8 conversations the NPS spikes, and 9-10 are significantly higher, extremely likely to recommend the  product.

Now admittedly this isn’t a conclusive correlation with only 6 months of historical data, but the striking resemblance of “conversations per month” to the Net Promoter Score begs the question, why are consumers who are having up to 6 conversations per month about a product or brand ‘unlikely’ to recommend the product to a friend or colleague?  Is this a flaw in either our or the NPS methodology?  Are customers over-reporting their conversations or under-reporting their likelihood of recommendation?  Are consumers aware of the difference between a product conversation and a product recommendation?  Share your thoughts with us!