Buzzfeed’s Pound Technology Marks a New Frontier in Word of Mouth Marketing
Image via Buzzfeed.
Word of Mouth Marketing – or WOMM, as it’s known among communications specialists who can’t resist a good acronym – has long been considered an extremely effective way to reach consumers. An article from Forbes published last year cited a Nielsen survey in which 92% of people polled said they trust “recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising.” In the Land Before FaceTime, word of mouth was a literal term; now it’s more likely to take the shape of sharing across multiple social platforms, plus email and messaging services like Gchat. The problem is that there hasn’t been a single, accurate source for analytics across networks, as most could measure reach within a single platform only. Until now.
Appropriately enough, Buzzfeed – the safe haven for content designed specifically to be shared – has developed a proprietary service called Pound that embeds a hash in the URL of a shared link to measure its reach as it’s passed across platforms. So, as a post goes from Facebook to Twitter to email to Gchat and Pinterest, Pound is there to measure it all. It promises to be the most accurate WOMM measurement available.
Fast Company has a closer look at how Pound works. Unveiled yesterday at NewFronts, and partly based on research from Microsoft and Stanford, Pound tracks all downstream visits, meaning it is, as Fast Company describes, “capable of processing over 10,000 web requests per second.” Buzzfeed publisher Dao Nguyen claims the site “now stores more Pound data in a single day than all the other data the company has been collecting for content optimization since it was founded.”
Buzzfeed is exploring how Pound can be used to track the effectiveness of their promotions and the reach of sponsored content and, eventually, to build a sharper view of exactly the type of content their readership truly likes most. The site promises to share more information on Pound as they continue to analyze data; expect marketing professionals and WOMM proponents to pay close attention.
