AT&T Mobility and Keller Fay presented new research on the topic of “ROI and Results: How to Quantify Word of Mouth’s Sales Impact” at a recent WOMMA conference. The results could not be clearer: “Word of Mouth is a powerful and statistically significant sales driver”.

More specifically, when word of mouth was introduced into AT&T’s market mix models, the company found that over 10% of sales volume comes as a result of positive word of mouth, and over 10% of lost or unrealized sales volume comes as a result of negative word of mouth. Only paid media contributes more to AT&T’s sales than word of mouth – with paid media accounting for approximately 30% of sales.

AT&T’s market mix modeling also makes clear the value of measuring offline word of mouth. According to AT&T, “we’ve tried other metrics besides word of mouth: Online buzz (social media) and NPS (the Net Promoter Score). While they provide some insights, they aren’t as strong or reliable for explaining sales as word of mouth.”

A full copy of the AT&T/Keller Fay paper can be found here.

Everyone, it seems, is talking these days about social TV. But just how significant is the television viewer’s engagement with social media while they are watching prime time TV?

Are certain demographic groups more engaged socially than others when it comes to TV, and are they the ones we generally associated with social media? What about genres – which capture the greatest degree of social engagement? These and other questions are answered by a major new study by Keller Fay and the Council for Research Excellence (CRE).

Here are some of the key highlights. The full presentation, along with details about the methodology, can be found on the Social Media Committee page of the CRE website.

To start, there are two big “numbers to know” that are revealed by the research: 19.1%, and 7.3%.

The first – 19.1% –  is the size of social TV’s daily reach. 19.1% of online Americans ages 15-54 are reached by social media at least once a day regarding primetime TV. For example, someone who saw something or posted something about a primetime TV show on Facebook or Twitter would fall within this category, regardless of whether they were watching or not.

7.3% is the scope of socially-connected viewing. It helps to define how many people are “socially connected” and engaging socially about the program while watching individual episodes of prime time shows – the so-called second screen experience. Socially connected TV viewing is most evident with new TV shows (which indexed at 142) and sports programming (which indexed at 129).

To what extent do viewers watch shows because of something they saw on social media? This was the angle that the New York Times highlighted when it wrote up the study results under the headline, “Twitter and Facebook Wield Little Influence on TV Watching.”  With respect to new shows that were premiering for the first time this past fall, 6.8% of people say they watched because of something they saw on social media, compared with nearly 40% who said they tuned in because of promos they had seen. For the season premieres of returning shows, 3.3% say they tuned in because of social media, whereas more than 70% watched “because it’s a show I watch regularly.”

Recently, Keller Fay joined forces with behavioral sciences experts BrainJuicer to assess the relationship between WOM and emotion, uncovering new insights that brands can use to tap this powerful combination to their business advantage. Combining Keller Fay’s brand WOM volume and sentiment measures with BrainJuicer’s measures of emotional brand appeal, the study looked at these relationships across 52 of the UK’s leading brands, spread across a wide variety of sectors.

The analysis shows a clear relationship between emotion and WOM: Brands which stir people’s emotions in some way are more likely to be talked about. The worst emotional response in many respects is no response at all – a “neutral” emotional response means a brand is significantly less talked about. (We controlled for brand awareness in this analysis.)

More specifically, brands which provoke a more intense emotional response are significantly more likely to be discussed on a day-to-day basis – the most “emotional” brands get three times more WOM than the least emotional:

The recording of a webinar hosted by Keller Fay and BrainJuicer reviewing the results in detail can be found here.