In the first topic (The Role of IWOM in Purchase Decisions) of CIC’s “Making sense of IWOM” white paper series, CIC suggested that the majority of consumers use IWOM to help them make purchase decisions about products and brands they plan on purchasing. What CIC did not do look at was if they found answers if they left, stuck around or if they posted comments about those products and answer other consumer questions about those brands and products.

To answer these questions, CIC today releases the second topic titled “How IWOM is generated and disseminated.” In this study CIC found that consumers in online communities not only passively listen to and receive messages, but also proactively post and spread comments about brands and products. According to the research findings, 54.1% of 640 surveyed BBS and blog users will initiate conversations or post comments related to brands/products.

In addition to answering that initial question, CIC also took an in-depth look into the reason as to why consumers generate and disseminate IWOM and discover that 8 main types of motivations exist, the 3 most important being interpersonal communication, self expression and experience sharing, which respectively accounted for 82.7%, 79.5% and 78.9% of 346 BBS and Blog users who post comments on brands/products online and the other 5 types being community status (54.6%), helping others (53.2%), upholding justice (45.4%), work related (44.2%) and seeking help (25.4%).

You can read this white paper in full below via Slideshare:

Send me a message to jason.zhanjia@in2marcom.com if you want a PDF version.

Disclosure: CIC was my former employer from August 2006 to June 2009.