¶ … Trusov, Bucklin, and Pauwels (2009) examines the growing trend of marketing via social networking platforms. Social networking is increasing the efficiency and productivity of word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing strategies, making them a much more productive choice than other traditional marketing avenues. WOM marketing relies on already established social connections and networks as a way to spread effective news about particular products and initiatives. This is being augmented with the growth of social networking in an increasing popular viral world. Yet, the researchers define the concept of WOM as "one of the world's most effective, yet least understood marketing strategy" (Trusov, Bucklin, & Pauwels 2009 p 2). Thus, this current research aims to explore its effectiveness as a viable marketing strategy in the current context. Essentially, the authors hypothesized that WOM marketing...

Thus, they needed to implement an effective methodology to be able to categorize and quantify the abstract data into more meaningful data sets which could then be statistically analyzed and compared to other strategies of marketing used today and in the past. The research used vector autoregression modeling approach to explore the viral environment. The researchers define this model as a method which "accounts for endogeneity and the dynamic response and interactions between marketing variables and outcomes," (Trusov, Bucklin, & Pauwels 2009 p 6). This method calculated the monetary value of WOM marketing via…