Though I have what appears to be a professional camera, I am sorely reminded of the fact that I still have a lot to learn with these photos I took at the event. While there were a couple of great shots in this set, I struggled with a very difficult lighting situation.  I shot over 290 photos of which only 51 made the cut.  Still, this photo set on Flickr tells a part of my story as I experienced the event - from working in the Fleishman Hillard offices on Thursday before the event, to a “Geek Dinner” I hosted at Daily Grill later that night and my journey to the Mayflower Hotel in the very, very, very early morning.

Take a look at the photos and see for yourself.  You may use any of these photos for your own purposes as long as you respect the Creative Commons License.

Carlen Lea also has a few photos that she posted right after the event.

If you have any photos you took, please let us know by adding a link in the comments below and tagging the photos with “BeyondBlogging2006″.

Categories: Speakers, From Event
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First, an enthusiastic thanks for what I thought was an outstanding event! I appreciate the invite to participate, and I can assure you I was stimulated and energized by the content. I thought Micah Sifry (”this is fundamentally about ‘Power’”) and Yvonne DiVita (highlighting the critical, often overlooked role of everyday women in the blogging revolution) were particularly insightful. One key issue that probably deserved more attention in you next event revolves around blogging and word-of-mouth ethics.

During my panel presentation, I introduced a new framework for making a key distinction between the type of Word-of-Mouth Ed Keller talked about in his key note, which I call “Intimate Word of Mouth,” versus an equally powerful (and potentially more pervasive) form of Word-of-Mouth (fueled in large measure by the explosion of blogs) known as “Incidental Word of Mouth.” I attempted to provide more clarity on this concept in an entry on my ConsumerGeneratedMedia.com blog today. Blogs, while linked together through social networks, are having their biggest impact in an indirect manner, especially vis-a-vis search, and this is a point often lost on large companies and brands. I certainly welcome comments, criticism, or pushback. - Pete Blackshaw

Categories: User Generated Content, Word of Mouth, Speakers
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Good morning. Am sitting in the balcony of the Mayflower Hotel Grand ballroom, blogging live from the Beyond Blogging 2006 symposium. Looking out over the crowd, it looks like there is about 300+ people here (conservative estimate) as a few more continue to trickle in. Apparently this is the largest gaggle of communications professionals that have gathered in DC for one of these events in a long time, perhaps ever.

After some opening remarks from the head of DC Communicator, Paul Duning, and Fleishman’s General Manager for the DC office, Martha Boudreau, Shel Holtz gave some great opening remarks that framed the conversations for the day quite well. Most notably, Shel talked about the shift of authority from institutions to individuals. He said, “Instead of thinking about crafting the message and delivering it to the masses below, marketers need to learn to cede control of the conversation to the people.”

Spot on.

He also talked about how the evolution of the technology has reduced the barriers to entry for participating in the conversation. This has also manifested itself through a desire for individuals to have real engagement with people, as they did in the ‘old days’. It used to be that when you wanted to get new shoes, you went to talk to the shoemaker and he made them for you. Today if you want to talk to the person who makes your shoes, you have to call the Philippines or call an 800# and talk to a representative of the company that does not know how they are made. People want a return to that sort of intimate connection with the people who service them, and Blogs are one way to get this.

I like Shel – and I just found out he is practically a neighbor, living out towards Concord. Will hopefully be seeing him again next Wednesday at the San Francisco Podcasters Meetup.

Categories: Speakers, From Event
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Since I previously wrote about the research report that Todd’s firm BoldMouth released and did a Podcast with him, I won’t bore you with any other background here - let’s get right to the reponses he gave us to his email interview…

Todd Tweedy, CEO
BoldMouth.com
Blog: Word Spreads Quickly

Q1 - What are the 5 Blogs you can’t live without?

Actually, I spend more time tracking what’s happening in terms of how blog content is distributed by other bloggers as well as how traditional search engines indexed, score, and rank blog content.

Here are a few blogs I follow:

• Channel 9 – great example of how to establish a corporate blogging movement across an enterprise that’s not full of corporate-speak.
• The Working Model – Back in February 2000, Ford Motor Company wanted to give their global workforce of 350,000 employees an Internet-connected computer. That didn’t go as planned for Ford. Today, imagine 60,000 product managers at Microsoft deepening customer relationship and dialoging with customers via blogs. Very interesting discussions on community and the tools that help create it.
• BrainJams – — I attended the January 30, 2006 event in DC and am hooked. The unconference series is all about co-creation and participation. It’s a great example for enterprises to mirror as they build out corporate communication plans using blogs. How an enterprise humanizes content and facilitate contributions from individuals in a community is often overlooked when creating a blog strategy. [editor’s note: no bribes were paid for the plug of my non-profit, but I will buy him a beer for the kind words at the Geek Dinner tonight]
• The Business Soul – This blog hasn’t officially launched but Black Star, the photojournalism, corporate photography and stock photo company, is going to publish a new blog with a focus on “humanity in corporate communications.” I’m definitely going to blog roll this one.
• Naked Conversations - This is Shel Israel’s blog. Shel is the co-author of Naked Conversations — How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. This is a very interactive book so buy two copies if you don’t have one already cause you’ll want to have at least one copy that isn’t filled with scribbles and underlined sections.

Q2 - Tell us a little more about you and your company.

I got my start in marketing via a stint in politics when I was only 5. My Mom would take me out canvassing neighborhoods to get-out-the-vote with my older brother. I caught the political bug and ended up working in the Legislative and Executive branches of government before spending a number of years doing public affairs marketing and grassroots mobilization – before we labeled it word-of-mouth - on the ad agency side of the isle.

My company, BoldMouth, is all about implementing word-of-mouth marketing campaigns that focus on community participation and co-creation in the development and distribution of product and service recommendations. We implement. We provide enterprises with innovative solutions to initiate, facilitate, and measure the impact of campaigns. We work with VP’s and Director’s of Sales and Marketing as well as Product Managers to integrate web presence strategies, search engine optimization, and community frameworks to support new product and service launches. We just finished a campaign for a publisher that resulted in a diet book making the #5 spot on the New York Times Best Seller List.

Q3 - What does Beyond Blogging mean to you? What does it look like?

Blogging is relatively simple. Blogging is just publishing – text, audio, video. A “blog” is just another type of website. And, when we “blog” we are simply publishing content that interests us in some personal or professional way. When we start connecting with other individuals that are publishing content that is interesting to us the possibilities are endless. I believe we’re already starting to see the first wave of what is likely to be “Beyond Blogging” as blog tool providers shift their offerings to include content management and community tool offerings. This shift is very important. I believe we’ll see a community portal model emerge in online communications as tool providers try new methods to address the challenges of scaling. The blog provider that can maintain ‘strong ties” between members across an audience, that was at one time a community, will win BIG.

Q4 - Do you have any sage advice for a communications professional trying to work with a client that wants to Blog? What are the 3 most important things they need to look out for?

I generally get asked three questions when we start working on a blog project:

1. How do we start the conversations?
2. How do we keep the conversations going?
3. How do they measure it?

I propose you start by identifying the “excellence in business strategy” success the enterprise has had whether operations, products/services or customer support. This becomes the message platform. Then build from there based on recognized interests of your audience. Be sure to get “Brand Ambassadors” engaged and, active early on too.

Here are a few more tips:

1. Make it easy to publish and, post comments.
2. Pick relevant category descriptions for structuring your content posts and use stemmed tags that map back to Top Tags on Technorati.com. Don’t forget to claim your blog.
3. Use pingbacks as a content distribution tactic and be sure use the direct URL’s for getting your content crawled quickly.
4. Incorporate permanent backlinks (permalinks) in your blog so that your content has a chance of sustained indexing over time.
5. Use RSS feeds to expand distribution.

Q5 - What’s the one trend in communications that isn’t being picked up on, or understood, by mainstream communicators?

I’m surprised that blogs aren’t viewed as a “viral marketing” mechanisms to support content distribution. I believe blogs are the ultimate “Tell-a-Friend” form. The secret to encouraging “pass-along” behavior is to focus on interest, not acquaintance, to drive distribution of content.

Q6 - What are some of your past Blog posts you would like to highlight for our audience? Why?

I actually blogged a business trip to Argentina in April 2002 and I wish I saved the content somewhere other than just on the service providers system. That ASP, of course, went out of business. Archiving blog content with a reliable third-party is likely to spawn interest in a whole new industry of service providers or perhaps expand the business models of local firms like @BackUp as well as Citrix’s GotoMyPC.com. I wish I secured the domain backupmyblog.com a long time ago! You can still get in on beta test and have your blogged backup for free. Oh, the domain IWishIDidThat.com is still available. Bottom-line, communications professionals need to have their clients archive not only the posts they publish on a blog but also the comments and link pool to the blog.

Q7 - Discuss briefly what you’ll be sharing with our audience at the Beyond Blogging event.

My company just published a study last week on Practices, Perceptions and Ethics in Word-of-Mouth Marketing with Osterman Research that has already been download more than 7,000 times. I’m sure I’ll touch on some of the key findings from the study as well as tips and techniques on how to integrate blogs into corporate communications.

Categories: Blogging, Word of Mouth, Speakers
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If you don’t know Corante, you probably have not been online much over the last couple of years. Their blogs have some of the best articles and experts covering a variety of topics that anyone who lives around DC will enjoy reading. Francois Gossieaux has an excellent Blog of his own, Emergence Marketing. You should definitely add it to your feed reader. (’feed reader’ is another term for an RSS Subscription manager - a tool for reading all your favorite news in one location)

Francois Gossieaux, President
Corante
Blog: Emergence Marketing

Q1 - What are the 5 Blogs you can’t live without?

(I am obviously biased about the first two)

http://marketing.corante.com/
http://innovation.corante.com/
http://www.hyperorg.com/logger/
http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/
http://www.freakonomics.com/blog [editors note: ditto on this, these guys are spot on]

I like blogs that are really well written, funny and also informative. Quality of the writing is my #1 criterion, but that’s just me.

Q2 - Tell us a little more about you and your company.

I am the President of Corante - the first blog-based media company. Corante is a trusted, unbiased source on technology, business, law, science, and culture that !s authored by leading commentators and thinkers in their respective fields. Corante also produces premium conferences and publications that help decision-makers better understand their industries and the world around them.

On a personal level I have a passion for marketing, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Q3 - What does Beyond Blogging mean to you? What does it look like?

Beyond blogging means two things to me. First, that quality content and opinions from the blogosphere find a way to penetrate other and more traditional distribution channels to reach people who don’t normally read blogs. Second, Beyond Blogging means extending the social networks that develop through blogs to face-to-face environments.

Q4 - Do you have any sage advice for a communications professional trying to work with a client that wants to Blog? What are the 3 most important things they need to look out for?

1. Don’t feel like you have to blog unless you have something really interesting to say. If you want to participate in the conversations about your company, your technologies or your markets and don’t have anything important to say, look at leveraging some existing employee bloggers to help you participate in the conversations you want to participate in.
2. Make sure that as an organization you understand the intricacies of the blogging culture and that you have the right corporate culture to start blogging. If you do not have employee bloggers, encourage some of them to become individual bloggers or hire new ones and put them either in charge of your corporate blog initiative or at least in an advisory position.
3. Develop a blogging landscape that includes the influential and connector blogs that participate in your conversations as well as adjacent conversations. Participate with them by commenting on and linking to their blogs.

Q5 - What’s the one trend in communications that isn’t being picked up on, or understood, by mainstream communicators?

I have two. The first one is that companies can truly no longer “control their message” - the only thing they can do is “attempt to influence” the conversation…

The second one is that most companies overlook one of their primary sources of customer/ brand communications - the customer service center

Q6 - What are some of your past Blog posts you would like to highlight for our audience? Why?

(Some of the more popular posts from my blog)

• Can word of mouth marketing be considered a “new” media “channel”?
• What do you do when your brand becomes the target of xenophobic rumors?
• Who needs a CMO anyway?
• Hyper-specialization is not always the right thing to do…

Q7 - Discuss briefly what you’ll be sharing with our audience at the Beyond Blogging event.

The challenges and opportunities related to establishing authoritative group voices in the blogosphere. The challenges and opportunities of extending the blogospehere’s virtual social networks to the physical face-to-face world. [Editor’s note: It’s good to see that more and more people are working to get out from behind their screens and spend more time with real people]

Categories: Blogging, Speakers
1 Comment »

Just one day away from the big event and I just got into the offices here at Fleishman Hillard on L Street. Unfortunately, I have been offline for the past 21 hours due to some WiFi issues and the five hours I spent with JetBlue. I have another long post to share with you shortly, but in the meantime, I have just received another reply to our Beyond Email Interview from Debbie Weil who is fresh off a trip to Toronto for Mesh where she spoke on a panel with my friend Tara Hunt of Riya.

Debbie is the author of the forthcoming “The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right” to be published on Aug. 3rd, 2006 by Penguin Portfolio. You can download a free chapter from the book’s blog.

Debbie Weil
Author ~ Consultant ~ Blogger
New meta site! http://www.debbieweil.com
Book: http://www.TheCorporateBloggingBook.com
Blog: http://www.BlogWriteForCEOs.com
Newsletter: http://www.WordBiz.com/signup.php

Q1 - What are the 5 Blogs you can’t live without?

Steve Rubel’s www.MicroPersuasion.com
BusinessWeek’s www.BlogSpotting.net
Halley Suitt: http://halleyscomment.blogspot.com/
Dilbert Blog: http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/
Hugh MacLeod’s Gaping Void: http://www.gapingvoid.com/

I like blogs that are really well written, funny and also informative. Quality of the writing is my #1 criterion, but that’s just me.

Q2 - Tell us a little more about you and your company.

I’m a corporate blogging consultant and a new author. My favorite gigs are in-house training for big companies like Edward Jones and Wells Fargo. It was gratifying to see Wells Fargo take one of my recommendations — to launch a blog related to history — and run with it. Their blog commemorating the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco Earthquake & Fire is here.

Q3 - What does Beyond Blogging mean to you? What does it look like?

Beyond Blogging means getting beyond “cool.”

It’s a way of saying that social media is going to seep into our lives on a daily, practical level. We’ll have a computer built into the door of the fridge and we’ll scan our RSS feeds telling us which local store has the best price today on fresh shrimp. Or where to nab a cheap ticket for a quick trip to the Caribbean.

We’ll search blogs and podcasts and wikis before making any big purchase decision. It’ll just be second nature. I guess that’s what Web 2.0 really means. We’re still in the early adopter phase. It will take a few years. We have to get beyond “cool.”

Q4 - Do you have any sage advice for a communications professional trying to work with a client that wants to Blog? What are the 3 most important things they need to look out for?

1. Does the client have a genuine desire to maintain a quality blog with interesting writing and useful information. In other words, can they convince the client that this is another way of marketing - not a publicity stunt or a new publishing channel for press releases.

2. The client wants someone else to “do it for them.” Long-term you’ve gotta write your own blog. If it’s not a senior exec who can be a thought leader, the client may have a really smart, connected employee who can do it.

3. This doesn’t require a nine-month project plan to get started. Just do it.

Q5 - What’s the one trend in communications that isn’t being picked up on, or understood, by mainstream communicators?

Not sure what you mean by mainstream communicators. MSM? The biggest trend I see is that great content, commentary, ideas, creativity, etc. are bubbling up from below. I.e. from nonpaid professionals. Some of them are 17-year-olds publishing clever videos to YouTube. One example is the bowiechick video demonstrating the cool things she can do with her Logitech webcam:

This bottom-up explosion of creativity is threatening both mainstream media’s control of news delivery as well as our traditional model of packaged, controlled advertising. The line between editorial, advertising and entertainment is getting blurred. And it sure is more fun and interesting.

Q6 - What are some of your past Blog posts you would like to highlight for our audience? Why?

Bill Gates hires me for CEO blog coaching and to ghostwrite his blog! (My best April Fool’s joke ever)

Time still the top Fear Factor when it comes to corporate blogging (Based on a survey I did of the 17,500 subscribers to my e-newsletter)

What REALLY happened behind Kryptonite’s blogging fiasco and what it means for corporate blogging (My interview with Kryptonite’s PR manager debunking the notion that Kryptonite ignored the buzz in the blogosphere and gotten bitten badly because of it)

Q7 - Discuss briefly what you’ll be sharing with our audience at the Beyond Blogging event.

- That the term “corporate blogging” is not an oxymoron.
- That blogs are really just next-generation Web sites
- That corporate blogs have lots of practical applications. Google uses its official corporate blog at as a complement to traditional PR, for example.

Categories: Blogging, Speakers, Corporate Blogging
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For those of you who know me, you have probably heard me talk about how blessed I am to get such great gigs as this one, writing for this terriffic event. I knew that writing here would be a great opportunity for me, but I could not have imagined how much I would learn from the great people who are involved with Beyond Blogging 2006. Learning of Yvonne DiVita’s work is another one of the great benefits I have received as a result of supporting this event - in her responses to this email interview, you will find out why. She is another one of those cool people who just ‘get it’.

Yvonne DiVita
President and Founder
WME Books
Blog: http://www.lipsticking.com
Blog: http://www.ahablog.com
Blog: http://www.wmeblogs.com
Blog: http://blog.thirdage.com

Q1 - What are the 5 Blogs you can’t live without?

How can I pick only 5? Okay, TODAY, these are my 5. Tomorrow, it could be different.

1. Diva Marketing - Toby Bloomberg keeps me on my toes. She covers the right stuff at the right time.
2. Crossroads Dispatches - Where Evelyn Rodriquez offers insightful thoughts on women, men, world peace and the emerging creative class centers of the world.
3. Talking Story - Rosa Say manages to gather the great minds in marketing and business all in one place - here’s where I go for my daily dose of innovation.
4. Hispanic Trending - Where Juan Guillermo keeps me up to snuff on the Latino community. Since Hispanics are a strong, growing business community, and they have such a rich culture, I find this blog not only informative, but enjoyable as a nice read. I don’t get to read it nearly enough, however.
5. Ageless Marketing - David Wolfe has some interesting work on his blog - relevant to the baby boomer community and why businesses shouldn’t ignore us. [Editor Note: I used to love talking to David when I lived in DC - he was one of the sharpest knives in the local Company of Friends drawer]

Q2 - Tell us a little more about you and your company.

What’s to say about me? I wrote Dick*less Marketing to get some attention for the women’s market online, and it succeeded fairly well. It almost seems as if the world is more interested in ME, though. How could I give my book such an outrageous title? is a favorite question. To which I answer: I didn’t. A man did - and convinced me to keep it. The book begat the blog, and the rest is history. I write several blogs, and contribute to others, because I think the voice of the blogger is what’s important. It’s the chatty nature of getting together around a virtual table in a virtual café, sharing stories. It’s about bringing people together - to learn more about each other. To that end, WME Blogs (part of Windsor Media Enterprises, LLC), works with the people to teach them HOW to blog, so their blog will be as effective as they hope. There’s so much more to it than just throwing up a header and typing in a few paragraphs. And yes, blogs are search engine magnets…or, they can be, done right.

Q3 - What does Beyond Blogging mean to you? What does it look like?

What is Beyond Blogging about? It’s about women. I am confident enough of that to predict that over the next 5 years, more and more women all over the world will embrace blogging (in all of its shapes and forms - which is a topic for another discussion) to join hands, stand shoulder to shoulder, and share stories of their lives. These stories will bring our collective voices to the forefront - women will dominate blogging because it’s a social media, because women are social creatures. Because women are the ones in charge of hearth and home, husband and child, the collective voices of our stories will ultimately change the social contructs of the world around us.

Q4 - Do you have any sage advice for a communications professional trying to work with a client that wants to Blog? What are the 3 most important things they need to look out for?

Here are the 3 things communications professionals need to look out for, when working with clients who want to blog:

1. Thinking a blog is the be-all and end-all of marketing communications. A blog is a conversation - not a dialogue. A blog is a connection to real people - not a place to pontificate. A blog is a piece of the whole. I think most of the roundtable members are saying the same thing, in different words. Because, of course, it’s true.
2. A quick, excited beginning that gradually drifts off into - nothingness. Blogs are a lot of work. Too many people lose interest when they don’t get immediate feedback (comments and trackbacks). You have to give yourself at least 6 months to build a community of interested readers.
3. An inability to be flexible. During that six months I mentioned in #2, you need to be flexible enough to change focus, design, categories, even goals. You need to keep an open mind, allow the blog readers to lead you where they want to go. ROI is not always measured in $$ - sometimes it’s measured in the voices of your readers. Keep that in mind.

Q5 - What’s the one trend in communications that isn’t being picked up on, or understood, by mainstream communicators?

What’s being missed? The connective/collective power of women bloggers. But, don’t worry. We’re quietly in the background taking care of that.

Q6 - What are some of your past Blog posts you would like to highlight for our audience? Why?

First: Yvonne Discovers the Power of We - because of the words — power and we.

Next: Where in the World are the Women?- because women are the architects of society (so said Harriet Beecher Stowe)

And: I can’t choose any others…there are a lot of posts about other bloggers, cause that’s what women do - we support our friends, so, I leave the choice of which posts are worthwhile to the readers.

Q7 - Discuss briefly what you’ll be sharing with our audience at the Beyond Blogging event.

What am I going to talk about at Beyond Blogging? I’m going to go beyond blogging to show everyone that the talkers of the world, women, are also the bloggers of the world. I’m going to give folks reasons to start paying more attention. Stay tuned…

Categories: Blogging, Speakers
3 Comments »

For at least 7 years I have been railing against CRM’s claims to provide a 360 degree view of each customer. When I initially started working with conversational intelligence back in 1999, I was talking to a few key people about the fact that CRM systems did not accurately account for any given customer’s online behaviour and their offline conversations - but we could fix that with some software I was striving to create. Even after it was built though, we would still be missing a good chunk of understanding concerning the potential impact of any given customer for good or bad. This was because we had no way of knowing what exactly people were talking about with their family, friends and co-workers… until now at least.

Our keynote speaker for the event on Friday, Ed Keller of the KellerFay Group, has just released some of his firm’s TalkTrack research findings regarding consumer’s real world conversations about brands. According to the company’s press release, TalkTrack is “the first continuous monitoring system of all marketing relevant conversations in America, in whatever form they occur, including face-to-face, telephone and internet.”

Ed will be talking about the results and some of the surprising insights they found in their research on Friday morning at Beyond Blogging 2006. We have included the official press release here for you to download as part of this blog post, so I won’t get into too much detail here - however, I do want to speak to a couple of particularly poignant aspects of their findings.

• The survey included conversations from 1,507 Americans ages 13-69 relating to 11,000 conversations and over 6,000 mentions of specific brands
• 92% of marketing-relevant word of mouth takes place “offline” (71% in person and 21% via telephone)
• 62% of marketing-relevant discussion is described as “mostly positive,” while only 9% is described as “mostly negative”
• The average American discusses specific brands in ordinary discussion 56 times per week
• Email, instant message and online chat rooms/blogs comprise 6% of word of mouth

While this seems to finally provide the statistical proof that Word of Mouth Marketers have long sought, the relatively low impact of the Internet is a surprise, especially given the fact that The Internet was the most frequently cited media channel referenced in brand-related buzz. I for one am interested in getting more of the details of the report and asking Ed some more questions about the findings. On both a personal and professional level this is very exciting for me. It is something I have always had to make assumptions about in my discussions with others - now I can cite real research that is ongoing and will improve greatly over time, providing even greater insights along the way.

For some reason, reading the press release made me think about a very small nuance of Word of Mouth that has a huge potential impact to the nature of the industry. For some reason Word of Mouth is seemingly more associated with Marketing than communications. In asking Ed about this, he felt strongly that the reference to marketing in this context includes communications professionals as well as advertisers and other folks in the different arenas of the marketing tent.

When I read that MediaVest EVP Jim Kite had said “that word of mouth represents a very big opportunity for marketers, with significant implications for both media buying and creative strategies” it made me look at the WOM industry in a different light. It became clear for me that the big problem with WOM was one of perspective. Most notably from those who hold the still eroneous belief that conversations can be controlled like a carefully crafted piece of marketing communications. In reality, we are able to inform, influence and persuade people, but ultimately the product/service is what really creates word of mouth.

No matter what many very bright people in the industry tell me, I just don’t see a media buyer purchasing 5,000 word of mouth units for a campaign as being a realistic practice (though I undersand that people are doing this today). While the results of WOM campaigns are clearly trackable, which is a key benefit, the consumer’s demand for authenticity within the broader conversation creates an environment that will reject any efforts to control a conversation and generate undeserved buzz. Many of the brightest minds I know have been thinking about what makes one brand take off as another comparable brand stagnates - no one has really come up with any insights of note as far as I know.

The TalkTrack findings point to the power of media and advertising to influence the nature of conversations, which is a key strength of communications firms and one of the main reasons my money is on the Communications agencies over advertising agencies as the industry matures. The core disciplines of traditional Public Relations (such as writing articles and talking to journalists) have more relevancy in my view than the ability to segment audiences and determine pricing strategies. Ultimately though, the real winners will be those professionals who have a cross-disciplinary understanding of all the relevant skill-sets with a solid foundation built on understanding and interacting with people.

Yes, marketing programs can incentivize and reward desired behaviour as IMG Direct does with its referral program paying bounties to the new customer and the customer who referred them, but it would seem to me that more people share their brand related stories in response to a positive and unexpected product or customer service experience. How many people really become ‘raving fans’ because of a bounty program or loyalty rewards? My guess is that more customers become raving fans because of the experience they have with the company (ie, its products, services and people) then those that are driven by the financial reward. This is ostensibly the biggest problem with hiring agents to artificially create buzz - if the product or service experience is not congruent with the buzz, you can’t get very far over the long term.

You may be able to make some short term impact with WOM programs, but unless you really understand your customers and have met one or more of their real needs, it will only be a flash in the pan. Most people today are seeking more reality and less Corporate speak. More high touch and less high tech. Organization’s clearly need to embrace communications strategies that account for word of mouth and try to influence the conversation in positive ways in regards to their organization. I am 100% in favor of continuing to experiment with different techniques and protocols with regards to finding WOM programs that work. Still, I am worried by what I perceive to be the potential for using WOM tools for inappropriate or unethical purposes.

I guess I am really advocating a very simple, but very important value based ideology when it comes to WOM - just keep it real. Don’t just monitor conversations and react, really listen and respond as you would to help a friend. Perhaps the one’s you listen to will become friends, or even ‘raving fans’. Don’t just try to get more ‘mentions’ to increase the quantity of buzz out there, cultivate quality contributions to the conversation from the real ‘Influentials’.

Perhaps it would be interesting to get a sense from future TalkTrack survey participants in regards to their perceptions of the trustworthiness of the organizations they talk about. How much they believe what the company has to say and also perhaps what they think of other consumers who relate to those brands. Regardless of my personal perspective on the nature of WOM, I know I am going to be paying closer attention to Ed Keller’s work in this arena. He clearly has developed something that provides immense value for modern communications and marketing professionals. To quote Ed,

“The fact that the average American talks about brands more than 50 times per week — which is a huge number — signals to marketers that it would be wise to seek ways to join in these conversations.”

While many of us have been encouraging just such an approach for many years - Ed has set out to prove the value and importance of getting involved - this could be the turning point for many executives in charge of big brands. For this and so many other reasons, I am happy to have this opportunity to meet Ed Keller and learn even more from him this Friday.