I’m sure like many people, it seems that every time you turn around someone is talking about word-of-mouth, some articles even make it sound like it was just invented a few years ago. But the reality is the WOM has been around, well, since as long as humans could talk. I mean, seriously, is there much difference from one of our very early ancestors saying, “I found some good berries down by the stream?” to people today showing off their latest cell phone?

Studies show that even with the Internet boom a significant percentage of WOM still happens face to face.
One of the areas that grassroots and word-of-mouth communication always played a critical role was in politics. Successful campaigns never forgot the impact that personal communication played when it came to election day. For the past several years, we’ve been applying this same model to marketing campaigns.

And we will be discussing this approach, “From Politics to Potato Chips” with our colleagues and clients at the Clorox Company at the Word of Mouth Basic Training 2 Conference scheduled for June 20-21 in San Francisco. There will more than 60 other speakers presenting case studies and “how to” sessions. We’ve arranged for a special $125 discount code for colleagues and associates.

Here are the details

WORD OF MOUTH BASIC TRAINING 2
June 20-21 — Hilton San Francisco
Register at http://womma.org/wombat2
Use discount code “beyondbloggingsentme” for $125 off

Categories: New Media, Events, Word of Mouth, PR Community
No Comments »

This is a podcast interview I did with Andrew Noyes, the Associate Managing Editor for Washington Internet Daily and Associate Editor for Communications Daily. Andrew wrote a nice bit of coverage on some of the important highlights from the Beyond Blogging 2006 event last Friday. We wanted to go ‘beyond’ the reporting he did and get some more of his perspective on the subject. He is obviously another one of the bright people from DC who ‘gets it’.

We talked about several of the big pitcure topics discussed at the event as well as the personal/professional Blog debate and how Blogging and Journalism can co-exist. Unlike several of the mainstream media people I have met over the last year, he sees the advent of Blogging as a positive occurence, as it is a great source for story leads. This is definitely a podcast you want to hear…

Notes: The show was recorded using Gizmo Project from my iMac in San Francisco to the conference room telephone at Warren Communications News in DC. It is 17:59 in length and has pretty decent sound quality given the VOIP to POTS connectivity and the use of iSight as my microphone. If you don’t get Washington Internet Daily yet, you should take advantage of this free trial offer they have to see why it is a must read for yourself.

Download as MP3 File (2.2MB)

Listen Now:

Categories: Conversation, Authenticity, Podcasts, Word of Mouth
No Comments »

Funny that Steve Rubel’s post “I Like Companies that say ‘We Suck’” came out when it did - guess the universal consciousness is bubbling up a big world-shifting idea once again. I have been working on a post all week about a similar topic, but I think Steve’s focus on companies admitting their faults does not go far enough. Yes, the tech companies have had a bit of experience with Mea Culpa’s over the years, and this is a requirement for the establishment of trust for an organization’s voice, but the real change that is needed is for companies to embrace all of the truth and their intentions in order to develop real trust within the Commons and amongst its customers. The sort of FUD that Microsoft used to masterfully deploy (and is now being put forth by Google) has no place in the world any longer.

While owning up to corporate short comings is a necessary component of trust, I see it more as philosophical shift towards more openess and being ‘real’ than simply admitting that a company sucks at something. No, I am not talking about giving away your client’s upcoming product plans three months before launch so a competitor can do it instead - that would be harmful rather than helpful. I am talking about letting employees and representatives behave like the real humans they are, rather than simply delivering the corporate spin and enforcing the seemingly hard and fast rules that ‘the system’ dictates.

Part of the problem is much bigger than any one company, it is an undercurrent that is sweeping away the industry. I spoke with Ed Keller about this briefly via email before the Beyond Blogging 2006 event last week. In his press release announcing TalkTrack, he referred to “Marketers”. Summarizing my conversation with him, I inquired whether he meant just marketing people or marketing and communications people. From his perspective the use of the term “marketer” was all inclusive of PR, Advertising, Research, Marketing, etc… Merriam Webster agrees with his definition, calling it “an aggregate of functions involved in moving goods from producer to consumer” but I see a need to redefine this understanding - to rebrand the marketing profession with not a makeover, but a “MakeReal”.

From my experience, and from the nature of a conversation I joined on Burning Bird with Shelley Powers in April, I have come to see that many people believe that marketing is evil and as such “Marketers” have a bad reputation. I won’t get into all the why’s here, but the main point was that the non-marketer general public sees the smarmy SALES tactics of some companies as marketing and this rubs off on all other aspects of the discipline. In certain parts of Silicon Valley, particularly the Open Source world and among many engineers, this is one of the leading causes of anti-consumerism. But like most anti-establishment rebellion, it is often more about an assertion of personal power and freedom in a world that seeks to impose power hierarchies and use fear of scarcity to control people who are left feeling helpless within a system that favors the rich corporations over the rights of the individual.

Tara Hunt picked up on this conversation with her post entitled “Marketing = Eeeeeeevil!” which contains some other great insights on this subject. While I agree with much of what she says in this regards, I disagree with her push for what she calls “Pinko Marketing“. To me, what she calls Pinko is really just a retelling of the original Cluetrain Manifesto - which she duly credits for much of the inspiration for her idea. The Cluetrain heavily influenced me and was a huge part of my original inspiration for pursuing the development of conversational intelligence software back in 1999 (before everyone but perhaps Intelliseek). While the principles are strong, the use of the term Pinko feels wrong, as does its association with communism.

I believe what we need to be talking about here is “Real Marketing“. As in keeping it real, being real and telling people what is really going on.

It may seem like merely a semantic difference, but there is a more fundamental shift of intention and focus at play here. Real Marketing is about matching products and services with the people who can truly benefit from those products and services. It is not about getting more people to buy something and maximizing market share. It is about getting the right people to purchase a product and helping them to get the most use out of it. It’s not about increasing sales for the purpose of making the numbers, it’s about getting more loyal customers who are obtaining real value from the product. It is about creating maximum efficiency in operations across the board - and that is only achieved by open and honest conversations.

As almost every panelist said at the event last week, we as “Marketers” can’t control the conversation any more - we can, however, participate in the conversation and facilitate certain portions of it. This reminds me of numerous meetings with almost every big client I have had around the issue of enabling open conversations through message boards or open comment systems. They were all ‘afraid’ of what people might say. Afraid that some truth might be exposed in regards to a product short coming, or a design defect, or a bad customer service experience. As I pleaded then, and still plead today - “THEY ARE ALREADY HAVING THESE CONVERSATIONS, AND YOUR VOICE IS NOT BEING HEARD BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T INVITE YOU TO JOIN THEM - THEY DON’T TRUST YOU!”

I have been working on a model of the stages of engagement in a customer relationship since my days of being Chief, eBusiness for the US Mint. While there are many deep things at play here in this model, the most fundamental premise here is that communicating the knowledge a customer needs to move through each stage of the relationship is the key - not advertising and not sales in the traditional sense. In this regards, I do agree with Edelman’s assertions on the potential for Communications Professionals to lead the way in the Social Media future we are just beginning to live today. Communications is conversation, so that is simple enough. I differ with them in that I see important roles for all practicioneers within the “Marketing and Communications Industry”. Advertising still has its place, as does research and an understanding of market segmentation.  What is needed is a more holistic approach that is centered on people.
Real Marketing means the end of empty hyperbole and hype. It is beyond the sales of Word of Mouth Units, the practical equivalent of increasing the volume of the sizzle - it is about increasing the nutritional value of the steak - about getting to the heart of what really matters. It still calls for the proper seasoning to make it tasty to the person consuming it, and we need to listen to whether the person wants that steak pink in the center or well done, but it is not so much about how many people hear that sizzling plate of Fajitas as it travels from the kitchen to the table. It has everything to do with people being able to get near real time information on what is in that dish, how it was prepared and what the people who have tasted it have to say about it. It is about the reputation of the restaurant, the description on the menu, the conversation with the server and the conversation over the shoulder with the person sitting next to you. It is about informed choices - it is about the market of conversation - it is about the market as conversation.

So what to do with this understanding? Blogging is a good place to start because it enables the sort of two-way dialogue that is essential for making Real Marketing work, but we definitely need to go ‘Beyond Blogging’ to make it Real. To really get the most from this however requires a fundamental shift in perspective - perhaps Don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements might be a good place to start. Or better still, let’s start a conversation right here and try to get to the bottom of this together…

Categories: Blogging, Conversation, Authenticity, Word of Mouth, PR Community, Real Marketing
No Comments »

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
No Comments »

So what does Beyond Blogging actually mean? I have asked a lot of people that and received some very interesting answers. But I think to really get Beyond Blogging is a matter for the framing question. I.e., is the question really about what is Beyond Blogging, as in what does the future hold? Or Is it about going beyond blogging today, to imply that there is much more to this whole phenomenon. From my perspective, Beyond Blogging is about creating a deeper understanding of the best practices that work today while setting a path towards what we need from technology to do a better job for our clients in the future.

As Howard Rheingold says, “What it is -> is up to us”, so let’s get involved in the conversation and start trying things out, seeing what works and sharing what we learn with one another. It’s a about letting go of what you know and how things have been done in the past and looking for better ways to serve our clients - to create the most impact for their organizations, to tell their stories in ways that reach their intended audience. Now more than ever, the people who build these Web tools are open to the process of co-creation - my friends at BuzzLogic have been working very closely with a few key communications firms ever since they began development on their soon to be released software and will likely continue to do so forever. [Disclousure: I am an advisory board member for BuzzLogic]

So why now? What’s really different? Everything - and nothing. As Joe Kraus says, “It is easier than ever to launch a company, but just as hard as ever to build a business.” For me, what is really different is that we are finally in the throws of the Knowledge Economy and on our way to the next evolution, the Wisdom Economy.

In the knowledge economy, the value is no longer based on what you know, it is created from the unique way in which you apply what you know. It is found in the unique value of your relationships, the richness of your experience and your ability to adapt the insights you have gleaned from past failures and success in new ways for new situations. While we learn much from the patterns and protocols that have worked for us in the past, we need to think like Edwards Demming and Tony Robbins - we need to strive for Constant and Never Ending Improvement - finding better ways to accomplish our client’s goals as Tom Foremski suggests in The New Media Release.

Beyond Blogging is also an understanding that this new era of “social media” and Web 2.0 is about more than a technological revolution - it is about a fundamentally different way of viewing the world. It is a Chaordic world, not one in which the old world “Command and Control” hierarchies will work much longer. It is not a world of lies and cover ups - it is a world of authenticity and impeccable honesty. It is about filling the funnel instead of cllimbing the ladder - it is about helping one another by sharing what we know and being LoveCats. As I have written with The Noble Pursuit, it is also a time when fear and power are losing their grip on much of the modern world, but runs rampant in the unintegrated gap. It is whole brain thinking. It is about love winning out over fear. It is about the abundant capital of knowledge driving the economy forward instead of the scarcity of resources. It is about respecting the “Z-list” Bloggers as much as the A-List ones.

It is about people first and technology second. It is about you and me, in conversation with one another, asking the big questions or the silly one’s - at a conference table, in the hallway or over beer - enjoying the world around us and doing our bit to help make things right in our own unique way, using our own special gifts.

Yep - I know - all that idealism is fine and dandy, but what is Beyond Blogging for the communications industry specifically? What should we be concerned with as professionals? First you must understand how to work with consumer generated media to further your goals. Word of Mouth is a great practice area, but it can not be bought and sold for its full value. Monetizing it in units is just simply wrong from my perspctive - though it may be what the media buyers of the world want to do, it does not make it right. Its real value comes from the hearts of raving fans and the real troubles come from those that are really pissed off.

The trend I have been watching most closely over the past few years since getting into conversational intelligence and word of mouth has been the use of knowledge to further the goals of marketing. As consumers have access to more and more information, they rely on being able to find out what they need to know - they strive to make meaning out of the noise. So why not help make the meaning for them by replacing some of the advertising and communications mix with messages that teach people the important bits instead of always tugging on the emotional heart strings. While it probably won’t work for Coca-Cola, it might for Diet Coke - in a real sense, a nutrional label is a form of knowledge marketing in itself.

What does knowledge marketing mean? What does it look like? AdSense is one example - simple short text blurbs that must avoid hyperbole. It is Campbell’s Soup offering a series of alternative recipes for using its soup in other dishes. It is AdSense sending an email newsletter that helps advertisers better optimize their campaigns, helping them get the most from the service offering. It is American Express offering small business expertise as part of their Open program. It is a hundred other uses of producing media and applications that help people move from being a potential customer to being a loyal one who is selling your products for you and teaching their peers all the tips and tricks that they learned along the way. This approach creates natural word of mouth amongst your most highly valued customers and may take the form of an advertisement, a web site, a brochure, an email newsletter, a non-profit tie-in or any other form.

In short, it is about a fundamental shift in the framework and focus of the traditional communications agency from handling the public relations, Web site content and crisis communications to one that helps companies in all aspects of their outbound communications. It is about helping clients organize their knowledge assetts and figuring out how to best communicate them to the appropriate audiences in the most appropriate manner. It is about working to ensure the congruency of communications across all customer touchpoints - from press relations, to blogger relations, to internal communications, to sales scripts, to advertisements, to customer service centers and everything in between. Most importantly, it is about really listening to your customers and your markets, being engaged in the conversation and just keeping it real.

If you want to know more about this, come talk to me at the event tomorrow morning over at the Mayflower hotel - would be glad to hear your feedback and see what we might figure out together…

Categories: Blogging, Conversation, New Media, User Generated Content, Media Relations, Blogger Relations, Word of Mouth
2 Comments »

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
No Comments »

On Tuesday I spent part of the afternoon with Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher at the beautiful DeYoung Museum, talking about everything from lanyap to domaineering. With no room at the wildly busy museum for a couple of podcasters on this sunny San Francisco afternoon in Golden Gate Park, we headed to my house to setup Greg Narain’s old podcast rig on the backdeck (in the backyard as I unfortunately say).

I wanted to talk with Tom about his somewhat infamous blog post called “Die! Press Release! Die! Die! Die!“. In this podcast interview, Tom shares some very, very important insights on the future of public relations and we joke about starting a company to help begin the transformation. Most importantly though, Tom provides some great ideas on how to improve relations with both journalists and bloggers. He really gets this stuff, you should listen in and find out for yourself.

The New Media Release is an evolution of the current industry practices, designed to make it easier for journalists to tell the important stories by focusing on their own insights. This follows up on some of the ideas Coleman Hutchins wrote the other day in his post “The Press Release Isn’t Dead - It’s Multipurpose, Evolving.”

Photo Credit: Kristie Wells
Download the MP3 (9.2MB)

Categories: Media Relations, Blogger Relations, Word of Mouth
5 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.