WOM How-to

Social media aficionado Chris Brogan has written up an exhaustive list of the "27 Things To Do Before a Conference," including items to manage your travel arrangements, your family responsibilities, and many more essential travel-based requirements.

We'd like to appropriate his list for a different purpose: pulling out those items which reflect what YOU, the proverbial conference marketer and host, should be doing to sell your conference.

Here are some things you should be doing if you're already not:
Check in at Twitter Search for anyone talking about the event you’re attending.

Meaning: Warner Brothers, could there have been a better way to handle this "Watchmen" situation?

What we're speaking about is the leaked opening credits of Warner Bros' superhero-laden film "Watchmen," and the peculiar reaction of the film company:

"The special effects firm that put together the opening credit sequence for Watchmen, yu+Co, posted them to their Web site on March 6. Now yu+Co's taken the titles down, per Watchmen studio Warner Bros' request. Bad move, Warner. The sequence, which probably used less total footage from the film than any of Warner's poorly produced trailers, wasn't anything but free publicity for a film that needs help at the box office.

It used to be agonizing enough just having to face others in a presentation. We all know of the perverse paranoia that can sometimes accompany public speaking, when otherwise innocuous actions take on a sinister feel. A hushed whisper over here, a note passed over there. God forbid: a chuckle!

Today, there is the added dimension of Twitter. Just last week we posted about Twitter CEO Evan WIlliams facing his own music at TED, when he was presented with 50 tweets that occurred about his presentation in just a scant eight minutes.

But, says speaking expert Olivia Mitchell, there are definite advantages to listeners twittering away during your presentation.

We were recently directed towards Twarketing: Twitter Marketing Case Studies, who just completed a case study write-up of WOMMA Member Quicken Loans. We must admit, we feel almost like proud parents. Simply put: Quicken is everywhere.

Places to find Quicken: Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo! Answers, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, Zillow, LinkedIn.
Blogs Quicken runs: What's the DIFF?, Quicken Loans Insider, Quicken Loans Community DIFF.

That is a lot of social media. We acknowledge the unabashedly promotional quality to this post, but there is a good reason: Quicken offers some very good lessons for big brands. They're connecting, they're doing it in-house, and they're doing it successfully.

If you're too busy for social media, then Shel Holtz has some "good news. Adopting social media can actually make it easier to do more with less. If you take a strategic approach, you can reallocate to social media some of the work you have been doing using less efficient tools and channels. In this regard, social media is like any other technology. Its adoption is spurred by the fact that it makes it easier to do things you’ve been doing all along with older, less nimble technologies."

Holtz breaks down the time-saving advantages of social media into a few key sections:
Monitoring: PR academics call it “environmental scanning,”
Reach the press: Multiple studies support the fact that mainstream media has glommed onto social media.

From the good writers at Search Marketing Gurus comes a handy do-it-yourself project for this Monday: add more blog subscribers. According to Search Marketing Gurus, there are four types of basic blog audience members: readers, commenters, subscribers, and reviewers. "Readers are vital, but they aren't very engaged until they become commenters or, more importantly, subscribers.

On Monday we featured a story about Adrienne Tallacksen's frustrations with the ever-lengthening online television commercial. Tallacksen noticed the commercial length increase, and it was enough for her to discontinue her usage of a certain website for online TV viewing.

Hopefully you've visited TED.com (TED Talks, "Ideas Worth Spreading") in your lifetime. If you haven't, you might consider it a repository for all things inspirational and educational. A warning: it's also incredibly addictive.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and is an "an invitation-only event where the world's leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration." TED just held its 2009 conference last month in California, and one of the featured speakers was Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter.

Adrienne Tallacksen doesn't own a television. She writes, "I can’t say I’ve missed having a TV all that much, but there are a few shows I still like to watch, and like many others, I watch them online."

Tallacksen is part of the burgeoning trend of online TV watchers, both on Hulu and the television shows' home network sites. The amenities available on these sites are quite robust, allows viewers to "pause and rewind if needed, and while there are the same number of commercial breaks online as during the TV broadcast, there has been only one commercial per break…until now."

...Until now. Tallacksen is quick to point out that the online commercials don't bother her, she understands the requirements needed to be able to produce legal online television.

This is not a recession post, in fact it's a post independent of whatever the current state of the economy might be. What it is, however, is a few paragraphs cognizant of the fact that keeping one's job is a desired reality for most persons.

With that in mind, we're linking to Rohit Bhargava's list of six ways of "Using Social Media to Keep Your Job." We hope you can adopt some of these ideas into your personal business plans should the need arise.

We've abbreviated Bhargava's post with the headers only, so be sure to get the full gist at the link below.

1) Grow your personal brand.
2) Be an accidental spokesperson.
3) Invite testimonials.
4) Network internally.

Over on Parramatta Road in Sydney, Australia, certain innumerable riches line a billboard. But you can't touch them.

In a concept created by the Glue Society, and in a contest to drive buzz for the Australian Outdoor Awards, "the Outdoor Media Association is giving away a grand prize of 10,000 one-dollar stratchies (scratch-to-win lotto tickets) -- all of which are currently being used to wallpaper a billboard over Sydney's Parramatta Rd."

Those out-of-reach scratch tickets can yield cash prizes up to $20,000 (AUS), so it's no small chunk of change that languishes on the Sydney billboard.

Bloghound's Lois Kelly admits she is on one of her "usual rants on dumb company marketing and PR stories," and we're happy she is.

This time, she's taking on "stupid press release tricks," something comparable perhaps to Letterman's Stupid Human Tricks; they've got a nice gimmicky appeal to them, but they're otherwise pretty useless.

Says Kelly,
I’m getting mighty tired of hearing executives demanding press releases for every little thing, turning smart PR organizations into press release factories with little strategic value.
What gives?

In December we linked to some clever, WOM-inspiring benches (http://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2008/12/04/clever-and-creative-bench-advertisements/) and frankly, it was one of our most popular posts for that month.

With that in mind, we've come across some more fantastically clever, WOM-inpsiring marketing ideas on the Everybody Loves Free Stuff Blog (http://blog.epromos.com/archives/2009/02/special_secret.html), and we think they're definitely worth linking to again.

1) Special Secret Surprise Inside: A toothbrush-shaped popsicle stick inside an ice cream bar reminds people to brush their teeth.

2) A sample of gas relief medicine inside a balloon helps you not feel bloated.

3) And a key inside a bar of soap helps promote a TV show about escaping from prison.

Check out

We've covered a lot of the 10 brands that Mashable highlighted for their recent post: "Presenting: 10 of the Smartest Big Brands in Social Media," and it is exactly because of the brands' social media and WOMM prowess.

If you're looking for ideas for a new WOMM campaign, or just looking for inspiration to modify a current one, look no further. The Mashable post runs the gamut of social media, and there's sure to be something for everyone searching for a WOMM
idea.

1. Blendtec Blends it on YouTube
2. Burger King and the Sacrifice Facebook Application
3. Starbucks Asks for Your Advice
4. Sun Microsystems and the CEO Blog
5. IBM With Lots of Blogs
6. Zappos on Twitter
7. Comcast on Twitter too
8. Ford and Social Media PR
9. Graco Uses Pictures on Flickr
10.

We'd like to share some research on influence from Harvard University that may pique your interest (assuming of course, that you received this newsletter firsthand or secondhand...well let us explain).

Nicholas Christakis of Harvard and James Fowler of UC San Diego have found that the ability of a person to influence another lessens greatly as degrees of separation mount; this probably doesn't shock you. What is surprising, however, is that after the third degree of separation, there is no longer any evidence of influence.

Take this passage, as quoted from the Harvard Business Review:
For example, the risk for smoking in a person connected to a smoker (that is, at one degree of separation) is 61% higher, on average, than would be expected as a result of chance.