By John Moore, Marketing Strategist at Brand Autopsy Marketing Practice and a Consultant for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association

Originally posted on PROMO

Talkable brands do not rely on expensive traditional advertising to drive sales. Instead, they tap into the inexpensive conversational power of customers as their primary advertising vehicle. These brands enjoy the benefits of using word of mouth marketing to not only increase awareness, but also drive sales.

Starbucks Coffee is a talkable brand. Whole Foods Market is also a talkable brand. It wasn’t by accident these two brands grew from a local business to a regional brand to global icons. Both brands made deliberate decisions to bake word of mouth marketing into how they did business not just one day, but every day.

As a marketing manager with Starbucks in their formative growth years and later, as a marketing director with Whole Foods, I was fortunate to witness and participate in the various methods these brands use to get customers talking.

Getting customers talking isn’t as difficult as you may think. The process begins by making decisions to be obvious, remarkable, and conversational.

Talkable brands like Starbucks and Whole Foods are obvious in what they stand for. Starbucks stands for bolder, more flavorful coffee. Whole Foods stands for natural and organic groceries. By deliberately deciding to stand for something, these two companies are known for their unique point of view.

Whole Foods Market does not sell products with artificial ingredients. The company is obvious in its stance against artificial ingredients. On its website, Whole Foods posts a long list of unacceptable ingredients it doesn’t allow products they sell. Walk up and down the soft drink aisle at Whole Foods and you will not see brands like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, or Dr. Pepper. Each of those best-selling sodas is made with artificial ingredients. Instead of seeing popular soda brands, you will see unfamiliar brands like Izze, Maine Root, and Blue Sky on the shelves at Whole Foods.

By being obvious in what it stands for, Whole Foods Market appears more original. And that’s the lesson other brands can learn—the more obvious you are, the more original you appear.

Popular marketer and author Seth Godin says, “You’re either remarkable or invisible. Make your choice.” Talkable brands decide to be remarkable by earning opinions from customers.

Starbucks deliberately earns opinions from customers. Think about your first visit to Starbucks and you’ll remember being confused with their odd names for drink sizes and the weird language Starbucks baristas used to call out your drink order. You know what I’m talking about—a “tall” is really a small, and a “venti” is an extra large. Don’t think for a second you haven’t learned how to order your favorite drink in perfect Starbucks dialect. You have. And by having customers learn to say, “grande non-fat extra hot, two-pump vanilla, one-pump hazelnut, no-foam latte,” it’s yet another way Starbucks is a remarkable and talkable brand.

The unique Starbucks language is polarizing. Some people love it, while others hate it. Starbucks knows its polarizing ways makes the whole process of buying a common cup of coffee uncommon. So uncommon it sparks conversations with customers.

Talkable brands join conversations wherever customers are talking. Customers, as we know, are a talkative bunch. Keller Fay Group, a marketing research firm, estimates the typical American takes part in 125 conversations per week with friends, family, and co-workers that discuss products and services. Of those weekly conversations, specific brands are mentioned over 60 times.

Today, these brand-related conversations are amplified trough social media websites like Facebook and Twitter. Both Starbucks and Whole Foods actively participate in the online conversations customers are having about them. (Starbucks has over 23-million fans on Facebook. Whole Foods has about 2-million followers on Twitter.)

Starbucks and Whole Foods are not using Facebook and Twitter as a broadcast channel to talk about new promotions and new products. Instead, they are using social media websites primarily as a listening channel to provide better customer service.

For example, Whole Foods actively responds to the many comments and questions people have about the company on Twitter. Nine out of every ten tweets from Whole Foods on Twitter is a company response to something someone tweeted. Whole Foods has a deliberate social media strategy that involves listening and responding more than talking.

Your business can start becoming a more talkable brand by deciding to be unique, then deciding to be remarkable every day, and by deciding to be conversational using social media.

John Moore is a Marketing Strategist at Brand Autopsy Marketing Practice and a Consultant for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association.

Dave Kerpen, CEO, Likeable Media

By Dave Kerpen, CEO, Likeable Media

Originally posted on PROMO

In the last few years, brands have quickly gone from seeing social media as frivolous to including social media as a necessary part of any marketing and communications plan. Facebook, Twitter and other social networks hold great promise to quickly and widely spread the word for promotions, contests and sweepstakes. But while there is great promise, when it comes to promotions, many have struggled with how to go about it.

Here are 7 simple steps to launching a successful social media promotion:

1. Build a community first. Too often, companies think that if they create an exciting contest or sweepstakes, it’ll “go viral” and bring them lots of Facebook fans or Twitter followers. That may happen, but you’re much more likely to succeed with your social media promotion if you already have an established Facebook or Twitter and blog community.

2. Define your goal carefully. Are you looking for increased targeted likes? Website traffic? Leads? Buzz? Sales? Your goal will inform what kind of promotion you put together, the budget and length of the promotion, and success metrics.

3. Create a simple experience. Elaborate contests can be fun to envision, but too often are complex and ask too much of consumers to enter. It’s a lot to ask people to create videos, for instance, but easier to ask them to upload photos and even easier to ask them to answer a question.

4. Understand the laws of the land. When you run a contest or sweepstakes, you have to make sure the t’s are crossed and i’s dotted in your rules. In social media, it’s even more complicated, as Facebook has its own set of ever-changing Promotions Guidelines to plan around.

5. Choose a great tool to help you. Two of the best-known social media promotions tools are WildfireApp and Strutta, but there are lots of social media promo companies worth looking at. When setting up your promotion, keep in mind not only how easy it is to enter, but also how easy and compelling it is to share across social networks.

6. Include a social network media budget to support the promotion. You wouldn’t host an offline sweepstakes without a media budget to support it, so don’t expect to host an online promo without an advertising budget. Ideally, the media should be spent on the social platform where the promotion resides. So if it’s on Facebook, run Facebook ads. On Twitter, run Promoted Tweets.

7. Track results and iterate for the future. Unlike offline promotions, which may take a year to plan and execute, social media promotions can be planned and executed a lot faster, giving you more time to look at the results and make changes for the near future. Whatever success looks like to your brand, it can always be better, so the more you track, the more you can analyze and improve.

Above all else, take off your marketing cap, put on your consumer cap, and ask yourself, “Would I be excited to enter this contest and tell all of my friends about it? Is this easy enough to enter? Is the prize right?” If the answers to these questions are all “YES”, you’re well on your way to launching a successful social media promotion.

A hurdle that most run into, however, is ensuring that their audience is actually seeing their content and promotions. In addition to a 2010 study that revealed that posting early in the day is more engaging, one of the most important techniques a brand must learn is how to optimize posts to make them more “likeable,” or worthy of clicking “like.” There are many ways to do this, but the method that is by far the most mysterious to brands is the often misunderstood News Feed, how it works and how to optimize it.

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Dave Kerpen is CEO of Likeable Media. He is also the author of Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (and other social media.) He can be reached at Dave@likeable.com. Likeable Media is a Governing Member of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association.

Christopher Baccus is executive director of digital and social media for AT&T

Originally posted on PROMO

By Christopher Baccus

Social media has led to a lot of great creativity and innovation in digital communications and marketing. It truly enables the whole concept of word-of-mouth marketing by giving users easy tools to share with their network, for ideas to spread beyond our own social circles, and for new ways to connect with brands and products we love and, thereby, spread our enthusiasm to others who may not have an affinity to what we know and love. The promise of online word-of-mouth communication is realized everyday across social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many other sites.

With all that promise it is important, as companies, for us to provide the most effective way to stay fresh with news and information to keep fans, followers, subscribers, and most importantly, customers efficiently informed. (What you need to know to create an online content calendar).

Many companies went through an organic growth phase with social media where there was a broader brand strategy lacking as several parts of the organization created social destinations that were duplicative or divided customer segments in erroneous ways. We at AT&T had some of this organic growth happen over the past several years as we made a serious investment in social media efforts.

Let’s review the 500-million user gorilla in the room: Facebook. We had several fan pages that were developed for short-term marketing efforts, focused on a single segment of our customers, and some duplicative brand fan pages. We knew we wanted a more focused and more effective presence on Facebook and worked to consolidate efforts over the past year.

Consolidating a brand presence on a social platform does many things, it makes search easier for the user who is trying to find an “official” brand page, it also simplifies management on a platform, and best of all it gets different departments inside an organization to work more closely together.

It also has some major benefits for word of mouth. Take for instance, ads in Facebook. Nielsen ran a study last year showing social context ads—which included people in your community showing up within the ad unit as liking the brand—performed 400% better for purchase intent than ads without social context. Brands with a more focused presence on Facebook will have less dispersion of their fan base, since they will grow their fans in fewer fan pages and will therefore build a larger fan community that will improve the likelihood of people showing up in social context ad units.

Another benefit of a more consolidated Facebook presence is improving the chance of your brand’s wall posts on Facebook showing up in news feeds. Some people do not realize that their fans don’t see all of the posts a brand does. For example, we have 1.4 million fans on AT&T’s Facebook page and our average impressions for a wall post is 400,000. Of course, impressions are not people so the number of people seeing the post is some factor less than the impression number.

Having more fans will create more opportunities for content showing up in people’s news feeds. How? Let’s say person X is a fan of AT&T on Facebook, but her friend person Y is not. When person X posts a comment or post on our page, that engagement will never show up on person Y’s news feed. If, however, person Y becomes a fan of AT&T her friend person X’s engagements will show up on person Y’s news feeds. The two friends have to be fans of the brand to see the engagement and hence increase engagement and hopefully positive word of mouth. If your brand is splintered into several fan pages then you are decreasing the chance of person X and Y being fans of the same fan page.

The examples here are only for Facebook and present an initial understanding of how a more focused presence on Facebook is beneficial to help spread conversation about brand experiences in social media. I truly believe less is more when it comes to a brand’s destinations on social media sites, because it will cause your organization to put more thought into when a new presence should be established, it will focus your fan building efforts to a common destination, and it will improve overall reach and spreading of quality content.

Christopher Baccus is executive director of digital and social media for AT&T.

Debra Parcheta, CEO, Blue Marble Enterprises, Inc.

We recently reached out to some thought leaders in the word of mouth and social media realm about topics that will be presented and discussed at School of WOM, May 9-11.

Today, Debra Parcheta, CEO of Blue Marbel Enterprises, answers our questions on storytelling, offline WOM, and brand culture.

“Storytelling” seems to be the latest buzz word in word-of-mouth and social media marketing today, do you see this as just a fad or a sustainable movement?

Debra: We have measured programs where storytelling created the compelling message for a campaign.

Often used to solidify a concept that calls consumers to action, storytelling can also give social media participants a basis for sharing. A compelling story results in the spread of information at a higher rate of word-of-mouth.

However, storytelling backfires when it’s not authentic or if it’s false. Consumers seem to expect real life, true stories, not fiction. (Only advertisers get away with creating fictional characters and plots - and the consumer seems to know the difference.)

With such a heavy emphasis on online and digital tactics these days, what can marketers do to focus on their offline touch points?

Debra: Many of the marketers that we work with are experimenting with shopper marketing tactics.

Shopper marketing, like word-of-mouth, is a very localized sort of effort, that touches individual consumers where they shop and while they are in the decision-making process.

The concept in the offline space is pretty much the same as in the online/digital arena; companies will spend more to reach a more-targeted audience.

While the audience is smaller, they are more likely to care about or need the brand involved and more likely to influence their own circle of friends when they become active with the brand.

Shopper marketing has some of the same drawbacks as social media has when it comes to measurement.

For example, few companies are able to calculate a concrete ROI for word-of-mouth activities that reach these very targeted consumers and even when they can show a higher ROI than other kinds of tactics, the tiny audience involved does not result in major shifts in sales or market share trends.

What are your thoughts on the future of word-of-mouth and social media marketing as it relates to brand culture within an organization?

Debra: In the future, brands who have been experimenting this year with social media branding now have some data to use toward developing a more sophisticated word-of-mouth or social media strategy.

Listening was really our first task in this space. The consumer was speaking. Did you hear what they were most focused on? Did you measure when the sharing of messages accelerated?

It may not have been when you hoped it would, but there were clues there about what the consumer was willing to pass along and the reasons that your brand was important enough to them to talk about it at all.

From these first years of measurement brands can create strategies that grow their share of voice and the loyalty of their consumers.

We expect to see more concise brand strategies in this space in the coming years because some learning is already happening.

The brand culture within an organization may see some shifts because of this. The voice of the consumer is most evident in new social media outlets and in some cases, is providing brand organizations with new insights that could not be seen before. When consumer engagement results in new perceptions about a brand or its uses, those concepts might also ripple back to more traditional tactics as well, making even more of a brand culture shift internally. We’ve seen another internal brand culture shift at some companies; younger managers with higher technology skills are being tasked with managing the social side of branding and traditional managers are becoming more reliant on them to gain responsible insights from this new, more personal level of relations with the public.

———————

Over the next week, we will also publish responses from:

• Scott Davila, VP & B2B Team Leader, CRT-Tanaka
• Damon Ragusa, President & CEO, ThinkVine Corporation
• Mark Rose, Editor of PR Blog News & Partner at Influence Consulting Group

———————

About Debra:
Debra Parcheta is the founder and president of Blue Marble Enterprises, Inc. (1994), a corporation that designs data collection processes and database systems for its customers. Blue Marble evaluates each customer’s unique data needs to design and implement decision support systems, data warehouses, and measurement systems. Debra has experience with numerous database management system languages and applications and environments. Recent awards include the 2003 and 2007 PRSA Silver Anvil Awards for a database that measures public relations success and Denver Small Business of the Year Finalist, 2003.

By Allen Bonde, Co-founder and CMO, Offerpop

Social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have quickly become part of the marketer’s everyday toolbox for attracting, interacting, and engaging with consumers online. This is particularly the case for Facebook, as that property now accounts for 11% of the time spent online in the U.S, double a year ago according to comScore, and relaxed rules and a wider array of third-party apps and services make it easier for businesses of all sizes to run campaigns and promotions such as sweepstakes, polls and special offers.

Of course with more eyeballs and more ways to entertain them via social promotions, the potential to reach not only your direct fans – but also their friends, and their friends – is extremely attractive to marketers and advertisers. Consider:

• Twitter ad revenue is projected to hit $150 million 2011,
• Facebook ad revenue hit close to $2 billion in 2010,
• Facebook fans are 41% more likely to recommend a fanned product to their friend,
• Each Facebook fan has on average 130 friends!

Clearly there are some amazing opportunities for marketers to create focused social media marketing programs and campaigns that make it easier for people to interact with your brand, spread the word, and drive more traffic – especially via lightweight, interactive promotions and contests.

However, as more brands look to create online experiences on their Facebook page or Twitter feed, there is a risk of saturation and even ‘permission overload’ where consumers are bombarded with requests to share their profile with more and more apps to get in on the latest deal or join in on the discussion.

First: Make it easy to participate

While reach and frequency define traditional marketing and advertising, reach and participation (which drives word of mouth, and more reach) drives the success of social campaigns.

But how do you drive participation? Beyond listening for what consumers want and creating shared experiences (see some of my thoughts on this topic here), perhaps the two most important rules in this new world of real-time, multi-channel social marketing are: lowering barriers and ‘speaking the language.’

• Lowering barriers means making it easy to participate and not creating roadblocks such as requiring users to accept a third-party Facebook app or submit unnecessary information just to vote in a contest or poll
• Speaking the language means aligning with the natural social gestures used in your target social network. On Facebook these are Liking, commenting, messaging and sharing photos. On Twitter these are retweeting, sharing links and use of hashtags.

Second: Let sharing and discovery amplify your reach

We see this potential in real-world campaigns on Facebook and Twitter today. Campaigns that use Facebook’s Comments plugin, for example, offer users a natural way to participate in certain promotions, such as commenting to vote in a photo contest or poll. Coupled with a built-in way to share their vote with their friends and others, and you can create highly effective ‘viral loops’ through posts, emails or even sponsored stories.

On Twitter, a similar set of rules also applies. But while the language of Facebook is closely tied to its original mission – allowing users to see, share and comment on photos (remember, The Facebook), Twitter is even more about ‘the feed’ and sharing links and hashtags.

Good examples are contests where users simply retweet a message or hashtag in order to participate and gain an entry to a contest. Such as the recent Audi ‘Progress Is‘ campaign on television and Twitter or the Avon Walk social promotion.

In both cases these campaigns created a shared experience and sense of community (and of course had some great creative), and were successful in generating significant reach and participation by making it easy to participate and spread the word via simple social gestures.

Allen Bonde is co-founder and CMO of Offerpop, a venture-funded social marketing tools company. Follow his tweets at @abonde and @offerpop, and try the Offerpop platform for free at www.offerpop.com.

By Jessica George, Director of Word of Mouth Marketing, Empower Media Marketing

Butterflies. Uncertainty. Anxiety. Panic.

We’re all familiar with the pre-date jitters. We remember what it was like getting ready to meet someone for the first time—that ridiculously awkward, dissonant feeling of hope (“not another dud who loves long walks in the park and his Chia Pet”) and fear (“please don’t let this one stalk me in Walgreens”).

These feelings are similar to those our clients express about engaging in social media. And, believe it or not, social media marketing and dating have more in common than just pre-date jitters.

The bad news? We have to overcome those jitters and get comfortable with a medium that puts us closer to our consumers than ever. The good news? If you’ve ever gone on a date, you know more about social media than you might think.

Let’s break it down by comparing common dating “dos and don’ts” to best practices for social media outreach.

Know where you stand

Before accepting that first date; we ask questions – and lots of them—to gauge potential. Who is he (audience)? Could he be a viable love interest (prospect)? How old is he? What does he do for a living? Where is he from? Who does he hang out with? What does he do for fun? Does he call his mom regularly? And so on.

The next questions are usually about you. What does he know and think about me? Why does he want to go out with me? Was this his idea? What does he expect from our first date?

Regardless of the specific questions, it all comes down to knowing what we’re getting into—and with whom—before engaging for the first time.

One of the beauties of the digital space is that we can use it to collect that information upfront in a fairly easy and cost-efficient manner compared to, say, focus groups. So rather than pulling our hair out trying to decide which of the barrage of social media tools to use, we first listen and learn from what consumers are saying about our brand, competition and respective category, then develop social media strategies from those insights.

Check your ego at the door

The reality is, consumers govern the digital universe and if we’re going to engage in personal, human dialogue; we need to take a personal and human approach.

Similar to a first date, if you talk only about yourself, don’t let the other person get a word in and – worse – act as if you don’t care about what he has to say – you can bet you’re going home alone.

It’s the same when engaging with consumers through social media. It is not just about you. We can no longer communicate with our consumers in a one-way monologue over which we have complete control. The heart of every successful social media strategy is building meaningful and lasting relationships with consumers. Instead of assuming that consumers live and die by our brands, we now have to understand what our brands mean – physically and emotionally – to our consumers and work to weave our brand into the fabric of their lives in meaningful and relevant ways.

The best traditional marketers have always understood this; social media makes it imperative.

Don’t play games

Don’t wait two days after a date to call. Don’t say you’re going to call if you’re not going to. Don’t lie about what you do for a living or how much you make. Don’t even lie about liking lobster, if you despise seafood.

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) has a code of ethics centered on transparency. Never “flog” or participate in blogs and discussions forums under an alias. If this is happening, you need to stop it immediately, fire the agency that recommended it and report them to WOMMA.

Give your consumers the respect they deserve as fellow human beings by being candid and honest. That applies – even when you’re in the wrong. Honesty and transparency are how you build trusted relationships in the digital space.

Take it to the next level

As Dr. Phil says, “spice it up and keep the relationship interesting.” Reward consumers for their time and attention. Make your time together engaging and fun. Most important, respect that your brand image is dictated by the consumer and learn to value his or her point of view.

Respect breeds rapport, rapport breeds relationships and relationships breed loyalty. At the end of the day, building loyalty is what will put you ahead of the game.

Now what?

If you don’t know what consumers are saying about you in the social media space, find out. (My company and some others out there have tools to help you do this.

Similarly, if you don’t have a social media policy, think about creating one for your company. Not only are your consumers active in the space, but your employees, as consumers themselves, are as well. To leverage social media effectively, your entire company – from the receptionist to the board of directors – needs to know the “dos and don’ts” of being active in the space.

Jessica George is Empower’s director of word of mouth marketing and can be reached via e-mail at jessica.george@empowermm.com.

Image via Super Stock

By Linda Dickerhoof, Director of Marketing & PR, VIPdesk & Chair, Customer Service Subcommittee, Word of Mouth Marketing Association

Responding to the need for a comprehensive look at best practices for the integration of social media and customer service, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) has developed the “Best Practice Guidebook for WOM in the Contact Center” (available soon). The Guidebook presents suggestions for implementation of a social customer care program based on interviews with 11 organizations, the main findings of which are outlined here.

Why the Contact Center?

There are three universal benefits to incorporating social media into the contact center:

1. Immediate Response. Many contact centers are already staffed 24/7, aligning with the always-on nature of social media.
2. Consistent Customer Experience. Contact centers already have the processes and procedures in place to guide consistent customer interactions, and can easily extrapolate these to social media.
3. Centralized Feedback. A central repository for customer data ensures that complete records of every customer interaction are captured. In addition, if there is an unintended upswing of customer complaints identification of a problem and development of a solution can happen swiftly.

Step #1: Proper Planning

The first step of integrating social media and customer service should be development of a plan. There must be a true business purpose for incorporating social media into an organization’s existing customer service function, as well as a social media presence that fits both business and customer needs. Senior management from all departments within the organization should be involved in the planning process, as “top-down” buy-in within the organization will help ensure long-term executive support, which often leads to success.

Goals and metrics are an integral part of the planning process. Without stated goals for social media participation, how can you measure program success? Goals can consist of metrics to meet that mirror your existing customer service goals or can be specific metrics for the social channels that you use, depending on the purpose for which the channel is utilized and desired results. Goals for the social customer program must mirror the long-term goals of the organization as a whole.

Recruiting and Training

The best approach for staffing a social media customer support team is to look within your organization for current customer service representatives (CSRs) or other employees with knowledge of or an interest in social media.

• Existing employees already know the ins and outs of your business structure, people and practices within the organization.
• Existing employees have the background and understanding of your company that is required to ensure that all information distributed by social CSRs is both accurate and in tune with the overall goals and objectives of the organization.

Alternatively you can go outside of your organization to find skilled individuals, however they will lack the knowledge of your business and standard practices, so you must make a point to get ahead in some other areas, such as expertise in the social space. Whatever approach you decide to take, the qualities in the people you are looking will remain the same: comfort with social media tools, norms and protocols; extremely strong written and verbal communication skills; and familiarity with the company (or at least the industry).

Once you recruit your agents—either internally from other teams or externally—training is an absolute must. Training social CSRs is not that different than training traditional agents—the basic skills and principles of providing stellar customer service remain the same. However, training specific to the social space is a must as the communication “norms” are very different than in more traditional communication channels.

Staffing and Operations

How an organization decides to staff their social media response team is dependent on many factors including:

• Size of the organization
• Number of customers and their social media activity level
• Size of the existing customer service team
• Amount of resources that can be diverted from other customer service functions

A common staffing challenge is accurately determining the number of social CSRs required. Unlike traditional channels, it can be difficult to forecast the number of agents based on historical trends and patterns. Looking at what organizations in your industry are doing can be a good guide, however not always 100% accurate.

Another staffing challenge can be developing hours of operation of a social customer program and deciding upon response times for messages received via social media. While social media interactions happen 24/7, it is not mission-critical for most companies to respond in real time. Many organizations respond to social media during the same hours that the customer contact center is already staffed. In addition, many companies try to respond to all messages within social media within one business day or 24 hours. Whatever is decided must be clear and transparent so that customers’ expectations are met.

Response, Escalation, and Quality Assurance Protocols

Developing organization-wide response protocols outlining what types of questions and comments should be responded to vs. ignored, and the manner in which to respond, is a must. The first part of a response protocol—what is responded to vs. ignored—is something to be determined on an organizational basis: some prefer to respond to everything, some prefer to respond minimally. The correct answer is probably somewhere in the middle.

The second aspect of a response protocol—how to respond, and the content of a response—can be a bit more challenging. While it is a common practice of many contact centers to provide CSRs with messaging scripts, this doesn’t translate in social media. As such, social CSRs must be both trusted and trained as to what is appropriate to say in what situations—both content and “tone”.

An escalation process should also be outlined before it is necessary. This will highlight what types of messages should be escalated to upper management vs. responded to by CSRs on duty. As is the case with response protocols, determining the types of messages to escalate and those that do not require escalation should be determined on an organizational basis.

About the Author

Linda Dickerhoof is the Chair of WOMMA’s Customer Service Subcommittee, and the Director of Marketing & PR with VIPdesk, which is trusted by global industry leaders to enhance their brands through its customer care and loyalty programs. An experienced marketing and PR professional, she has spent more than 10 years helping organizations including VIPdesk, Network Solutions, ASAE and UUNET improve their name recognition and visibility, ultimately positioning their brands as leaders in their respective industries.

Originally posted on PROMO.

By Molly Flatt, Word-of-Mouth Evangelist, 1000heads

Word of mouth is valuable only because of what causes it and because of what it drives. It’s time to move the conversation about conversation away from a focus on ‘buzz’ and toward an investigation of innovative strategies to shift what consumers feel and do, not just how they talk.

Emotion is the root cause of word of mouth. Conversations about brands and products occur when consumers feel something strongly enough to want to share. Many marketers make the mistake of focusing on spreading the conversation—pushing a press release to bloggers, or asking people to retweet a link—rather than stimulating the emotion behind it. Conversation without emotion is meaningless, and of limited value to a brand; the whole reason people turn to their peers is because of that personal engagement, that opinionated slant that makes a recommendation relevant and influential. Neutral or regurgitated word of mouth may boost a brand’s visibility (although even that is questionable considering the deluge of content out there), but it is unlikely to change behaviour.

And that introduces the second valuable aspect of word of mouth: the behaviour that it drives. The conversation may be spreading by word of mouth, but if it isn’t actually influencing people to behave differently toward your brand—whether buying for the first time, buying more, or staying loyal—it’s simply empty talk.

So, word of mouth is simply the potential indicator of two valuable processes: emotional advocacy and behaviour change. This is why conversational success measurements such as level of participation; depth and range of emotion; strength of recommendation; and audience relevance and resonance are in fact much less fuzzy than those that look at reach figures alone. They indicate how the brand has changed the people behind the conversation—and it is this alchemy alone that brings true word-of-mouth return-on-investment.

However, the lack of understanding about the real value of ‘conversation’ threatens to hamstring the social business industry before it has evolved. At the recent Word of Mouth Marketing Association Summit, Jeremiah Owyang presented Altimeter’s research on the Career Path of the Corporate Social Strategist. This demonstrates that many early adopters of corporate social strategies are now in danger of being relegated to a ‘social media help desk’ role. Having failed to demonstrate the full value of their nascent programs and having met fierce internal resistance, they are becoming short-term, reactive respondents to consumer conversation, a sort of customer service offshoot siloed from the rest of the company.

In his new book, “The Conversation Manager,” brand consultant Steven van Belleghem offers one solution—that modern marketers must retrain as Conversation Managers, versed in the listening, engagement and integrated strategy skills that a social world demands. This is a great idea, but suggests that, first, consumer conversation should be the preserve of marketers, rather than everyone in the business; and second, that it is the conversation, and not the conversers, that count. Word of mouth is the essential mechanism that gives them a way into engagement, and a way to measure whether that engagement has worked, but not the focus in itself.

So instead, I suggest that training in emotional and behavioural triggers becomes part of every job role. We must all become scientists in how to use our given specialism (be it product development or customer care, human resources or public relations) to affect the feelings and actions of our company’s target audience. And this applies cross-industry, whether you work in charity, government, B-to-C or B-to-B, moving your audience is what will bring you both money and mindshare.

Initially, all employees need to start listening to consumer conversation about their brand. They should learn to use ongoing social media monitoring, but also head out to stores, suppliers or the street and listen to how their customers feel and behave, discovering the impact of their own work. Everyone should do a rotation within the customer service team each month; consumer packaged goods companies should have away days to supermarkets; product developers should be closely watching Twitter feeds.

They next need to listen to people who truly change emotion and behaviour for a living; but this must go beyond a lecture with a consumer psychologist and incorporate learnings from some disruptive, inspiring sources. Who better to help you design an immersive consumer experience than a theatre director? Who better to help you transform a complaining customer than a crisis arbitrator? Who better to help you add a bit of magic to your new product than a magician, or to create a case study than a film editor, or to create a technical manual that even a kid could understand than a school teacher?

Yes, there is a need for companies to continue to explore the tactical role of social tools and platforms in disseminating their voice, and a social strategist role is still valid. But to build valuable word of mouth into a business—word of mouth that comes from somewhere and does something—every employee needs to start thinking in terms of emotion and behaviour.

The joy is, we’re all experts in this stuff—we’re human beings, after all—yet we somehow lose these instincts when we walk through the office door. This isn’t about understanding how to get more visits on Foursquare, it’s about understanding how to connect and influence in a seriously primal way.

Otherwise, it’s all so much blah, whether it’s on Facebook or in the park. Words are signifiers of what we feel, and spurs to what we do. We need to treat them as means, not ends.

Originally posted on Small Talk, a HealthTalker Blog

By: Andy Levitt, Founder & CEO, Healthtalker

As we head into 2011, brand teams and their agencies will be fine-tuning their marketing plans for the year. I doubt there will be dramatic changes in the general allocation of DTC budgets as most big brands will maintain a reliance on mass media reach and frequency patterns to raise brand awareness. And while print, PR, direct mail and digital will be in the mix, too, it’s safe to say that for the first time, “social media” will have a confirmed spot within most brand plans in the year ahead. It’s a big win, for sure - but the victory here may not prove so successful.

I’d hazard a guess that no fewer than 25 brands right now are trying to figure out how they can either develop or expand upon their Facebook pages. No doubt, plenty of MLR teams are struggling to find the proper balance, and the inherent limitations are most likely frustrating eager marketers.

Would the whole process be easier if it were called Health Media rather than Social Media? And isn’t that what brands want after all - people focused on health discussions, not on a host of other topics completely unrelated to growing their market share?

Last week, Reuters published an article that highlights the findings from recent research conducted by some smart folks at MIT. The big news was that groups of friends are key to changing health behaviors - but not in the way you would think. In fact, the headline screams out that “it takes more than a far-flung network of friends on Facebook egging you on; it takes a jostling herd.”

So maybe that Facebook page is less critical than you imagine.

In particular, the research discussed in the article (which is in the September 3 issue of Science) confirms that individual adoption of a particular behavior was much more likely when participants received social reinforcement from multiple neighbors in the social network.

What that means in English is that it’s the interpersonal connections - conversations with family, friends and colleagues - that really can influence behavior. It’s WOM 101, right?

The key is that the message needs to be consistent in order for the change and influence to occur. Therefore, when enough people in a network share a common viewpoint, it is likely to take hold and spread to most of the people who are listening. That’s where the big win takes place.

Don’t get me wrong - Facebook is an amazing platform, but I’d argue that its use is far more compelling for the social side of life, and less of a platform that can be leveraged to change health behaviors.

So perhaps the time has come for brands to think about creating the right platform for those influential conversations, rather than jumping in to the wrong place, just because now they can.

Andrew Levitt is the Founder & CEO of HealthTalker, a word of mouth agency that specializes in the healthcare industry

A company’s social media policy serves, in its simplest form, as a guide to how a business, its employees, and anyone else speaking on behalf of the business should share opinions, beliefs, and recommendations with customers online.

Fast Company magazine recently examined social media policies from a range of businesses and found there “there is little consistency in the policies” and “the complexity of a corporate social media policy depends on the robustness of the corporate culture.”

Surprisingly, Walmart’s social media policy, especially with Twitter, is decidedly hands-off. Best Buy’s policy includes a long list of “dont’s.” CNN’s policy is rather strict. Read the full Fast Company article for great insights into the do’s and don’ts of drafting a social media policy.

WOMMA members have told us designing an effective social media policy isn’t easy. It requires a balance between using proper legal guidance with relevant marketing practices.

Recently, we held a webinar sharing insights into designing a social media policy. On the webinar were two lawyers and one marketer. Anthony Diresta (WOMMA’s General Counsel, Partner with Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP) and Luis Xavier Hernandez-Ochoa (Category Regional Counsel at Unilever) represented the lawyer side and I represented the marketer’s point of view.

This webinar coincided with the release of WOMMA’s Guide to Designing a Social Media Policy (.pdf file). Like the webinar, this guide offers a legal view and a marketer’s view. The legal view in the WOMMA guide comes in the form of a lawyer-friendly template policy. The marketer’s view is a three-pager detailing important decisions a company must make in developing their social media policy.

For an overview of both the legal side and the marketing side to designing an effective social media policy, watch this archived webinar…