Word Of Mouth Marketing

(Part 2? Yeah, check out Part 1.) In case you missed it, Ron Paul supporters, ASU students, and VFX artists were among those that joined the fray since my last post. The variations continue to proliferate further down the tail, satirizing - and entertaining - more niche audiences. What does this add up to? Segmentation.

First of all, this isn’t new. We have had a social media-related ethics code in place since 2005. At that time, it was the Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics. It helped us decide what was ‘best-practice’ and what wasn’t. These are our ethics not something handed down through culture or a governing body. We simply believed that social media’s true power was grounded in trust – trust between bloggers and their readers; between brands and their followers; between marketers and customers.

“It’s an English basement.” That might not mean much to you, but it probably made you chuckle if you fall into one of the two groups: Of course, this video is one of many variations of the Sh*t Girls Say series - which has a cumulative YouTube viewership of 20+ million and growing. You know the premise: Stereotypical expressions from people of a certain ilk, organized by gender, hobby, lifestyle, or geography. There are takes on skiers, hipsters, suburban moms, and even sh*t nobody says

In a recent Washington Post article, Polarized News Market has Altered the Political Process in South Carolina Primary, we peak into the news consumption habits of a South Carolina voter. Two election cycles ago the South Carolina native would read newspaper for political news, now she “settles in at her desktop to fire up Facebook.”

TIME Magazine’s person of the year in 2006 was “you,” paying tribute to the hundred millions of social media users who framed the information age with user-generated content. Conceived in 2006, Twitter, along with other “emerging platforms,” was evolving and looking for better ways to enable users to share content. Five years later, Twitter includes brand pages in efforts to expand its 100 million user base.

It has taken the whole weekend to completely digest all the amazing learnings we gathered last week at the WOMMA summit. The WOMMA tagline is “Creating Talkable Brands Next and Best Practices” and they totally delivered. Great learnings from great brands like Mattel, Sprint, Intel, Unilever and Sephora just to name a few. But the most talked about sessions were definitely the keynote addresses that carried four themes that will help us navigate the social media industry over the next year.

image by John Moore a.k.a. @BrandAutopsy On a panel last week for a WOMMA event at Chicago’s Social Media Week, I had the pleasure of sitting with Keller Fay’s Ed Keller, Brains on Fire’s Robbin Phillips, and Social Media Today’s Robin Carey to discuss social media measurement under the heading of “Is WOM worth it?”.  In the context of that discussion, I talked about the siren song of social media counting (vs. measurement) and the trap that we too-frequently see: social

This past week social media showed users a little bit of everything – from the serious to the silly. If you’re anything like me, your Twitter and Facebook newsfeeds are continuously populated with link sharing from friends (and them adding their own commentary, which is always logical). Here are some of the most common serious and silly links shared among my friends this week. What was shared most in your feeds? The Serious Obama joins FourSquare President Obama becomes one of the most high-profile people