Marketers are usually challenged to justify word of mouth social media marketing programs to the finance department. With economic challenges ahead, your job doesn’t get easier. As someone who’s focuses on both creative and measurement, and as Interim CFO at Bazaarvoice, I started thinking more about the question of what marketers need to sell CFOs on the social marketing opportunity. Ultimately everything comes down to the bottom line – drive revenue, margin or costs down –

I hear the word "community" from many marketing managers these days. I hear it so often it would seem every business should strive to have a community. As if community is becoming a common business objective or goal. While the concept of community — and assumed relationship to WOM and customer loyalty — is attractive, the realized business impact of community is a far reach for most companies. I launched a community of baby boomers back in '97. Chat and forums made Thirdage.c

Sean Moffitt at Agent Wildfire, author of blog Buzz Canuck, just published a list of top 23 U.S. Word of Mouth bloggers. As described by Sean… "…these broad-minded bloggers and company heads have distinguished themselves by trying to understand how ideas spread, online and offline, through a range of different strategies and tactics. In my opinion, they are much closer to the purpose and benefits of web 2.0, co-creation, social networks and other web, cultural and social

A few weeks ago I was on an Austin Technology Council panel for the topic of Guerilla Marketing (YouTube Videos here). I’ve always loved Guerrilla marketing, and wrote a book on Guerrilla and Word of Mouth Marketing in 1997 with foreword from Jay Conrad Levinson, the "father" of Guerilla Marketing. I also have this unpublished book of 193 Clever marketing ideas … I’m not going to do anything with it, so I posted it to Scribd for people to read for free. I made a few notes to

This year the Word of Mouth Marketing Association is doing something completely different (disclosure: I’m on the board). It will be WOMM-U (Word of Mouth Marketing University), the first training-based conference full of case studies, operational cookbooks, and practical advice to make Word of Mouth Marketing work in your organization. The tracks will include topics on Managing a blog program Activating WOM in Social Networks Building a Sustained WOM Program Measurement: Th

This morning I got a research brief from Mediapost summarizing the findings from the Marketing Effectiveness Networking Group (MENG) and Anderson Aanlytics study. This study surveyed marketing executives to identify key trends and strategies of effective marketing. The subject line of the email said: "Marketing Execs Say Basics Are Most Important in 2008". By "basics" I thought they meant strategies such as becoming measurement-oriented, shifting ad portfolio, investing in em