What a dilemma! You are asked to reduce budget, cut costs, reduce expenses. However, you need your BEST to gain market share, compete for customer dollars and emerge from the recession as a winner. You need the best employees, technology, service, partners, vendors, and agencies so you can outsmart and out-execute competition. You need the best to drive demand when marketing rules are being reinvented by customer conversations. You need the best because, more than ever befor

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 I also have this unpublished book of 193 Clever marketing ideas … I’m not going to do anything with it, so I posted it to Scribd for people to read for free.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

Take a look at this new compilation video of the last WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) event in Las Vegas. #UnitedStates #Counties #wordofmouth #WordofMouthMarketingAssociation #MarketingandAdvertising #Miami #Business #wommu #WOMMA

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

I haven’t kept up the pace of posts here compared to previous years. Part of this is because it’s been an exciting, busy year. But the other cause is my writing time is fractured between this Decker Marketing blog, our company blog (Bazaarblog) and writing other articles / columns. So, I thought I’d point you to articles I wrote elsewhere over the past year or so that you might find interesting… Some of my columns on iMedia Connection: The Big Idea Behind Social Commerce How

At this year’s Word of Mouth Marketing Association Summit (WOMMA) on November 14/15 in Las Vegas, one of the topics will be “who owns word of mouth?” Is it one person in PR or advertising? Product development? Someone on the web team? In some companies it’s someone in PR, who is responsible for blogger relations. But in my opinion, that’s a tiny fraction of word of mouth on a typical fortune 500 brand. In some companies, as it was at Dell, the word of mouth ‘owner’ was someon