Good question.

I probably think of social media in the same way you do.  Something along the lines of “the sharing of real thoughts, ideas and questions questions via online platforms like blogs, Twitter and Facebook.”  The executive that I was talking to considered all word-of-mouth to be part of social media.  Their point was, “consumers are talking, that’s social isn’t it?”

Yup, it sure is.  So IS word-of-mouth social media?  Or is social media word of mouth.

In my opinion, yes and yes.

In this age, for either to be effective they need to work together.  There are so many conversations happening online that if your word-of-mouth isn’t making it’s way into the social media space, it’s probably not working.  And if your online social media initiative isn’t jumping over to the real world, it’s probably not resulting in sales.

WOM/social media, it’s one and the same to me.

And by the way, it’s also a good idea to make sure everyone on your team is aligned to all of the buzz words everyone is throwing around the office.

The percentage of people who claim to help a friend make a purchasing decision didn’t surprise me.  In fact, I might have thought it would be higher – and that’s saying something considering how much I believe in the power of word-of-mouth marketing.  But I was really surprised on these stats

• One out of five people contribute to a forum
• One out of five people attend offline events with people of a similar interest – Like a Tweetup.
• 40% of people actively share information they find online

Just more reason to find your influencers, build a relationship with them and empower them to spread the word.

The emarketer piece also has some information on which age demos are more active in sharing information.

Do you rent or do you own your marketing?

A traditional, media driven strategy is like renting.  Smaller upfront investment and less risky.  If something goes wrong, you call the landlord and they fix it.  But the problem is that you never own it.  You gotta keep paying “rent” (buying media) to stay in the game.

But a word-of-mouth strategy is a lot like buying and owning a home.  It’s bigger upfront investment and if something goes wrong, you own it and have to fix it.  But over time, you build equity in your home and your investment pays off.  Word-of-mouth is very similar.  Over time, the consumers start talking about your brand and you don’t have to keep paying rent to maintain awareness and improve image.

The big question is whether you have the patience for that investment to pay off.

If you weren’t able attend, take a stroll through this slideshare deck and soak in all of the big thinking that was going on.

But this  potentially awkward story has turned into a beautiful word-of-mouth opportunity for the company.  And the best part is that they’re not even doing anything to facilitate this – at least that’s visible to me.

A couple ad agencies, namely Forza Migliozzi have launched a website called buyabeercompany.com and are accepting fake donations to round-up the $300 million the experts expect to be the selling price.

People can “pledge” money to the account and the website will keep a running tally of how much “the people” have pulled together to buy the company.

This seems to keep happening for Pabst?  Going back to my time with the company, we seemed to get a boost of organic PR every couple of months.  Remember the PBR fraternity at Oregon State?  What about the PBR casket? Why does Pabst get so much organic PR?

I call it PR karma… when it comes to publicity, you make your own luck.  The modern day PBR (and consequently, Pabst Brewing Company) is a brand that’s built on word-of-mouth marketing, which in turn, is street cred.  Consumers flat-out love the brand and are attracted to interact with it.  The results are interesting stories that are created by real people – and that’s the best kind isn’t it?

But it got me thinking…

Maybe it’s because the most popular topic on Twitter is Twitter and blogs tend to talk about other blogs more than anything else – but it seems like everyone is forgetting about the old-fashioned and less cutting edge part of word of mouth marketing: offline.

For all of your online word of mouth building efforts to truly work, it almost always has to go offline.  That’s why I find it so interesting that everyone is jumping into the social media game head first.  For every 100 social media marketing experts, how many offline, word of mouth experts is there.  I can think of a few, but not many.

A few questions and things to think about:

• If you’re focused on building relationships online, what are you doing to engage consumers offline?
• If you have an agency to manage your online community, do you have one to manage the offline?
• Do your online conversations include a call for offline action?
• 71% of “word of mouth” conversations happen face to face (source: Fizz, TalkTrack/Keller Fay Group 2006)

The person I was talking to said, “I don’t think you want people stalking the brand.”  I’m not sure I’ve ever disagreed with a statement more in my life.

Brand Stalkers is EXACTLY what we (and any marketers, for that matter) want.  To me, stalking is the next level up from brand loyalty.  I LOVE our stalkers!

Brand Stalkers are:

• Consumers that are extremely engaged in all of your brand’s activities conversations, innovations.
• They’re opinionated and involved.
• They’re emotional about your brand.
• They obsess about your brand.
• They talk and recommend your brand.
• They congratulate you when you do something good and they let you know when you do something bad.
• They care.

So I want to thank that person for helping me better understand #1 objective as a marketer: attracting stalkers.

SwomFest was different than any other marketing conference I’ve attended.

• They started off the day with a live dance troop performing the Thriller dance.  Zombie costumes and everything.  Click here for a video sample.
• They kept everything fun.  Extended breaks to keep everyone fresh. A DJ spinning music to keep the atmosphere upbeat and BEER at lunch and in the afternoon. (Full disclosure, Flying Dog Brewery was a sponsor of SwomFest and provided the beer.)
• The content flow was well thought out and made sense.  I’ve been to too many conferences where is was a hodge-podge of case studies without any flow.

The general flow of the day went like this:

• Ben McConnell started off the day talking about WOM and why it’s more impactful than other forms of advertising.  Good presentation, but he was preaching to the choir.
• Next, Haley Rushing of GSD&M (Austin Ad Agency) talked about discovering and developing your brand’s purpose.  Haley did a great job of articulating how a “mission statement” has been bastardized into something that isn’t meaningful to employees or consumers.  Her biggest example was Southwest Airlines (GSD&M client) and how their purpose is “Giving People the Freedom to Fly”.  Here is a video of Haley talking about a brand’s “purpose”.
• The highlight of the day was Yaphet Smith.  Yaphet is an interesting guy: He’s a CPA and attorney, but makes a living as a screenwriter.  He gave example after example of how to tell great stories and how important it is for a brand to communicate its story to consumers for the purpose of building WOM.
• In the afternoon, there were a variety of presentations, but the most interesting part to me was Dell’s Sean McDonald talking about WOM/Customer Response/Social Media in a big company.  My big takeaways from his talk were:

1. Every conversation counts.  (Earlier in the day, we talked about how 1% of the consumers influence others to purchase)
2. The responsibility of having on and offline conversations with your consumers goes all the way up the line of the organization.
3. If social media isn’t understood or accepted in your organization – screw ‘em and just start doing it.

I don’t know if there will be another SwomFest, but if there is, I would highly recommend attending.  Smart people, smart presentations and best of all, it’s fun.

I’ll be following up on SwomFest a little more later this week with some action items I came up with for my brand.

I’m looking forward to this for a couple reasons:
1. This will actually be a fun conference. Most of the conferences I’ve been to recently have been real snoozers.  They say this one will focus on integrating word of mouth into the “DNA” of your brand.  In my terminology, that’s what I call creating something that “You Can’t Buy”.
2. Flying Dog is sponsoring. And no, we’re not just slapping our logo on the event banner, we’re actually providing beer for the pre-party and during the event.
3. It’s in Austin and I’m heading to the Broken Spoke.

clipped from www.cobrandit.com Watch Video

Why the change?

First off, I never really liked the last name (Blg Slice of Awesome) since it was relatively meaningless.  Second, it occurred to me last week that the best marketing is the kind that you can’t buy.  In fact, you hear people say “You can’t buy that that kind of marketing!” when they see a brand truly connecting with consumers.

• You CAN buy advertising (that’s why they call it an “advertising/media buy”) – but if you’re here reading my blog, you probably know that advertising old school thinking.
• You can’t buy product innovation that captures consumer attention and imagination.
• You can’t buy passionate consumers who recommend your brand, product or service to their friends.
• You can’t buy meaningful interactions and conversations with consumers that educate them on your brand’s folklore or functional benefits.

Of course you can spend money to facilitate these “priceless” opportunities, but you can’t flat out buy them.

So this blog will focus on the idea of the best marketing tactics being the ones you can’t buy.  Sure, I’ll have some other odds and ends here and there, but my focus will be on the ideas that connect with consumers in a personal way.

If you have an examples or ideas for marketing program that ar better than anything you can buy, email me at: nealdstewart (at) yahoo dot com.