Should brand owners appoint WOM managers?

March 25, 2009 – 2:24 pm

One of the many questions asked at this morning’s WOMUK Espresso briefing was were there any signs of brands appointing social media managers?

I remember back in the day (well, about 2004) being asked by AOL if I knew of any potential candidates for a WOM Media Manager role they were creating. But I didn’t. And I’m not sure if they ever got around to creating, let alone fulfilling the post.

These days the professional social media network posts seemed to be buzzing with ads for social media strategists, managers and consultants. But I’ve yet to encounter a major brand which has made an appointment.

Hopefully it’s only a matter of time.

Internal stake-holders  are critical to the successful adoption and convergence of social media strategies and traditional marketing techniques. They’ll help develop much-needed processes, drive culture change and act as knowledge-centres for the rest of their organisation.

Let us know if you’ve got the skinny on traditional marketing brands who are already ahead of this curve (we promise not to cold call them).

Ix

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Wildfire hosts WOMUK Breakfast Espresso Briefing

March 25, 2009 – 11:55 am

This morning saw Wildfire host a WOMUK breakfast briefing session in which Ivan talked about using alternative media in a recession and the implications for marketers of trying to participate in the Social Media space.

Caroline from Happen also gave a short presentation on how her company is using community spaces to harness consumer innovation and enable organisations to co-create with their lead users.

After the presentations we had a short Q&A session led by Steve from WOMUK which revolved around two key threads – what organisational & infrastructure changes are necessary for companies to be in a position to embrace social media and what are the key metrics to apply to social media when planning and executing campaigns (if “The Campaign” is even a concept we can work with in this space). Molly from 1000 Heads and Ivan had plenty of input, particularly on the latter point. Happily Metrics & Measurement will be the theme of the next WOMUK Espresso briefing – details will be posted on the WOMUK website soon.

This morning’s presentation is available on slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/wildfirewom/alt-media-womuk-presentation

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Baby Boomers adopting Social Networks & Blogs

March 25, 2009 – 8:29 am

It seems that Baby Boomers really are booming in the social network space. Whilst GEN Y’ers are generally considered to be the hardcore users of social networks a new report from Accenture shows that older users are now adopting at a rapid pace.

Some standout stats from the report:

the percentage of boomers reading blogs or listening to podcasts grew to 28 percent from 18 percent, while the percentage of Gen Y doing so remained flat at 45 percent;

the percentage of boomers watching and posting of videos on the Internet grew to 36 percent from 26 percent, while the percentage of Gen Y doing so dropped 2 percent; and

the percentage of boomers using social-networking sites grew to 28 percent from 18 percent, while the percentage of Gen Y doing so rose to 82 percent from 80 percent.

Read More:

http://www.micropersuasion.com/2009/03/social-networking-demographics.html

http://www.twice.com/article/CA6645564.html?desc=topstory

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ExecTweets.com

March 24, 2009 – 9:57 pm

Here’s an interesting little aggregation site that Microsoft are running for a current campaign – http://www.exectweets.com. Seems like it pulls in tweets from high ranking execs around the world and aggregates them for the community to see. You can recommend an exec and have a browse at tweets by industry.

Jeremiah Owyang has a post about it which is worth a read.

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Next Generation Social Marketing

March 24, 2009 – 2:52 pm

We saw this posted on Slideshare – a good overview of social marketing tools and trends:

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The ROI of Social Media Marketing

March 24, 2009 – 2:06 pm

Here’s an interesting article posted on The ROI of Social Media Marketing (http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006989) based around a report produced by The Aberdeen Group and sponsored by Visible Technologies.

Seems like more and more companies are entering the space but the thorny subject of measurement still remains. Whilst it’s interesting to see the tactics marketers are engaging in to enter the space perhaps the most encouraging thing is that many companies are looking for ways to engage in online conversation with their customers and consumers.

Thanks to @WOMMA for the tweet that pointed us in the report’s direction…

By wildfirewom | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Hello world!

March 11, 2009 – 5:42 pm

Welcome to Wildfire’s mouthpiece.

We will be posting all sorts of thoughts, facts, conundrums and musings on Social Media and Word of Mouth marketing.

Lot’s more to come…so stay tuned!

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