Influential Marketing Blog

7 Ways To Publish A Book For Marketing

I love books. Not just for the power of conveying an idea through a printed form, but also for the emotional significance of actually holding a book in your hands. More and more recently I have been books become a brilliant marketing tool for everyone, from political candidates to technology companies. Along the way, there are several ideas that I have collected for how using a book could be an effective part of a marketing strategy. Here are a few:

1. Explain a complex idea - Some businesses or product lines are based on something complex that is not easily understood. One example of using a book to explain a concept like this was a book Microsoft was handing out earlier this year at CES about their Windows Home Server product. It was called "Mommy, Why Is There a Server in the House?" and took a kids book approach to explaining why anyone would want a server in their home.
2. Commission an existing author or writer - This can be a great way to build on an existing author's profile and audience by working with him or her to commission a new piece. Hilton Hotels used this strategy as part of their Olympic marketing effort when they commissioned an award-winning kids author named Todd Parr to create a new book for them around their marketing tagline "Be Hospitable." Johnson & Johnson used a similar strategy back in 2002 with Understanding Children, a book they supported the creation of from Richard Saul Wurman (well known author and creator of the TED conference).
3. Partner with a "co-author" - There are two types of situations to use a co-author - the first is if you are actually a team and share similar ideas that you want to publish together. The second is to get someone who will do the actual writing while you help to provide direction and content. This second method is the one usually preferred by politician or famous person when they get a writer to help them create a "tell-all" biography of their lives.
4. Offer a book template - Though in a very different category, the Disease Control Priorities Project has an interesting way of distributing their content in a book form. You can go online, select various chapters from a group of publications and create your own book. The model of offering a template and letting people assemble their own books with your branding/message integrated is one that could work in many other industries.
5. Commemorate an experience - Art galleries use this technique often, creating limited edition books that commemorate their exhibits and the artwork contained in them. They work well because the art is so visual and many of these exhibits can be gatherings of work that will be dispersed after the exhibit and never again brought together - so the book seems very archival and worthwhile.
6. Organize a collaboration - There are some great examples of this technique - from Seth Godin's The Big Moo collaborative book a few years ago, to the Age of Conversation parts 1 and 2 (Disclaimer - I am a contributing author to Part II) which gathered together lots of contributors and invited them to write on a related theme to bring all these pieces together into a book. The resulting publication is often something that has built in marketing support as all the contributors will promote it to their networks.
7. Sponsor a branded printing - This may be the simplest way to use a book for marketing as you are basically using a book that has already been published which aligns to your product or brand in some way and reprinting a branded edition. Pretty much any book ever published can be reprinted in a branded version, usually with a new custom foreword or different cover depending on the number of units purchased.

The Real Secret To Apple's Success

At some point just about every marketer is bound to look at something that Apple is doing and wish they could have done it for their own brands. There are a few other brands that have this universal admiration from marketers. Coca-Cola is the other notable example that comes to mind. Yet there is a temptation I have noticed to simplify the success of Apple to two things: innovative products and great marketing. I would love to believe this as much as any other marketer, but there is a crucial missing third element that most people never talk about which I think is actually the most important reason Apple has been so successful. They do one thing that almost none of their competitors in any market can do ... they control distribution.

They have their own stores, their own sales people, and their own model for selling their products that cuts out any middleman or competitors completely. The fact that they control distribution offers many benefits:

1. Consistency of messaging - As opposed to other consumer electronics brands that must educate sales people who work for someone else, Apple can control their sales force and the messages that they learn to talk about. As a result, everyone tells the same story about their products.
2. Removes the competition at point of sale - A big issue for many of their competitors is that a customer may come into a store with one product in mind, but can often get steered toward another during the time they are in store. Often they will walk out not with the product they intended to buy, but something that was cheaper, recommended more heavily by the sales staff, or (most frustratingly) another product whose packaging simply was more appealing.
3. Makes upselling easier - When you walk into an Apple store, everything is Apple branded in some way (even the products manufactured by other companies). As a result, you are in the ultimate upselling situation, where you might pay $45 for a connector cable that would ordinarily cost $5 elsewhere. When you are captive in the store and already spending $499 on a big product, who really cares about another $45, right?
4. Retail environment reinforces the community - Apple fans are enthusiastic about the brand and products that they love. Because Apple has distribution focused on their stores, they can create events, features and resources that all reinforce this community. From the Genius Bars to special events hosted at Apple stores, this offers an invaluable marketing asset that few of their competitors can match.
5. Pricing is controlled - It is virtually impossible to find huge discounts on Apple products (particularly new ones). This is another effect of this controlled distribution, that if you are setting the places people buy your products, you can also centrally control the price. Not only does this allow for more consistency, it also gives you the ability to include pricing in your marketing materials and ads because you know its the same price everywhere.

The Great #080808 Beijing Olympic Twitter Campaign Catches Fire

Anyone who has been to enough events with social media creators knows that it is inevitable that people will find a way to connect and find one another. To a degree, Twitter first caught on from this need a year and a half ago at SXSW in 2007. I have witnessed it over and over, through examples like attendees of four conferences finding one another to share an evening of Korean BBQ in NYC a few months ago, or finding someone to hang out with as you are travelling to a foreign city for business. Social media creators are not just creating content, they are becoming experts at connecting with one another.

So I wasn't surprised to see that the tag 080808 is catching on as a way for all of us in Beijing at the Olympics to find and connect with one another. Started by three Chinese bloggers (Flypig, Webleon and Babechloe) and described on http://tag080808.com/, this campaign is already bringing together not just everyone here in Beijing who is creating social media content, but is also becoming a brilliant way to follow all these live voices of the Games in a real time stream. As the Olympics kicks off tonight, this tag and the resulting conversations on Twitter will accelerate dramatically. For my part, I have already started tagging my content with this and will soon revise my Twitter icon to use the 080808 template created for the campaign (the image below is a compilation of current icons from a post about the campaign on Read Write Web).

In addition, I just sent out a Tweet about a blogger meetup that will be sponsored by Ogilvy and Lenovo where we can try to get some of the many diverse bloggers here in Beijing together for a drink and chat. If you happen to be here, send me a message at @rohitbhargava and let me know if you can make it to The Bookworm in downtown Beijing on Sunday, August 10th at 7pm. And even if you're not in Beijing, you'll want to start using this tag to find the best content and impressions from social media creators here at the Games. This is a case study in the making ...

Official Image from the Tag080808 Site:

The Rise of "Egommunication"

There is a magic power that a growing number of people are starting to have. It's happening all around us with social media and yet most of the time it is going without notice. I can now communicate with someone without communicating with them. I can tell them something without talking to them. And I can virtually guarantee that my message gets through to them no matter how flooded their inbox. Welcome to the world of something I would call egommunication.

Egommunication is a form of communication where you can share a message or piece of content with someone based on their own consistent habit of checking mentions of themselves and their content online ... in other words, relying on their ego as a channel for your message to get through. It is a tacit form of communication. In effect, you take advantage of the fact that just about everyone in social media is self-googling on a frequent basis.

Here are a few examples of what I would call egommunication:

1. Tagging someone in a photo, note or other content on Facebook so they will go and check out that content
2. Writing a blog post mentioning someone's blog post and counting on the fact that they will check their Google alerts to see that mention
3. Writing a tweet on twitter mentioning someone or something so that you can reach the audience of people that are doing searches for those terms

The nicest thing about egommunication is that the more popular the person you are trying to reach, the more likely it is that this form of communication will work because they often have the biggest egos (and I don't mean that in a negative way). It's the only communication form I can think of where ease of connection is inversely proportional to the internet fame of the person you are trying to connect with. Think Guy Kawasaki is unreachable? Send a tweet mentioning his name and see what happens. Dream of capturing the attention of Robert Scoble? Write a blog post mentioning him and link to his blog. Of course, it's not a substitute for direct communication and any of the examples above are people you could also email. 

Yet as volume of email goes up for us all, sometimes egommunication becomes a much more efficient way to communicate. Instead of emailing Guy and Robert about this post, I'm linking to both of their blogs - as well as Jeremiah Owyang, John Bell, Ann Handley, David Vinjamuri, Andy Sernovitz, Virginia Miracle and Doc Searls (all people I respect that I want to read this post and possibly comment on the idea).  I suspect it won't take any of them long to see this post and read it. They may or may not comment, but I'm just about 100% sure that the idea of egommunication won't be lost in their inbox ... and at the end of the day, that's a really interesting phenomenon to watch.

Lenovo Extends The Olympic Experience With 100 Athlete Blogs

For any die-hard Olympic enthusiasts like me, you already know that today is a special day. It's exactly one month from the beginning of the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing (on 08/08/08) and media attention is already starting to turn towards these Games in a more frenzied way. For several months now, I have been part of the team here in Ogilvy's 360 Digital Influence group working on what I believe will be one of the most unique Olympic sponsorships of the coming games. Of course, I'm biased since I work on the campaign, but yesterday we started to spread the word about a new campaign that I have mentioned already once before on this blog.

The campaign is called The Voices of the Olympic Games and over the past several months we have recruited 100 athletes from more than 25 countries and more than 30 sports to all blog about their experiences leading up to the games. Our campaign strategy, in a sentence is:

Use Lenovo products to power athletes sharing their real experiences leading up to and during the Olympic Games directly with fans around the world.

There are several reasons why I'm really excited about this campaign. The most obvious is that as part of it, I will be heading to Beijing to offer a live voice - something I can't wait to do. More than that, however, the scale of this project and bringing this many real voices together from so many different cultures and sports is a much needed view of the Games that will be unique in its lack of melodrama.  None of our blog posts will be set to sappy overture-style music, and the stories we have are all an unfiltered view directly from the athletes that are competing. 

Along with our site aggregating all these voices at http://summergames.lenovo.com, we are also going to be using a live Twitter feed (@lenovo2008), Flickr, del.ici.ous, and there is a Facebook application created in partnership with Citizen Sports that has already topped 60,000 downloads. I'll be blogging lots more about the Olympics, but for now please check out our site and let me know what you think. We've got another month to put the finishing touches on it before Opening Ceremonies!

Campaign Mentions & Buzz (leave a comment if you'd like to be added to this list):

• Kevin Dugan: http://prblog.typepad.com/strategic_public_relation/2008/07/social-media-br.html
• Adrants: http://www.adrants.com/2008/07/ogilvy-er-lenovo-blogs-and-tweets.php
• MarketingVox: http://www.marketingvox.com/39699-039699/
• Kyle Flaherty: http://www.engageinpr.com/2008/07/08/olympics-and-social-media/

Fly Derrie-Air Proves Newspaper Advertising Still Works (Sort Of)

A few weeks ago the Philadelphia Inquirer and a few other local papers in the Philly area launched a very interesting mock advertising campaign for a new airline called "Derrie-Air" which was proposing the revolutionary new business model of charging air passengers based on the combined weight of their luggage and themselves. The site describes what makes Derrie-Air unique: "the magic comes from our one of a kind "Sliding Scale" the more you weigh, the more you'll pay."

We've all been in situations where we could imagine the logic of having a policy like that, but it turns out the campaign was a joke that ordinary consumers could pass along to others, and one from which the newspaper could collect valuable metrics from. The problem with the campaign is that it takes exactly the kind of one sided view the doesn't work anymore. For example, the newspaper ad drove a group of people online from the Philly area, and those people likely emailed the site to friends or blogged about it. Other sites picked up on the campaign and decided to also feature it. I learned about from an email - and found coverage on several advertising and marketing blogs already about it.  If you are reading this now and hadn't heard of the campaign, you just learned about it from a blog.

I am sure the site got great traffic and the Philadelphia Inquirer and the other papers behind it reported these fantastic metrics to advertisers in order to get more of them to buy into the paper. I think real lesson here, however, is that no matter which channel you choose to promote in, they will all be interconnected. For this campaign, newspaper provided the initial surge in traffic, however anything after that would have to be attributed to word of mouth, either online or offline. The irony is that inadvertently, the campaign probably proved how interconnected media really is ... and how clueless some advertisers really are if they believe a pitch that tells them all the visits to this mock site can just be attributed to a few newspaper ads.

Inside Lenovo's Olympic Blogging Program

This past week in the string of posts about the book coming out, I've been stockpiling ideas for "real" blog posts and wanting to write about them more and more. Thankfully now that I launched the Personality Matters blog, I will post most of the updates about the book there and refocus on marketing strategy and insights here. I can't promise I won't share the occasional post about the book ... but I know that you're giving me your time to read this blog because you want marketing ideas and you want lots of them. So this post is about one I'm particularly excited about.

The Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence team recently finalized the details to take the lead on what I would have to call my dream project. Those who know me know that I am what you might call a full on Olympic enthusiast. I went to college in Atlanta and was there for the 1996 Olympics. I moved to Sydney in 1998 and lived there during the Sydney Olympics, and my first son was born right in the middle of the Athens Olympics (during the women's marathon, ironically). So I've been there and seen it, and more importantly, I think it is a world stage that nothing else even comes close to.

Which brings me to this very ambitious project that we are helping Lenovo with. David Churbuck, our main client, posted about the idea behind the project on his blog and it is a brilliant summary of a big vision that Lenovo and David himself has for this project. Here it is in a nutshell:

The Problem: Media coverage of the Olympics has become about melodrama that is broadcasted as "real" stories. But those producers only choose the athletes who have overcome quadruple knee surgery and the lack of a college degree to become a world champion ... in other words, the extreme stories.

The Insight: What about the real athletes who spend every day training and working hard just to get to the Olympics whether they have a shot of winning or not?  Their voices could be the most powerful and this Olympics more than any other promises to offer the chance for them to do that.

The Project: We are seeking 100 potential Olympic athletes from around the world to all start and maintain a blog all about their experience leading up to and during the Games. In return, Lenovo is offering all participants the chance to use a new IdeaPad laptop for their blogging and help from our team to set up and maintain their blogs. 

This is a big project on a scale that is completely global, multi-lingual and very ambitious. Lenovo, to their credit, are not content to sit back with their sponsorship of the Olympic Torch Relay and Olympic Village (already considerable efforts) and call it a job well done.  If this is the year for Olympics 2.0, this program should be one of the best examples of it. Our main goal right now is finding Olympic athletes, so if you know any (or you happen to be one), please get in touch with myself rohit [dot] bhargava [at] ogilvypr.com or David.

Notes From the Twitterbowl: The Top 3 Strategic Super Bowl Ads

Last night during the big game, I joined a large group of marketing and social media types to share some live thoughts about the Super Bowl ads through Twitter (sending them to the @superbowlads user account).  The aptly named "Twitterbowl" consisted of lots of folks live rating ads and sharing some feedback about the ads live during the game.  Voting on ads in real time is nothing new ... however doing it and reading the thoughts of my other contacts during the game was an interesting way to experience the ads.  Though I would have expected a more sophisticated commentary from the group as a whole, being marketing people and all.  Many folks seemed to just be rating ads on entertainment value as opposed to whether or not the message actually made sense for the brand, but it was still a fun experience as part of the game.

Aside from realizing that people can really have completely opposite views of what makes a successful Superbowl ad, it was also clear that all of us love to have our opinions.  Everyone decides what is most entertaining for them, but since this is a marketing blog, I'm going to go with my own top 3 Super Bowl ad list based on strategic value for the brand.  So, here is my list of the top three 3 strategic ads that were creative, engaging, messaged properly and could actually have a real impact in terms of sales (and only one of them made the USAToday Top 10 popular ads list):

1. Tide "My Talking Stain":  This spot was easily relatable (everyone has had that stain they couldn't do anything about), funny, and generated awareness for an under appreciated product  In the Twitterbowl, most folks loved it, and it will easily have the recall when anyone is walking the grocery market aisles and sees it.  The only downside?  The word in the Twitterbowl was that their marketing site (www.mytalkingstain.com) went down under all the traffic.
   
2. Under Armour "Under Army":  Any company that is number 3 in a competitive industry has perhaps the most to gain from a Super Bowl ad because it positions them on equal footing with the other two.  For Under Armour, this meant taking the reigns from Nike and Adidas with their "Under Army" spot, which they did brilliantly.  Not to mention it was one of the rare Super Bowl ads that (gasp!) has something to do with football.  Ironically, it wasn't popular in the Twitterbowl - but for the masses and Under Armour's target audience, I think it was spot on.
3. Audi "Godfather": Audi's spot was a big deal in marketing circles before the Super Bowl even aired because it represented a rare entry from Audi into the Super Bowl mix.  The ad itself was a brilliant parody of the Godfather that positioned the new __________ as the ultimate in new luxury.  Anyone want to bet what percentage of the boomer males watching the game were picturing themselves in that car?

Of course, I am tough on these ads because I am putting the often forgotten lens of strategic value over deciding what was a good creative execution.  If we just looked at entertainment value, which I am sure lots of polls are doing today, the winners were probably a few of the Bud ads and the Pepsi Night at the Roxbury spoof.  Worst ads?  They have to be the Gatorade/Vitamin Water/Sobe combos (seriously, can anyone tell them apart?), the CareerBuilder nasty exploding heart ad (they should have stuck with the monkeys), and the singing Comcast ads (which, thankfully, most of the country probably didn't see).  Big props to Dell and Lionel also, for being the only advertiser (that I could tell) to actually be part of the Twitterbowl. 

Oh, and it was a great game to watch too ... congrats to Giants fans everywhere.  If it can't be the Redskins, it might as well be the Giants doing the NFC East proud.

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Announcing The Ultimate Marketing Bookstore

Several months ago I participated in the LitLiberation Blogger Challenge launched by my friend Tim Ferriss to try and raise money for DonorsChoose.org (a site which allows teachers to submit funding proposals to ask for help doing something they don't normally get the funding for).  Around the same time, I started playing around with Amazon Affiliate links and made more than ten bucks on links by just using a few links on several blog posts.  That's only a small amount of money, but it got me thinking about the potential of using an affiliate program to generate money for charity in the marketing world.  Over the time that I was away from blogging, one of my side projects was to start contacting several influential people to see if they would be willing to participate in a new kind of bookstore - which I called The Ultimate Marketing Bookstore.  Today I am launching it (although I will resist the temptation to call it a "Beta launch").  Here's how I described the purpose of the site and what makes it different:

This site is different because it features all the reading lists of marketers that you already know and respect in one place.  From CEOs to marketing directors to top marketing bloggers - The Ultimate Marketing Bookstore lets you see and shop from all their reading lists ... and all for a good cause.

The way most of us find out about great marketing books is the same way that we learn about great products ... through recommendations from people we trust.  Most online bookstores are just categories of books selected by one or two people.  They are great if you trust those people, but they are not comprehensive. 

As I describe above, all the proceeds from affiliate commissions that this site generates will be donated to DonorsChoose.org on a monthly basis and I plan to try and spread the word in the marketing community about this new bookstore and will be adding new names on a weekly basis.  Here are a few reasons why I think this idea can work:

1. Collects a central hub of reading lists from marketers that are currently widely distributed online. 
2. Encourages marketers who are not sharing their reading lists to do so in an easy way.
3. Makes great marketing books easier to find and buy.
4. Creates a community of marketing book readers and allows them to contribute to a good cause
5. Offers a platform for new marketing books to get promoted to an interested audience

That's the initial idea, but I'd love to hear some feedback on what you think could make it better.  I am still reaching out to marketers to add their book lists, so stay tuned in the next few weeks as I will likely be adding lots more names to this list, and I plan to publish updates with money raised and associate this bookstore with a challenge on DonorsChoose.org so the amount raised (and what the dollars are being spent on) is highly visible.  Blog badges and other tools to promote the site are in the works as well.  Any other suggestions?

Note: A big thank you to all the people who responded to my LinkedIn question about which charity could be the best to support for this.  DonorsChoose.org was the most popular suggestion.

Guest Post: Is Word of Mouth a Discipline or Just a Channel?

by John Bell

Rohit has invited a handful of folks to post on his blog while he manages his true key influencers - family (including the newest member!). It only seems fitting that each of us post on what we care about most. In my case, that's word of mouth marketing.

My team uses digital marketing, social media and traditional strategy to amplify and activate word of mouth all to support our clients business objectives. While I love social media and it is a part of all of our work and personal digital lives, I must frame it as a set of techniques, methodologies and behavior geared towards motivating people to share, participate and even recommend products and services to their circle of friends, colleagues and family - their affinity groups. Why "must" I? At the end of the day, we have to measure. Social media is not a measurable unit. WOM is. To make WOM a reliable approach to marketing, it must be measured in a way that CMOs, Communications Officers and CEOs, can report its effectiveness to reaching their business goal. WOM can be measured and reported today. We do it. BzzAgent does it. Visible Technologies does it. In the near future, an industry standard for that measurement will arise. Social media drives WOM.   

I am fresh back from the Word of Mouth Marketing Summit 2007 in Vegas. I serve on the board of the organization so take any endorsements for the organization with that in mind. The quality of the experience was up there: good speakers, topics, brands, solid debate, some news. It reminded me of why I joined the organization. Still it wasn't perfect. But that's okay. I enjoy the naive enthusiasm we all have for creating a new discipline based upon the tenants of two-way conversation with people, authentic relationships and the value of advocates (or "promoters" in the Net Promoter Score framework).

Problem is - are we a discipline? An expertise? Or just another channel? Having spent last week with about 500 people from brands, agencies and start-ups who think word of mouth is important enough to travel to Vegas during the final budget-clampdown quarter of the year, here's some points to consider:

Discipline or channel?
Discipline: Word of mouth marketing takes belief (based on understanding and knowledge) and discipline. There are no shortcuts. As Sean Driscoll from Microsoft points out , there is a 'right model' and a 'wrong model' of influencer marketing (which I interpret as a part of word of mouth marketing). The wrong model suggests that I can just tell people about the wonder of my brand and they will yak about it. The right model assumes a truly engaged conversation model where we listen as much as we talk. To do things "right" in Sean's vernacular, it is very hard to just tack on some WOM-stuff to a large traditional marketing campaign and expect significant results. Like any discipline, word of mouth marketing requires certain procedures and conditions to succeed.

Channel: The media buying companies and some advertising agencies want to see WOM as a channel. They deal in channels. They want to fill up on the 360 degrees of our lives reaching us at home, at play, at work. They want a new channel to deliver messages. Preferably one that is as predictable as other channels ("if I spend $1 more on WOM it will deliver X"). That's why BzzAgent's current configuration has been so successful with media agencies. they can just buy 6000 agents in three markets for 12 weeks. Feels like media. While the agents will talk about the product, this is not two-way conversation. And the brand is renting those agents not building a long-term relationship. Still, it is a form of word of mouth.

Discipline: To deliver on the promise of social media, word of mouth marketing, influencer marketing, conversation marketing - whatever part of WOM you want to emphasize - we need a simple, shared approach to measurement that compares well to what brand managers are used to. Yes, that probably means some sort of ad equivalency. That approach - comparing to advertising - may be a trap. Look what happened to public relations. In most cases PR reports media "hits" as equal to ad impressions. Shouldn't they be valued far north of simple paid impressions? And WOM, shouldn't that be like 10X and ad impression (with a true "recommendation" even north of that)? WOMMA and other groups are working on an industry standard for measuring WOM. I think we will have a solid model in 2008 that will be a tipping point for the discipline.

Channel: Many ad-based marketers see viral video as the answer to their WOM aspirations. If they can just get enough views of a video, it starts to feel like traditional media. And if the mechanism for accummulating those views is people sharing and recommending amongst their friends then that, my friend, is social media. Within the Ogilvy family, we have the ultimate accomplishment/curse: the Dove Evolution video. With millions of views under its belt, it really deserves to be the poster child for viral video. Because those views grew from people recommending it to others, it is more valuable than TV impressions (pull vs. push) BUT, it is one dimensional and doesn't fully utilize what is possible in word of mouth marketing. Still, many marketers will use this case as their compass for word of mouth and try to leverage the channel of video-sharing to meet their goals. Viral video leverages something that ad agencies are very good at: storytelling and filmmaking. That's why branded entertainment is ad agencies' social media technique of choice.

It's a discipline

Word of mouth is a broad discipline like advertising or public relations. It requires technique and methodologies that are particularly relevant to do it well. It is possible to treat it like a channel by tacking on some WOM tactic to a larger advertising program, but it may not pay off in comparison to those more traditional marketing tactics.

Most WOM strategy is about engagement and building strong relationships with a core group. If it serves a "reach" purpose, it is through the long-term multiplier effect of one satisfied and engaged customer telling 3 friends who tell 3 friends and so on. If you want to reach millions with a product launch in January and have no existing set of WOM relationships, word of mouth marketing is probably not your first choice. BUT if you had those relationships in place - oh, what a launch it would be.

Now the next interesting question is whether word of mouth will be a stand-alone discipline or be integrated into either PR or ad firms or both. Think of account planning (or connections planning). More often than not, this is a discipline found inside ad agencies. Yet several firms like Naked have cropped up where account planning is the defining discipline of the firm. Will the same thing happen with Word of Mouth? Forward thinking communications/marketing firms will build or acquire the expertise for a true word of mouth discipline (not just channel experience). they will do this in droves once the measurement nut is cracked. Until then, you will have the visionary companies who believe that business objectives for many (not all) clients can be achieved well and efficiently using WOM - setting up a WOM shop. That's where our team - 360 Digital Influence - comes in. I still believe that enlightened PR firms (i.e. more than 'media relations') shops) stand a better chance culturally of making these units work than traditional ad agencies.  Some specialty shops are already cropping up - Brains on Fire and Zocalo Group come to mind. Since WOM can be enhanced by advertising, PR, digital marketing, you name it, I prefer as much integration as possible.

Much has been written on the characteristics of the best word of mouth marketing. Suffice it to say that it is different than the discipline necessary for successful advertising campaigns.

John Bell runs the 360° Digital Influence team at Ogilvy and blogs at the Digital Influence Mapping Project