WordSpreadsQuickly.com

i’m going to blog the Grammy’s using my Palm 700p. This is my fisrt post. It’s slow but it will work…very exciting stuff.

Charlottesville, VA., December 6th – BoldMouth Inc., a social marketing services agency, announced today that Scott Hildebrand has joined the agency as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, a new position at the company. Hildebrand brings over twenty years of diverse marketing experience and leadership to the role.

Hildebrand most recently served as Managing Vice President of Brand Marketing for Capital One, one of the largest banks in the country. In this role, he headed consumer marketing efforts for the U.S. credit card division. Prior to joining Capital One, Hildebrand was Vice President at Epsilon, a leading database marketing firm. He has previously served as a management consultant with Arthur D. Little, a marketing executive for the Marriott Corporation, and as a brand manager for PepsiCo.

Hildebrand says he is excited about BoldMouth’s extensive experience in the social network marketing arena, and looks forward to building a next generation ad agency. “BoldMouth is an exciting firm with unique expertise and great clients. My role will be to build on this foundation by delivering new ways to bring people together as we change the face of media and the part played by advertising agencies in a social marketing context,” noted Mr. Hildebrand.

Hildebrand received his B.A. in Economics from Georgetown University and an M.B.A. in Marketing and Finance from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. In addition to his extensive professional experience, he has served on the Board of Directors of the Direct Marketing Association, the Board of Advisors for the Interactive Marketing Institute of Virginia Commonwealth University as well as a lecturer at the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation’s Yeck Center for Advanced Studies. Hildebrand is also a respected industry expert and frequent public speaker on direct marketing topics. Hildebrand has acted as an industry spokesman on several federal policy issues, and has testified before both chambers of Congress.

About BoldMouth

BoldMouth is a new kind of social marketing services agency committed to helping clients build their business, rather than just marketing campaigns. BoldMouth uses technology to facilitate organic dialogues and amplify communications between individuals with recognized interests in brands, products and services in the: entertainment, health and wellness, consumer packaged goods, computer software, travel, membership associations, and publishing categories. BoldMouth provides custom research, strategic planning, campaign implementation, application development, design services, and analysis. BoldMouth’s clients include AARP, Kraft, MTV, Microsoft, Metagenics, MTV Networks, and Scholastic, among many others.

• BoldMouth - Word of Mouth Marketing
  (tags: boldmouth, word of mouth, viral, social networking)

• eMarketer.com - Word-of-Mouth in B2B
  Emarketer has referenced data from our Perceptions, Practices, and Ethics in Word of Mouth Marketing a number of times. This reference touches on our findings related to what stimulates WOM.
  (tags: WOM, word of mouth, boldmouth, osterman research, marketing, b-to-b)

• Viral Marketing for the Real World Harvard Business Online
  Think aggregated interest marketing as a tool to fully integrate media channels.
  (tags: Duncan Watts, Viral Marketing, big-seed marketing)

• Google urges firms to embrace viral marketing
  (tags: google, viral marketing, videos, mentos, coca cola, tv advertisers)
• eMarketer.com - Social Network Marketing to Reach $2.5 Billion in 2011
  Placing a value on individual workers that will support social networking initiatives within the enterprise in my opinion is likely to dwarf the forecasted spending on social networking that eMarketer is proposing.
  (tags: social networking, business, marketing, emarketer)
• Milk Gone Wild // Watch the Commercial That Was Too Hot for the Super Bowl
  Advertising looking for examples of excellent viral marketing campaigns should check out PETA’s Milk Gone Wild site. I’ll post an interview with the folks from PETA later this week.
  (tags: PETA milk viral marketing)

• Teen’s study makes iPod face the music online
  (tags: word of mouth, Jim Nail, ipod, apple, research)
• Beta Network - Web 2.0 Startup Beta Testing Discussion Community on Tangler
  (tags: web 2.0, beta testing, online community, tangler)

Justin Kirby, who is one of the most respected voices in the word-of-mouth, viral and buzz arena, has been reaching out to organizations, academics and agencies to get feedback about predications he and Dr. Paul Marsden included at the end of Connected Marketing: The Viral, Buzz, and Word of Mouth Revolution. Here is the list of 10 predications Justin and Paul made along with my comments below.  You can join in on the conversation too!  Simply go visit the Connect Marketing survey page and post your comments if you want to post your own thoughts on the book’s predictions. And, please tell me what you think about my own reactions.  Now that’s really Connected Marketing! 
1. Connected marketing will become more strategic, with the focus shifting from promotion (creating remarkable campaigns) to innovation (creating remarkable products).

Connected Marketing will become more strategic when the advertising industry shifts away from distribution-based measurement and planning metrics to consumption-based frameworks that focus on interest recognition.  I believe the process is likely to move forward when enterprises start adopting “centers of excellence” around operations, product development, and customer service that link to learning based on listening to “new experts” who will guide advocacy and the creation of Corporate Talking Guides that will replace the outdated USP (unique selling proposition).  The shared world view is about sharing not selling.  Connected Marketing is about facilitating that sharing online, on the phone, and offline.
2. ROI metrics will be mandatory for viral, buzz and word of mouth campaigns. ‘Advocacy rates’ and ‘sales uplift’ will become important parts of ROI metrics, displacing traditional measures such as campaign reach.

If you’re not measuring feedback you’re firm is bound to fail in the Connected Marketing arena.
3. Word of mouth tracking will become a key metric in brand tracking market research.

The internet is the best qualitative research tool there is.  The question is whether social intelligence monitoring firms have the technology and backbones to deliver intelligence insight in a real-time world.  As for what we call it whether it is word of mouth monitoring, social media insight or plagiarism remains to be seen.
4. Buzz, viral and word of mouth marketing will be merged into the wider marketing mix, with online viral marketing adopted and integrated within advertising, word of mouth within promotions and buzz within PR.

Content syndication is likely to be desired by traditional agencies since I believe it mirrors some of the same process and relationship frameworks these organizations already rely on.  My predication is we will start questioning how buzz, word-of-mouth, viral and social content delivery is defined in the larger context of Connect Marketing.  In the future, I believe the bigger question is likely to be what do we call a new product launch that is being conducted by a firm practicing Connecting Marketing?  Will a new product launch be called a promotion or a customer loyalty campaign?  My hope is that customer-focused campaign thinking come forward as the foundation for all Connected Marketing campaigns.  As for the Public Relations field, I believe PR professionals are likely to be leaders in the new Connected Marketing customer retention practice of the future.
5. Managing and avoiding negative word of mouth, online and offline, will be an increasingly important area in connected marketing.

Enterprises will either be proactive or reactive when it comes to word-of-mouth.  Not much is likely to change here.  If anything, Connected Marketing will raise awareness of firms that have attempted to block-out the voices of idiosyncratic individuals with a blog.
6. Online branded entertainment (advertainment, advergaming, alternate reality games) will be used more as key brand touch-points for entertainment brands.

Your prediction is right on.  Multiplatform content providers take note: Online branded entertainment is likely to be a central networking tool to build dialogs.  The internet is a collection of niches.  The more focuses brands can be the better.   The days of brand protection and brand monitoring are over when brands can focus on pleasure rather than pleasing the lowest common denominator uncovered in quantitative research.
7. Techniques developed in connected marketing initiatives will be adopted for change management and internal communication.

I’m not sure I agree on this point.   I think principles of Connected Marketing can and will be adopted internally by enterprises but more in the form of making modifications to facilitative leadership training rather than enterprise-wise communications practices.   I’m sure we’ll see more Corporate Blogging Guidelines or Social Media Policies in the future but retention and recognition enhancements based on Connect Marketing principles is asking too much of corporate culture.
8. Techniques developed in viral, buzz and word of mouth will be increasingly adopted in CRM programs as both retention and acquisition (turning buyers into advocates) tools.

I hope so…
9. Cell phones will develop rapidly as an important medium for spreading connected marketing promotions, such as mobile invitations, SMS barcode discounts, etc.

“On the phone” as a category of Connected Marketing behavior has been overlooked or ignored in the United States.  I think that is going to change very quickly.  Our firm is about to connect a major study of word-of-mouth among young adults across the United States and it will be interesting to learn how millennial’s redefine standards in terms of where word-of-mouth occurs. 
10. Marketers will eventually be able to locate influencers by zip/post code, by which point they will be all chasing the same chosen few… Prepare for another paradigm shift in marketing?

We need to be really careful in the future.  This Connected Marketing predication reminds me of the challenges YesMail faced in shifting their business model just before the internet bubble burst.  YesMail started selling their commercial email lists based on a performance based purchase method – cost per action — that resulted in the firm saturating their best performing lists and destroying their business.   People just stopped responding.  However, that scenario is not likely to play out anytime soon.  It’s safe to say that enterprises are good – for the most part – at generating transactions and not in getting into dialogs with customers.   In any event, I think we’re safe for now.