WordSpreadsQuickly.com

Maybe Wal-Mart’s latest PR propaganda counter to producer Robert Greenwald’s new documentary that takes some serious swings at the Pac-Man Icon of all Discount Shopping is following the some unwritten PR laws of war or perhaps it’s simply the old “I’m rubber, you’re glue, whatever you say bounces on me and sticks on you.”

It really doesn’t matter but I was interested in Greenwald’s bio. He seems like a kewl guy and, it got me thinking about an article I read in What is Enlightenment? called Getting to a Deeper YES.

The piece is about Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation and, discusses the draw-backs of a zero-sum negotiation strategy (think Wal-Mart here: I kill you dead, you go away strategy) and highlights an alternative model of win-win or non-zero-sum proposed in the book Getting to Yes (think about being more facilitative here: how can I be of service? Is this working for you?)

So what the hell does this all have to do with Word of Mouth? Thanks for asking.

It starts with cooperation. Good word of mouth frames for the network participant how they can connect with others to have greater influence that benefits all parties. The connectedness in this case is the “we’re in this together” messaging Greenwald uses in his blog. Here’s what it looked like five-months ago:

“This film is going to thrive on the contributions of all of you to help finish it, and then to become the distributors around the country and get the film to the millions who should see this.”

Robert Greenwald
June 1, 2005

The tactical framework isn’t that novel but it’s the customized elements offered to site visitors that lets the voice of network participants find their own connections that’s important to note as you build out your own WOM model. You know, I believe it’s the reason Thank You George never really generated the word of mouth response I expected. The connections were there but the connections were never connected due in part because the benefit was one sided.

This doesn’t mean that incentives = benefits. What I’m proposing is connections = benefits. I’ll share more on this concept based on research I’ve conducted using Games.com and playing Battleship in a separate post.

Greenwald also reaches out to a higher power by not only having screenings in over 1000 religious venues but by having an additional messaging platform that taps into is what Robert Wright in the book NonZero calls the “spiritual traditions.” How you ask? Greenwald links this film to the notion of spiritual traditions without getting mired in religious trappings by using the film to raise moral questions and link them to business practices.

I also liked how well Greenwald was able to play well with other sites to support common objectives and in doing so he generated inbound links to his site – backlinks – that really juice your ability to go after desired keywords on search engines. The relationships feel very co-opish and shouldn’t be overlooked especially when you’re trying to get a page on a site well ranked for a certain keyword phrase to generate qualified traffic to your site. And, speaking of traffic check out how much of a boost recent media coverage is contributing to traffic stats for walmartmovie.com:

Getting the backlink thing right is important… and to do it right you’ll need contextually relevant links that include core keywords you want to be ranked against. You’ve need to coordinate anchor text and inbound links from your “partners.” The domain walmartmovie.com misses opportunities by not providing unique anchor text for links which results in engines pulling other elements on a page where the link originates including header, title or description tags from a page to qualify the relevancy of the link. Regardless, Walmartmovie.com is actively using tracking codes for links to look for new opportunities – another aspect to keep in mind when building out your own WOM model – sustaining and optimizing performance — and building a knowledge base to take in-market learning and using it to make better decisions.

Let’s just call it a win-win strategy.