Title: The Year of Privacy – Are You Prepared?
Featured Speakers:
• Tony DiResta, Partner, Winston & Strawn, LLP, WOMMA General Council
• Liisa Thomas, Partner, Winston & Strawn, LLP
• Monique Bhargava, Attorney, Winston & Strawn, LLP
Key Takeaways:
• Assessments of your current practices
• Identification of typical compliance gaps and how to remedy them
• Vendor issues
• Ongoing compliance techniques
Watch the Webinar with Audio (Members-Only)
Watch the Slidedeck (Open-to-Public)
The last few years have shown a meteoric rise in group buying sites. Just one year ago, Groupon’s CEO and Founder, Andrew Mason, spoke at WOMMA’s School of WOM conference. Since then, Google offered billions to buy-out Groupon, a deal that never went through.
Now Facebook and Google have launched their own deal shops, spurring a great debate about what looks like a very crowded market. A simple search on Google for Groupon “Facebook Deals” “Google Offers” yields 73,000 results. And many of the headlines use words and phrases like Rival, Takes aim, Doesn’t Stand a Chance, and Competition.
So who will win?
Though there are nuances to each group buying site, they all center around one thing: big discounts. This is a product that is very easy to copy. The site that grows beyond simple discounts to offer something more will gain an advantage.
What started with connecting people to new companies needs to evolve into a service that connects people to new people while connecting everyone to new companies.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Please comment.
Read a comparison chart between Groupon, Facebook Deals and Google Offers
Perhaps this is another instance of social media overload. A recent report by Forrester found that a mere 6% of 12-17 year olds want to be friends with a brand on Facebook. (I know you have to be 13 to get a Facebook account. No idea why they sampled 12 year olds.)
This presents a problem for all the brands who want to solve ___________ problem with Facebook, or other social networks for that matter. So how do you create interest in your brand’s Facebook page? Mr Youth, a WOMMA Governing Member who specializes in youth marketing, offered a few very helpful tips.
1. Use Humor – Make humor part of your brand personality. It will keep your posts interesting and sharable.
2. Add to the Experience – Social networking connects friends. Find ways to help enable that. It will increase brand affinity and active users.
3. Have Fun – Social media is popular because it’s fun and simple. Do fun and simple things on your page and the Likers will come.
Read the full post for two more tips at Mr Youth’s blog, Grown Up Thinking
A recent report from Useful Social Media found that upper management is increasingly participating in their company’s social efforts.
Additionally, the variety of uses has proven to be fairly vast with significant percentages in Product Development and Employee Engagement.
Key Takeaway: We’ve reached the top! Congrats everyone. Nice work. Now practitioners, strategists and the like need to deliver C-Suite quality metrics, measurement and ROI.
Read more about the study at The Digital Influence Mapping Project
Michael Slater
Michael Slater will run a Speed Networking hour at WOMMA’s School of WOM, May 9-11. Attendees will pick out who they want to meet and Speed Networking will line up the quick introductory meetings.
I recently spoke with Michael about how attendees can get the most out of Speed Networking.
How did Speed Networking get started?
It got started back in 2000 as a result of the inefficiencies of going to traditional networking events. I was heavily involved in my business school’s alumni association. They hosted traditional cocktail mixers. The challenge was, as a young alum, I’d go out and try to meet people, but I was intimidated and felt awkward. I never knew if I was meeting the right people. And it wasn’t a lot of fun. So I went back to the alumni association and asked how I could make it better. They said, “Well, you can figure it out.”
So I said, “I have an idea.” Based off the very popular speed dating, I figured out how it could work for business. We built a model that was similar to the speed dating model.
Fast forward several years, we then got involved using technology that allowed people to specifically determine who they want to meet. So through pre-selection, the experience is more targeted. Being a good business school student, ROI was always involved. So we did some very simple math.
If you go to a traditional networking event with 100 people, you might meet 3 new people. So at most, 300 connections are being made at the event. Compared to a Speed Networking event where you’re likely to meet 10 people, 1000 matches will take place. As a result, the odds of having some type of business engagement take place is substantially higher. It increases the return on investment for both the organization and individual. And it’s more exciting and less intimidating.
What is your advice for the people who have done traditional networking, but never ventured into Speed Networking?
The first thing that comes to mind is that this is the most non-intrusive way of meeting people. I often describe it as riding a rollercoaster for the first time. You’re a little nervous at first, but once the experience is done, you feel fantastic.
Attendees will go through a very simple registration wizard where they create a profile of themselves. They’re then going to see a list of categories of types of professionals who will be participating. Then they rank each one of those categories. So when they get to the event, we’ll show them where to take their seat, all of that is coordinated. Participants will already know a little bit about the people that they’ll meet, so they can do a little homework.
Each profile has a question that the other person has asked. That takes away a little bit of the awkwardness. For example, mine might be “Ask me about the impact of Speed Networking.” So that breaks the ice and naturally allows people to flow into conversation.
What would recommend participants do after the event to keep the connections alive?
If you don’t follow-up, then you have absolutely wasted your time. At our events, you’re provided with a schedule. On that schedule is all that person’s contact information. There is also a place for notes. So when you’re speaking, jot down notes about whatever you discussed. Unlike dating, we advise to reach out to them within 24 hours. Don’t play the three day game. If you found a really good connection, schedule something right then and there. Plan to meet for coffee or a drink afterwards, but make a commitment to a next step. Some type of action item that you both will adhere to is critical.
The general rule of thumb is that if there are 10 rounds of speed networking, you’ll have 4 to 5 of the meetings that have value to you. Then, fast forward a couple of months, participants continue some type of engagement with about 2 to 3 of those people.
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About Michael Slater
Michael had begun hosting speed networking events in early 2001 while working as a business development professional. As he grew successful in business development the demand of his speed networking events had grown substantially and SpeedNetworking.com was born to help assist other organizations offer highly structured and effective networking programs to their members to obtain similar results as Michael.
WOMMA Members in the Spotlight
We are proud to announce our newest members:
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Alloy Completes Sale of AMP Agency to Current Management Team
AMP Agency, an integrated digital and experiential marketing agency, announced that the management team led by original founder and CEO Gary Colen has conducted a buy-out acquiring all agency assets from former parent company Alloy Media + Marketing. Effective immediately, AMP will operate as an independent agency headquartered in Boston. With the move, all employees will retain their roles with the agency.
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Affect Strategies has rebranded itself as simply Affect.
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Edelman Appoints New Global Leadership for Digital Practice
Kevin King named Global Practice Chair; David Armano named EVP, Global Innovation & Integration; Steve Rubel named EVP, Global Strategy & Insights
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Zuberance is holding a post School of WOM panel
Event Details
Date: Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Time: 5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Location: River East Art Center, 435 East Illinois Street, Chicago, IL
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Many WOMMA members are speaking at Mashable Connect:
Rohit Bhargava – Ogilvy
Scott Heiferman – Meetup
Rob Key – Converseon
Steve Rubel – Edelman Digital
Raymie Stata – Yahoo!
WOMMA is looking for hosts to take the conversation offline in 2011. WOMMA Wine Wednesdays are designed to bring WOM and Social Media enthusiasts together to meet, drink, and learn.
WOMMA members have the exclusive opportunity to host a Wine Wednesday in their city. You get to show off your cool digs, promote your company, and meet your fellow WOM enthusiasts.
For more information, visit here or contact Tarah Remington Brown, WOMMA’s Director of Member Relations, at Tarah@WOMMA.org or 312-853-4400 x.205
“History is your guide. Big shifts occur around every eight years.” – Steve Rubel, EVP Global Strategy and Insights, Edelman Digital
The internet is a wild ride. Foreseeing the next big thing seems hopelessly impossible on the granular level, but at 10,000 feet, the view is clearer. From 1994-2002, the internet was heavy with corporate money and light on solid ideas. The dot-com crash brought the democratization of the web through social sights that grew naturally through simple and useful user experience.
So What’s Next?
Steve Rubel posits the Validation Era. Or in other words “Intimacy is in and publicness may be out – or at least on the decline.” Content curation is extending to individual users. The average Facebook user doesn’t know 20 percent of their “friends.” Social media overload is happening, and the market reaction will change how users interact with each other and brands.
Key Takeaway: To avoid being curated out of relevance, the quality of your content needs to be high. Otherwise, your brand will be bundled with all the other irrelevant connections and tossed aside.
Read more at Steve Rubel’s blog
Google Lucus Fayne. He loves Kent Elliott Roofing in Irving, TX. Also Pro West Remodeling in Stow, OH. Also American Exteriors in Manchester, NH. Boy this guy has a lot of houses and knows how to choose a contractor.
Lucas was born at the hands of a programmer developing simple website templates for small businesses. Those who didn’t have the presence of mind to change Lucas’ name found themselves in good company.
This sort of tactic is one unfortunate example of a greater problem. There are many Lucas’ out there written into code or imagined by marketers. And these phantoms are ruining the value of recommendations.
Read more about fake comments at The New York Times
Toyota lost a lot of face when they had to recall 9 million vehicles, but their brand image held. This wasn’t luck. They had a very solid response that included a lot of social media work. Their response acts as a great guide for the worst of PR nightmares:
1. Have a team in place. Toyota had set up a social media group that integrated PR, marketing, Customer relations and agency partners. This centralized group was critical to responding to the thousands of bad posts.
2. Plan for the worst. Armies play war games. Brands should play PR crisis games. It prepares your team for something that is exceedingly difficult to predict.
3. Get your executives out in front. Toyota leaders held community chats on Digg Dialogg and Twitter. It humanized their brand and showed how much executives actually care about the customer.
Read two more ways Toyota deflected damage at Ragan
