Key Takeaway: If you aren’t Talkable now, you aren’t going to be without a little change. Get creative. Break your mold. Surprise your customers. Take some advice from Bonnie Raitt.

Watch John’s full series at Brand Autopsy

Results:

• 16 million people reached
• 50,000 downloads in one hour
• 800% increase in website interaction
• 337% more website visitors

Read more at Digital Buzz Blog

Moms everywhere impart nuggets of wisdom upon their children. It teaches kids how to function well in the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the same lessons that got you through grade school apply to marketing and communications.

Rod Brooks was inspired to share some of these lessons yesterday for Mother’s Day:

1. Be polite, friendly, and honest – These three should never be questioned. Brands who want a thriving community need to treat their members with the upmost respect. A smile accompanied with honesty is the best way to show that.
2. Keep your room clean – The space your community lives in is online and offline, in inboxes and Twitter streams. But no one will want to be there if it’s cluttered. Audit your content and determine exactly what you need to be successful.
3. Get your homework done first – Spend time learning. It’s key to understanding your target and their needs. Learn, learn, learn then act. You’ll do a lot better on the test/sales.

Read Rod’s seven other tips from mom at Seeing the Edge

The Car is the Controller

Electric cars inspire feelings of oneness with the world and the environment, but not excitement. BBDO Germany set out to change that with the first ever game of Pong played with cars as the controllers.

—————-

Small Enough to Fit in a Tweet

Down in Argentina, Smart Cars made headlines through a Twitter campaign. In perhaps the first ever Twitter animation, Smart Cars tweeted over 400 visual animations from their @SmartArg account. The tweets make a short animation when scrolled through quickly.

Try it yourself on @SmartArg

Read more at Food Beast

Creatives were their audience. If you know any creatives, they tend to have strong opinions about fonts, logos and technology – arguments lost on vast swaths of the population. So how do you raise awareness of creative faux pas and a creative workspace? Plan a protest, of course.

Playing on the Occupy Wall Street movement, CoLab planted (fake) protesters outside their workspace. Signs like “Make the Logo Smaller” and “IE6 Destroys Families” spoke directly to their audience. In addition, they promoted the campaign through Twitter and email, which is how I heard about it.

This campaign ran in late March, so the exact numbers are still coming in. However, the word of mouth ducks are in line. They tapped into a conversation that their audience already has. Then they put a new spin on it. In doing so, CoLab showed how well they understand their target through a sharable piece of content.

See the campaign in action by searching #OccupyCoLab

“With a Thanksgiving celebration, you take the time to prepare a great meal and gather those you care about; then, the leftovers extend the specialness of the day for some time thereafter. Content marketing works in a similar way.”

Think of blogs as the whole spread. They’ve got staples, like though-leadership, and garnishes like videos, infographics, and and white papers.

Rob offered 21 tips on how blogs can feed other content. Here are a few:

1. EBOOK: Is an extension of your blog. Take that blog content, edit it, repurpose it, add value to it. String it together in a logical and coherent manner. Dress it up with pretty pictures and formatting. Lo and behold, you’ve got yourself an eBook.

2. VIDEO: In and outside a blog is a powerful tool for corporate content marketing strategies of any size. They are a boom for internally produced video projects and consumer-generated video alike.

3. EVENTS: 56% or companies with content marketing programs use events to build face-to-face relationships (source: PulsePoint Group). And 74% and use social media. Repurpose your most popular blog content for these events

Read more about Content Marketing at Barn Raisers

An interview with Steve Knox,  Senior Advisor, Boston Consulting Group. Steve is an expert on the psychology of word of mouth. He will Keynote at WOMM-U, May 7-9 in Chicago.

WOMMA: How do you see brand advocacy and content relating to each other? Does one influence the other more or is it a chicken and egg situation?

Steve: I think it is a chicken and egg situation because content is an important part of brand advocacy. The consumer, in order to advocate, needs to have something besides just, “I recommend this brand.” It has to be, “I recommend this brand because…” At this point, content becomes the overlapping part.

Content here is meant in the broadest sense of the word. It’s not just content like a piece of advertising, a promotion, or a coupon. Content is what the brand is about. What they represent. How they’re tied into the community. The list is endless as long as we think of content in the broadest sense of the word.

Advocacy has to be in relation to something. Rarely does advocacy come from people simply recommending a brand without a clear reason.

Would you say the brand story plays a large part in it instead of granular, singular pieces of content?

The brand story does play a large part of it. But remember the brand story is just one piece of content. The overarching point I’m trying to drive is that as long as we expand our definition of what content is, don’t let the word “content” limit you in terms of what consumers are advocating about.

It can go from technical/functional all the way to promotional and emotional. It runs the full gamut.

What would you say is absolutely necessary for a fully synced content advocacy plan?

There are two factors that are critical. First, there must be some form of a relationship between the giver and the receiver of the advocacy. Whether that comes from a brand to an individual or one person to another, there must be some form of relationship. This is largely ignored in marketing – this concept of building relationships in order to promote brand advocacy.

The other factor is the concept of a disruptive schema. Schemas are these mental models of how you make the world work. Rarely do people advocate without a disruption to a schema. The closest word to this interruption is “surprise.”

Is the schema is the tipping point where passive fans become active advocates?

It’s a little different. Think of it in terms of your own advocacy. Why are you going to tell your friend about something? What’s your motivation? It’s generally rooted in one of two reasons.

Either you have a surprising piece of information that you think by giving it to your friend will benefit your friend. If that piece of information isn’t surprising, disruptive, or it’s something they already know about, you are unlikely to bring it up.

The other reason why you’re likely to tell a friend is because you want it to reflect back on you – that you’re in the know, you’re cool, you’re altruistic. Whatever your internal motivation, the reason you’re advocating is to reflect back on you. Again, the only way you can do that is if what you’re advocating about is surprising. If it isn’t, you won’t do it.

No matter what the motivation, that piece of surprise is necessary to be there.

You know that I’m now going to be thinking about this every time I talk to my friends, right?

It’s a simple fact of our human motivation. It isn’t bad. It’s just the way we’re wired socially.

For instance, I’d never say to you, “You should buy this paint because it covers that wall.” That’s what paint is supposed to do. So why would I talk about that.

Now, if I said to you, “You should buy this paint because it covers the wall in half the time.” That’s interesting. There must be that disruption in order for advocacy to occur.

———-

Keynote sponsorships are available. You’ll introduce the Keynote and have your company closely aligned with their expertise. Reach out to Kristin Horstman at Khorstman@WOMMA.org or 312-853-4400 x209.

The idea rests on this: If a face-to-face conversation is one awesome word of mouth interaction, then a post on social media will equal the same quality interaction multiplied by the number of people in the network.

Ed Keller challenged this notion with data from brands with “tens of millions” of fans. A mere 0.45% are active fans. Further research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute found that less than 1% of fans ever engage with a brand after clicking Like.

What’s more, BuzzFeed and StumbleUpon conducted research that concluded:

“Put simply, the vast majority of sharing occurs in the normal fashion evidenced in real-world word-of- mouth.”

Key Takeaway: The best way to do “Word of Mouth on Steroids” is to create something amazing that people want to share. There are no shortcuts here. Create something talkable. That is all.

Read more at KellerFay’s blog

—————-

Ed Keller will Keynote alongside Brad Fay at WOMM-U, May 7-9. They’ll introduce research from their forthcoming book, The Face-to-Face Book: Why Real Relationships Rule in a Digital Marketplace.

KellerFay is a WOMMA member.

Croudfunding on Kickstarter is on pace to hit $150 million dollars in 2012, $4 million more than the budget for The National Endowment of the Arts (NEA). Kickstarter’s project guidelines state:

“Kickstarter can be used to fund projects from the creative fields of Art, Comics, Dance, Design, Fashion, Film, Food, Games, Music, Photography, Publishing, Technology, and Theater. We currently only support projects from these categories.”

The Opportunity for Word of Mouth

Research shows that people, particularly Millennials, like brands that support cause conscious and collaborative projects. And anyone can donate to Kickstarter. This could be an excellent way to causally and publicly support projects. Even small businesses can get in on it with small donations.

Read more about Kickstarter’s milestone at Talking Points Memo