No, it’s not a social media or marketing book - although they are both in there. We are telling stories about companies that have embraced this new culture of peering and openness and gone much deeper than other content on the subject on how they’re making it work. If you are in an organization, starting a business, knee deep in the digital thickets, love the concept of customer enagagement or have an affinity for the culture of the marketplace, this is the book for you.

We’re elated McGraw Hill has decided to publish us and that Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics and Grown Up Digital is writing the foreword.

It’s personally exciting getting to talk to and meet some of the best in the business and understanding first hand what makes their efforts tick. Our on-shelf date is in December’10 so the insights are coming fast and furious.

Here are the basic tenets of what this book is about and why it will be different:

-          Rigorous discipline - this is not a personal opinion book but substantive opinion developed from investigating hundreds of brand experiences and primary interviews with the architects behind these efforts, distilled through the lenses of the authors who have a combined forty years of experience on the progressive side of strategy, marketing, digital and communications practices

-          A balanced viewpoint - there is no axe to grind or embedded functional bias among the authors. We operate across many different worlds and come in contact with a large web of different resources and opinions.

-          How business practitioners succeed- a higher order challenge exists within companies now, not on “what to do” or “how not to mess up big time” necessarily (although we briefly touch on this) but rather “how to do it” in order to not only move individual opinion but large stakeholder groups to rally behind these efforts. We will investigate these organizations to find out what makes their efforts successful.

-          Some foundational basis on why people need to change - we have primary research and survey information not broadly revealed to the general public yet.

-          A smart way to integrate web 2.0 into their strategies and tactics for growing brands - we provide a structure across chapters, reference guide and ancillary awards, vlog and wiki that will provide role models, success stories, best practices and reference tools to make conclusions instantly translatable.

-          Credibility and support of Don Tapscott and Wikinomics - with a foreword and counsel by Don Tapscott, best selling author and highly credible “father of collaboration” and expert understanding of digital environment, in addition to the affiliated title of this book, we’ll have instant credibility from CEO/CIO/CMO audience and from the much larger business, media, communications and public audience.

-          Outside of the Echo Chamber - although we’re very well-connected, we don’t believe we’re over-exposed our insights or content to the larger community nor do we group oursleves into a number of thought leaders who tend to see the world through a partisan lens.

Join along for the ride at our Facebook group, Twitter page @wikibrands and soon to be launched blog or connect with me personally at @seanmoffitt

We recognized that at least initially this prospective client was seeing us as some glorified variant of a CRM firm or perhaps even lower in the food chain - a customer headhunter. Nothing could be further from the point.

Unfortunately, given the lack of exposure for anything that isn’t mass media driven or social media trendy, marketers and industry professionals aren’t getting enough training, coaching or intellectual curiosity to discover the “real world, out there.” Agent Wildfire is trying to change that.

Here’s why you should care.

Fact - Word of mouth is the #1 growth engine in marketing. Don’t take our word for it, take theirs.

Fact - Word of mouth is the #1 thing linked to business growth. Don’t take our word for it, take theirs.

Fact - Word of mouth is growing. It’s more trusted and more beneficial in this economy. Once again, we’ll lean on others to make our arguments for us. But we have a great presentation ourselves if you need back up.

Fact - As much as social media has become the jewel in the digital crown and an important breeding ground for word of mouth contagion and cool stuff, more than 80% of word of mouth happens offline. You need to know how to affect these conversations too. Once again, others will support.

Even for people that overcome their standoffishness, they need to understand what word of mouth marketing and media really is vs. the much more streamlined TV buy process “make commercial, buy media, air in chunks of 30 or 60 seconds”.

Here it is unplugged then. Although we’ve counted up to 29 different types of programs we actually execute with many different audiences, objectives and timelines, the stripped down version of what we do rests on 8 sequential activities that we’ve conveniently put into the acronym WILDFIRE.

What’s the Big, Buzzworthy Idea - does this make me want to get involved?

In a separate post, we have detailed the 36 reasons why people buzz - we develop conversation-inducing themes and stories that tap into these motivations and grab people by the heart, brain or wallet and make them notice, talk about and advocate the program and underlying brand(s). Most agencies don’t focus on the repeatability of a message or longevity of engagement but instead focus on how to convince you as an individuals that the brand is purchasable right there and then. Missed oppportunity - they rent your audiences, we build them.

Influencer outreach and engagement

We find and invite your 6 types of influencers (recruited depending on your objective) and get them enthused about what your doing. They become our front row seeded audience that delivers effective early insight, ambassadorship and content. It’s tough investigative work with a lot of sweat equity. Most agencies and firms in our area, don’t even bother to subscribe a different level of importance on their target population, we do. It involved knowledge of who they are, what motivates them, who do they know, how do they feel important and what keeps them involved.

Laying the groundwork - building the platform, tools and networked extensions

We construct, host and administer the key web platform, tools, widgets, social media, mobile and offline prongs to your community or campaign, ensuring it has the best chance of getting noticed and spotted, rebroadcasted, mashuped and referred. This can take on many shapes but importantly, the technology involved in anything word of mouth is typically less than 20% of the overall equation. These are not templated approaches but require a marriage of a number of talents we call the Unagency.Tech firms and specialists would suggest a “build it and they must come” attitude and with most agencies, the web is an afterthought. We take the middle ground approach.

Deliver an experience - before you ask people to get others excited, they have to get excited themselves

It’s a cardinal WOM rule - what’s in it for them. Does your word of mouth initiative pass the sniff test. People don’t talk about average stuff they want stuff they can use as social currency to pass onto others. Delivering a transforming or immersive experience that make people appraise, reconsider and talk about the brand is what we do well. Although we love the efficiency of the web - we’re one of the only firms in this space that is media-agnostic, and for a lot of brands this means a physical touchpoint is required too. These experiences generally fall into six camps - brand sampling, event/experience, VIP preview/suctomization, special activity based, research advisor based or altruism-based.

Fan the flames of activity - get into the right places with the right motivations

A good percentage of people can drive traffic to a site - that’s the price of admission - we need to stoke something deeper. Revisits and rebroadcast is our business. How do we get people to care so deeply about something that they will be moved to act and involve their social circles. Oh, and do it again and again. Much tougher. Smart use of polls, memes, stories, collaboration work, user generated content, trivia, nomination, graduation, photos, videos, groups, messaging, lists are key factors….essentially answering the question what is the sweetspot between the brand wants and what the member wants.

Interact with the community - staff for dialogue

This neighborhood called word of mouth has many two-way streets. We staff up for the conversation based on either our own hires or extensions of our company called community managers - they stop communities and campaigns from becoming ghost towns. They bridge the role between company and customer and incubate the flow of conversation, buzz, content, recruitment and feedback. Here are the core 15 roles of community managers in programs we manage. In other agencies, this role is virtually non-existent leading to initial focus/interest followed by massive amounts of lapsed and disinterested users.

Research and feedback - getting to the insights and metrics

An important part of any marketing medium, particularly one in its adolescence is measuring what you do. From both the soft qualitative side and the hard quantitative side, we sift through the analytics, poll results, user submissions, referrals, redemptions and social media impressions to generate a sense of what impact we’re creating. Some food for thought here.

Expand the idea - life stage management and 1+1=3

Great communities and campaigns start with a simple idea and extend from there. Once we’ve developed traction on a new initiative, we like to add fuel to the fire. Informed by the research, we usually press our clients to add more features, more integration, more partners, more audiences, more geography and create a bigger inferno to support a growing universe. In particular, communities have a lifespan of their own - many don’t mature for 2-3 years and require constant tweeking, tilling and rotating to match the needs of their audiences at the time.

Simple, right? No.

Whereas we might agree this seems like simple kitchen science - there is an artistry in the details and an advantage in having lived in this world for so long on a dedicated basis.

When you’re looking for a firm in the word of mouth arena and the broader grassroots universe, they need the full body:

A heart - they have to have a passion for this stuff, WOM is for lovers and you’ve either got it or you don’t - ask the practitioner to show them their blog, their social network profiles and that they live in this space outside of the 9-to-5 rat race.

A brain - intelligently knowing how to link to a strategy and knowing where to step and not step is fundamentally important to being a trusted practitioner. Give the WOM suitor a chance - a light worded brief and a few days should be enough to know whether they can come back with strategic brilliance that makes intuitive sense or gimmicky fool’s gold that will be your marketing plan’s orphan child.

Arms and legs - having credibility and a foundation in the word of mouth space, pool of influencers and social media is necessary, plus an ability and capacity to reinvent and make brilliantly captivating and new stuff happen is the lifeblood of a word of mouth enterprise. Ask your WOM suitors what they’ve done to communities and campaigns to stretch dollars, exposure or engagement more than the client could themselves, how broad was their approach in generating offline and online conversations and how they dealt with adversity.

Instincts - knowing what might make a small idea, bigger and a big idea massive is a function of a partner vested in both the client’s business and the real world. Put them on the spot - ask what are there top 10 influences or inspirations in the WOM space - if you hear a lot of humming and hawing - they likely are pretenders and not bonafide WOM pros.

A strong gut - data plays a big role but at some point, information needs to lead to insight and insight needs to be coloured by the judgment of what will delight, surprise and motivate in the real world. When you receive a proposal back, at least one of their ideas should strike a human emotional chord that suggests the idea might be a runaway hit - if not, you are likely receiving the “paint by numbers, today it’s beer, tomorrow it’s soap” type of approach.

This week we have a list of the top 20 Social Media reads. This is the last installment of the Wildfire Weekend Reads series. Heads up for something new coming in September and enjoy the weekend!

#1 The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media by David M. Scott

#2 Join the Conversation - How to Engage Marketing Weary Consumers with the Power of Community, Dialogue and Partnership by Joseph Jaffe

#3 The New Influencers - A Marketer’s Guide to New Social Media by Geoffrey A. Moore

#4 Social Media Marketing - An Hour a Day by Susan Bratton

#5 Marketing to the Social Web: How Ditial Customer Communities Build Your Business by Larry Weber

#6 The Corporate Blogging Book : Absolutely Everything You Need to Know To Get It Right by Lutz Bob

#7 Now is Gone - A Primer on New Media for executives and Entrepreneurs by Geoff Livingston and Brian Solis

#8 Web 2.0 Heroes by Bradley L. Jones

#9 Groundswell - Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li

#10 The Art of Strategic Listening - Finding Marketing Intelligence in Blogs and Social Media by Robert Berkman

#11 Web Analytics : An Hour a Day by Jim Sterne

#12 The Age of Conversation 2: Why Don’t They Get It? by Gavin Heaton & Drew McLellan

#13 Web 2.0 - A Strategy Guide by Amy Shuen

#14 Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter

#15 Facebook Marketing - Leverage Social Media to Grow Your Business by Steve Holzner

#16 SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate by Joel Postman

#17 The Network Society - Social Aspects of New media by Professor Jan A G  Dijk

#18 Blogging for Business - Everything You Need to Know and Why You Should Care by Shel Holtz

#19 Wikipatterns by Stewart Mader

#20 Advertising 2.0 - Social Media Marketing in a Web 2.0 World by Tracy L. Tuten

#1 The Tipping Point - How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell

#2 The Soul of the New Consumer by David Lewis

#3 Leading the Revolution - How to Thrive in Turbulent Times By Making Innovation a Way of Life by Gary Hamel

#4 A Whole New Mind - Moving from the Information Age To The Conceptual Age by Daniel Pink

#5 Buying In - The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are by Rob Walker

#6 Freakonomics - A Rogue Economist Explores The Hidden Side of Everything by Levitt & Dubner

#7 Predictably Irrational - The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely

#8 The Art of the Start - The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Gudie for Anyone Starting Anything by Guy Kawasaki

#9 Next Now - Trends for the Future by Salzman & Matathia

#10 The World is Flat - A Brief History of the 21st century by Thomas Friedman

#11 The Long Tail - Why The Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson

#12 Presentation Zen - Simple Ideas on Presentation Design by Garr Reynolds

#13 Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam

#14 Outliers - The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

#15 Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything by James Gleick

#16 Microtrends - The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes by Penn and Zelesne

#17 Blink - The Power of Thinking without Thinking by Malcom Gladwell

#18 Grown Up Digital - How the Net Generation is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott

#19 Sway - The Irrestible Pull of Irrational Behavior by Brafman & Brafman

#20 The Opposable Mind - How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking by Roger L. Martin

#21 The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz

#22 The Medium is the Message by McLuhan and Fiore

#23 Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t by Jim Collins

#24 No Logo by Naomi Klein

#25 Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive by Noah Goldstein

Have a great weekend!

Jasmine

#1 Authenticity - What Consumers Really Want by Pine by Gilmore & Joseph

#2 Purple Cow - Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable by Seth Godin

#3 Brand Sense - Build Powerful Brands through Touch, Taste, Smell, Sight and Sound by Lindstrom and Kotler

#4 Experience the Message: How Experiential Marketing is Changing the Brand World by Max Lenderman

#5 The Starbucks Experience - 5 Principles of Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary by Joseph Micelli

#6 The Experience Economy - Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage by Pine & Gilmore

#7 Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose their Authenticity and How Great Brands Get It Back by Rohit Bhargarva

#8 Love is the Killer App - How to Win Business and Influence Friends by Tim Sanders

#9 Priceless - Turing Ordinary Products into Extraordinary Experiences by Lasalle & Britton

#10 Managing the Cusomer Experience - Turning Customers into Advocates by Smith & Wheeler

#11 Stirring it Up - How to Make More Money and Save The World by Gary Hirshberg

#12 Experiential Marketing - How To Get Consumers to Sense, Feel, Act, Relate by Bernd Schmitt

#13 Leading for Growth: How Umpqua Got Its Cool by Davis and Shrader

#14 Why We Buy - The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill

#15 Chief Customer Officer - Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action by Jeanne Bliss

#16 Cult of iPod by Leander Kahney

#17 Uncommon Practice: People Who Deliver a Great Brand Experience by Smith & Milligan

#18 Living The Brand - How to Transform Every Member of Your Organization into a Brand Champion by Nicholas Ind

#19 Trader Joe’s Adventure - Turning a Unique Approach to Business into a Retail and Cultural Phenomenon by Len Lewis

#20 Chocolates on the Pillow Are not Enough by Jonathan Tisch

Enjoy the long weekend!

Jasmine

Attached you will find the 2009 Buzz Report, an inaugural research study that provides a pulsecheck on Canadian business leader’s response to the new landscape of marketing, media, customer experience and brand-building.

This advance report is based on 300 online survey responses from some of Canada’s top executive marketing, business, digital and communications leaders polled online from late 2008 and first half 2009.

Unique among research reports in Canada, the Buzz Report study takes a complete look at new marketing, media and customer-driven strategies & tactics; not just general macro spending trends or specific social media.

This report was generated by Canada’s leading grassroots marketing, media and research company Agent Wildfire (www.agentwildfire.com) and sent to you as a favoured colleague ahead of widespread release.

Formal release of study results will be launched on August 3, 2009.

Please feel free to share the results of the study with your audience(s).

Key Highlights of the Study:

- 79% of study respondents are optimistic about social media/word of mouth delivering value in their organizations

- 67% expect investment of money, time and resources in social media/word of mouth to grow in the coming year
- “Awareness, publicity and buzz” is the #1 stated objective for initiating social media/word of mouth initiatives
- Social networks, social media, mobile, user generated content and influencer marketing are predicted to have the biggest new media segment growth in the coming years
- 32% believe a conversation worthy idea/concept is the key attribute of word of mouth, the #1 ranked choice
- 38% believe communications/PR is the most accountable owner for social media/word of mouth in an organziation
- Measurement, lack of budget and loss of control were considered the biggest obstacles to adopting social media/word of mouth
- Lack of authenticity, lieing and not creating two-way dialogue were considered the biggest sins of current practitioners
- 83% strongly agree/agree that agencies need to reinvent themselves to stay relevant in this
climate
- 59% believe user generated content/social media is a bigger benefit vs. 25% believe it as a bigger threat to their business
- 52% track content generated from social media and word of mouth, most other measures are tracked by less than half of the respondents polled
- 70% of people do not necessarily agree that Facebook will be the dominant social network in 3 years

If you want to interview the author of the study Sean Moffitt or get supporting assets, graphs or visuals, please send an email to jasmine@agentwildfire.com .

#1 Lovemarks - The Future Beyond Brands by Kevin Roberts

#2 The Culting of Brands - Turn Your Customers into True Believers by Douglas Atkin

#3 Zag - The Number One Strategy of High Performance Brands by Marty Neumeier

#4 The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Ries & Trout

#5 Pour Your Heart Into It - How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time by Schultz and Jones

#6 The Art of Innovation - Lessons In Creativity from IDEO - America’s Leading Design Firm by Kelley and Littman

#7 Lateral Marketing - New Techniques for Finding Breakthrough Ideas by Kotler & Trias de Bes

#8 Democratizing Innovation by Eric Von Hippel

#9 A New Brand World - Eight Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the Twenty-First Century by Bedbury & Fenichell

#10 Open Business Models - How To Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape by Henry Chesbrough

#11 Relevance - Making Stuff That Matters by Tim Manners

#12 The Fall of Advertising and Rise of PR by Ries & Ries

#13 Living Brands - Collaboration + Innovation = Customer Fascination by Raymond Nadeau

#14 Brand Innovation Manifesto - How to Build Brands, Redefine Markets and Defy Conventions by John Moore

#15 Open Brands - When Push Comes to Pull in a Web Made World by Mooney & Rollins

#16 The Age of Engage - Reinventing Marketing for Today’s Connected, Collaborative and Hyperactive Culture by Denise Shiffman

#17 Brandjam - Humanizing Brands Through Emotional Design by Marc Gobe

#18 Brand Digital - Simple Ways Top Brands Succeed in the Digital World by Allen Adamson

#19 Tuned In : Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities that Lead to Business Breakthroughs by Craig Stull, Myers & Scott

#20 Tribal Knowledge - Business Wisdom Brewed from the Grounds of Starbucks Corporate Culture by John Moore

Have a great weekend!

Jasmine

This week we have a list of the Top 25 Word of Mouth/Buzz Books. Please add any we missed out on!

#1 The Anatomy of Buzz - How To Create Word of Mouth Marketing by Emanuel Rosen

#2 Buzz - Harness the Power of Influence and Create Demand by Salzman, Matathia, and O’Reilly

#3 Creating Customer Evangelists - How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force by McConnell and Huba

#4 Influence - The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

#5 Word of Mouth Marketing - How Smart Companies Get People Talking by Andy Sernovitz

#6 The Influentials: One American in Ten Tells the Other Nine How to Vote, Where To Eat and What to Buy by Keller & Berry

#7 Brand Hijack - Marketing without Marketing by Alex Wipperfurth

#8 Made to Stick - Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath

#9 Citizen Marketers:  When People are The Message by McConnell and Huba

#10 Permission Marketing - Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends Into Customers by Seth Godin

#11 Primalbranding: Create Zealots for Your Brand, Your Company and Your Future by Patrick Hanlon

#12 The Ultimate Question : Driving Good Profits and True Growth by Fred Reichheld

#13 Connected Marketing - The Viral, Buzz and Word of Mouth Revolution by Kirby & Marsden

#14 The Secrets of Word of Mouth Marketing - How to Trigger Exponential Sales Through Runaway Word of Mouth by George Silverman

#15 Beyond Buzz - The Next Generation of Word of Mouth Marketing by Lois Kelly

#16 Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore

#17 Buzzmarketing: Get People to Talk About Your Stuff by Mark Hughes

#18 Conversation Capital - How to Create Stuff People Love to Talk About by Cesvet, Babinski and Alper

#19 Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000 - Running a Business in Today’s Consumer-Driven World by Pete Blackshaw

#20 Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers

#21 Persuasion - The Art of Getting What You Want by Dave Lakhani

#22 Linked - How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

#23 Guerrilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Stevenson

#24 Can We Do That?! Outrageous PR Stunts that Work - And Why Your Company needs Them by Peter Shankman

#25 Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Media Consumers in a Digital Age by Henry Jenkins

Happy weekend reading!

Jasmine

To kick off our six part summer blog series, the brains at Agent Wildfire have decided to create a list of some great weekend reads for your educational enjoyment! Each Friday I will post a list of the top reads for a different topic that we like here at Agent Wildfire.

This week we have created a list of the Top 15 Community Books. Hope you enjoy!

#1 Wikinomics - How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Tapscott & Williams

#2 Crowdsourcing - Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe

#3 We are Smarter Than Me - How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business by Libert & Spector

#4 Tribes - We Need You to Lead by Seth Godin

#5 Herd - How to Change Mass Behaviour by Mark Earl

#6 Convergence Culture - Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins

#7 Here Comes Everybody : The Power of Organizing without Organizations by Clay Shirky

#8 The Starfish and The Spider - The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Brafman & Beckstrom

#9 Communities Dominate Brands by Ahohnen and Moore

#10 Consumer Tribes by Kozinets, Cova, Shankar

#11 Spark - Be More Innovative Through Co-Creation by John Winsor

#12 The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

#13 Enterprise 2.0 - How Social Software Will Change The Future of Work by Niall Cook

#14 The Wealth of Networks - How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freeedom by Yochai Benkler

#15 Marketing to the Social Web - How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business by Larry Weber

Jasmine