Here’s my keynote presentation from Infopresse I gave last month “Social Media and the Food Industry” .

The toplines:

- 16 insights

- 6 reasons why your company should lead this effort

- 9 Essentials to get this world right

- 20 great food examples

Let me know your thoughts and and other great industry examples or insight.

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.

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 .

Sean Moffitt will be talking about It Takes a Community to Raise a Brand on Tuesday, May 12th and be part of the panel on Wednesday, May 13th discussing Building an Effective Community and Branding 2.0.

One small example of some of the information Sean Moffitt will be talking about:

Are The 12 Distinct Roles of Community Managers and Brand Evangelists:
• Program management/development
• Events host
• Blog author/announcements
• Moderation
• Research collector
• Online administrator
• Community ambassador
• Personal concierge
• Client team intermediary, go-to and on-the-ground responder
• Product educator
• Pushing the membrane
• Client stir stick/internal rallying cry

If you or your company would like to learn more about Community Building or would like Sean Moffitt to present his findings, email or phone:
Brittani Jarvis
brittani@agentwildfire.com, 416-255-4500 ext. 228

For the past couple of weeks I have had the great pleasure finding community managers for an upcoming project. I started by putting up a post on Craigslist and within a few days I had hundreds of applicants. I then had the difficult task of deciding who was worthy and who was not worthy of moving on to the next stage of a phone interview. There were many different types of applicants – the funny applicant, the serious applicant and the I’m just going to tell you everything about myself applicant. I narrowed my list down to ten potential community managers in each city by resume, if they intrigued me in their application and their involvement in social networks.

Out of my list of ten from each city I narrowed it down to four from each city. I selected these four based on what they said in their paragraph of their application. If you can impress me in about five paragraphs then you are who I want to speak to. The phone interviews were even better then the written applications. There is nothing better than having an interesting chatty conversation leaving me going “Wow” after I have hung up from you. After choosing my community managers I think the top three traits that each of these people have are:

To put it simply, they are just interesting: I was intrigued from the paragraph they wrote in their application to the half hour phone interview we had. It can be hard impressing a stranger you have never met and the community managers I chose did this with no effort at all.

They are involved: Whether it is in their community or on social networks. They are out there interacting with others and who better to have as a community manager than someone to get the word out there to others.

They are enthused: The community managers I chose, each one whether it was during our phone call or sending me an email after all gave me great ideas of places to go or sites to visit to expand our network and each wanted to know when they could start. If you find community managers that are enthused about the project it makes everything run so much smoother.

By Brittani Jarvis

I have copied the post I had left on the site for your consumption.

“So what does The League of Kickass Business people actually DO? Converse. Collaborate. Imbibe. Network. Ruminate. Reflect. Soapbox. Change things. Tinker. Spark off each other. Meet in clandestine locations every couple months. All apply.

Put simply - if you are a difference maker in the digital, marcom or business ranks in Canada and you enjoy big headed, passionate people who are at senior or executive levels, you should join this group - The League of Kickass Business People.

If you are offended or put off by the title of our group, this likely wasn’t your cup of tea in the first place. That’s why there is chocolate, strawberry, vanilla and ick, nea-politan ice cream I guess. We just happen to like senior folks who get it and realize there has to be a bit of surprise, humour and lack of pretense in what they do and in this case, the groups they join.

Having grown to over 400 people within a tiny shingle of Facebook and through 5 previous events and the requiste fish bowl of business cards., we figured we would ratchet the community up by porting it over to Ning (and yes I hate the Google ads in the side margin but it’s the price of efficiency).

The hope would be we could identify 1,000 of Canada’s very best in this hub and cap it off there for awhile (grab a look at Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True fans as inspiration)

We’ve had a history of getting a group of people together mid-week every couple of months and inviting a speaker, a charity/success story and some other type of interactive session. Hopefully in doing so, we drink some good wine or beer (thank you Molson for your sponsorship), learn some interesting stuff, meet a wide and disparate span of cool people and raise some money and profile for a deserving charity. This will likely continue - cool themes and A-list celebrities and speakers are always welcome suggestions.

The plan is to hive off and do smaller group dinners every month of 24 like-minded people and have this LOKBP forum be for the meeting ground everybody.

So keep it simple right - if you’re reading this, you’ve probably joined or about to join. Once you’ve done that, kick our tires, stroll through the members and drop a line. Then pass along contact information for any other members that might find a Treehouse club for senior intelligent and opinion-leading rainmakers interesting. Finally, watch for events and invites for future events - we’ll likely do one in Toronto and one in Vancouver in the first part of 2009.

…and keep kicking ass,

Sean Moffitt, your benevolent LOKBP leader and evangelist