In our hyper-connected culture of touch screens, smart phones and ironic fashion, the act of trend-spotting has become a science unlike any other.

Trends pulse through many veins of society, from technology and fashion to financial and dietary—trends inform and perpetuate the taste of the masses.  Having the ability to forecast a trend just before it becomes fashionably popular in a given market can mean big successes for an individual idea or even a whole industry.

Why Waste Time on Trendy?
While it may seem like a clichéd act harkening back to high school years spent trying to be the first kid to wear Nike Air Jordans’ or use ICQ messenger, genuine trend spotting is a valuable tool.   The fact is, trends are more than just accidental explosions of popularity; they are reasonably calculable offshoots of human desire. Once you are able to track and foresee trends, there is no limit to the ideas and avenues of profitable innovation that you can seize.

For instance, when the desire for affordable, fast dining outside the home first appeared in the late 1940’s, a few trend-spotters were quick to respond.  Spawning burger and fried chicken stops across America, the fast food nation trend as we know it was conceived, and those originally inspired trend-setters are still pumping out McProfits today.

How Can Trend Spotters Help You?
It boils down to the pattern whereby tracking trends generates inspiration and insight into consumer culture.  And, if you are able to harvest trends before they become mainstreamed and mass produced, not only will you find yourself ahead of the curve, indeed, you can be the innovator of the next successful IPad, American Appareal, Facebook or something even better.

TrendCity
It is in this haze of trends that the TrendCity project becomes obviously necessary.  Ultimately, TrendCity will become the go-to website for groundbreaking trends pertinent to Canadians.  Our website will act as a hub of inspiration for thought leaders and trendsetters in Canada.

By bringing together leading trendsetters we can create the ultimate online community of Canadians to share their insights on the current trends in their area of expertise.  TrendCity members will be able to maximize their networking potentials and feed off the inspiration of other like-minded “Trendies”, while benefiting from exclusive access to groundbreaking trend reports and guest lectures.

TrendCity is currently a work in progress, but we are actively seeking to grow a team of talented Trendies to populate our community.

If you are always ahead of the curve and constantly forecasting future trends (whether it’s science, the arts, design, business, film, technology, education, etc.), send an email to: andi@agentwildfire.com and brag about your trend-talents.

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.

We’re in Montreal this week with our ever-delightful and engaged friends at Infopresse presenting “The Food Industry and Social Media”.

Always enjoy our trips to Montreal and always impressed with the “lean-forward-ness” of the Infopresse audience. April 14th is the date at the Park Hyatt Regency Montreal.

Hopefully we can parlay some of the leanings from our book Wikibrands alongside our command of great social media done well in Food, to educate and trade conversations with an engaged audience.

I’ll be sharing the stage with other fellow foodie/business potentates - Luc Durand from Ipsos Descarie, Pierre-Bernard Dow Blanchet from Taxi and Patrice Resther from Haussmann Conseil to give a full 360 degree view of how to do business in “alimentation” for 2010 and beyond.

Please feel free to chat with us after the session as we have dedicated the afternoon to meeting some of Montreal’s finest digital players, progressive marketeers and engaged business people.

Social networks have not diminished the power of the influencer, they have revealed it.

Consider a few stats:

On LinkedIn - people with +$200K income are 7 times more likely to have +150 connections

On Twitter - only 0.7% of twitterers are followed by 1,000 people

On Wikipedia - 1.7% of the audience publishes 70% of the articles, 0.7% of the audience edits 50% of the artcicles

On Digg - the top 100 Digg users post 56% of the content

In the blogosphere - high authority bloggers post 300x more frequently than low authority bloggers

In life - Influencers have 2x as many social connections and get involved in 2x as many social activities

Face facts - some of these people are not like the other.

And as an organization stretched for time and resources, you need to find out who these people are and get them on your side.

From what pulpit does the influencer’s power govern? There’s like many individual reasons why these people are so powerful but people tend to worship them from their 4 core altars of powers (RECS):

Reach - whether it’s because of hard work, a bit of luck, reputation or charming personality (and usually all 4), these people have many many people who like them, respect them, follow them, fan them - don’t ever let anybody tell you that reach or scale isn’t important when you’re trying to get a message started and going and also remember don’t discount real world reach because you can’t see it - remember more than 80% of conversations still happen real world away from their social network dashboard

Exposure - not only is the vast number of people that follow people but it’s also how broadly scattered that counts. The whole idea of “weak ties” suggests that the more different social circles you’re connected to, the better your message will jump across networks - from a digital standpoint that means, that they blog and I see them on Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook and perhaps some other niches - noticing a wide range of interests and events attended is also an indicator of exposure-driven influence.

Credibility - so they have a lot of people, they also have a wide variety of people - who cares if no one listens to them? Do they have content that screams read me, do they state opinions people adopt with Oprah-like loyalty? Do they’re content rich posts and tweets get rebroadcasted? Do people go out of their way to get their opinions? Credibility takes shallow influence and makes it real and things like follower counts is one of the biggest mistakes in suggesting credibility (retweets, treackbacks and comments do have some merit though).

Suasion - by some magic force, these people get other people to do what they might not normally do. Do these people host events and people come out? Do these people recommend others and people act on their suggestions? Different than credibility, the force of “suasion” causes people to act.  It can be ambient suasion ( they post creative stuff that people react to) or direct (they make recommendations that curns reaction). As a lifelong beer marketer and word of mouth expert, I always suggested to my promotion teams - don’t sample just anybody - find me the guy/girl who is holding court at their table of 20 and is the one in charge of what pitcher of beer they drink. That’s suasion!

Next time, you are thinking about an influencer or grassroots outreach program, think to the power of RECS. Or simply contact Agent Wildfire about our award-winning influencer outreach programs.

Candidly I’m not surprised. For a good decade, the culture of our agencies have been lagging the culture of our customer.

At Agent Wildfire, we have spent the time to know how to get the world of “word of mouth, social media and effective customer engagement and collaboration” right. We have put the time in, asked the best in the business on how they do it, spent the long nights engaging with our audiences and orchestrated ourselves to be the top services firm in Canada geared to social influence marketing.

We like a lot of agencies, don’t get us wrong. But trust me when I say, the moment a client brief says we need some social media, digital engagement or influencer outreach in this year’s campaign or new launch, most start running for the hills. Sure, we get the phone calls to come in on pitches, but by force of nature, passage of time, greediness and/or arrogance, the agency tries to execute it themselves, leaving the industry of “social media” pockmarked with another failure by an agency that overstretched their experience and knowledge base.

Here’s the big problem - finding good talent in this space is difficult, keeping good talent in this space is difficult, doing it in an environment where the agency culture doesn’t respect the impact that social influence  can have is a Herculean task.  Add on top of that, having senior people who have built their careers on mass advertising trying to consider consider the alternative/the future, changing the closed agency culture that is geared to being the creative savants and strategic wunderkinds for their clients and given their current structures, having agencies pay enough attention to this new media that has less standards, less algorithmic predictability and thus, less ability to monetize is glacial in its slowness to adapt.

That’s why you need us. We’re geared for conversation and hungry to prove we’re the best. We have a simple mission of getting our clients noticed, talked about and advocated. It’s a very different mission than our agency brethren. They want to convince masses of consumers that the product is right, superior or well-differentiated for your appetitites.Some do it very well and it works despite our era of media fragmentation and limited attention spans.

We instead want to get customers to participate in the brand, because we know if they do and have a good experiecne, they will become advocates, evangelists and ambasssadors. It is the new currency of marketing and it’s what makes 2/3rds of our economy tick.

And this evolution - requires markedly different talents and infrastructure for getting it right. We believe we have the right alchemy of people, passion, assets and processes to get it right.

Below, you’ll see our overview of why we’re geared for conversation across all key 9 components of building communities/campaigns/buzz more than any other type of services firm in Canada:

Dare you, give us a shout and we’ll stack our skills and abilities up against any top 10 agency in Canada not in TV, radio or outdoor - they would kill us - but smart, engaged grassroots marketing and media - game on!

An invite and referral-only gathering of style-conscious tastemakers, innovation brokers, culture-savvy trendspotters & seriously connected ringleaders who live, work, play & think ahead of the mainstream.

the big idea:
The future is already here, it’s just not widely distributed yet. Less than 4% of the population are true trailblazers of culture - the people that develop incredibly creative or innovative stuff or the people that spot the best stuff first. They are incredible allies for brands trying to build crowdsourced content and creative, sparks for innovation research and seed ambassadors for new launches. TrendCity is the first Canadian-focused network of thousands of these early-adopting people.

elements:
Email newsletter and Insight Blog - exposure among leading Canadian people, places and things
“Wall of Orange” Trendspotter Network - a database of informed early market movers
“Wall of Purple” Tastemaker Network - a hothouse of creative talent and ideasparks
Trend Reports - periodic and customized reports on marketplace and cultural trends
TrendCity Beta Testers - feedback from informed market tastemakers
TrendCity Launching Pad - twice-yearly live event platform for launching products
TrendCity Consulting - workshops and private events on creative ideas and insight on what’s next

benefits:
- superior concept research
- advance testing group
- seeded tastemaker and trendspotter exposure
- innovation stimulus
- seeded and credible ambassadors
- marketplace insight

scope:
- Geography - Canada - Major Cities
- Timing - All year - April and September events, November professional event
- Scale - 5,000 qualified trendspotters/tastemakers

the right partners:
- New launches
- Buzz industries –i.e. entertainment/fashion
- Tech, gadgets, hardware and wireless
- Innovation and insight chasers
- Premium brands and exclusive products
- User-generated content seekers
- Non-traditional exploratory techniques

contact:
Agent Wildfire - Canada’s Word of Mouth Experts www.agentwildfire.com 416-255-4500

the big idea:
The web is filled with “dreck”, wouldn’t you want to find the best of the web all in one place, customized to your interest. And wouldn’t you want you brand sitting in or next to that content too. Although global sites exist, there is yet to be an aggregated best of the web for Canadians, that’s The Influencers in the Know. Tune into our curated web, find out what the influencers are reading and discover special announcements. Content also linked to TheInfluencers.ca

the benefits:
- Cutting edge web exposure/sponsorship for innovative brands
- Target selective influencer audiences
- Promote relevant events
- Conduct blogger outreach
- Provide sponsored, seeded content
- Recruit influencer network
- Optimize search engine rankings

scope:
- Geography - National
- Timing - Fourth quarter 2010
- Scale - 1000s of influencers exposed

the right clients:
- an early adopter, passion-driven audience
- a new launch or campaign
- an upcoming event
- a breakthrough product/product feature
- a content rich, taste-appealing web destination

url:
www.theinfluencersintheknow.com

contact:
Agent Wildfire - Canada’s Word of Mouth Experts www.agentwildfire.com 416-255-4500

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 .

Come out and get informed, inspired and lead by Canada’s own word of mouth and community building expert while he argues on why word-of-mouth is dominating traditional media in a stressed economy. Sean will elaborate on 12 key types of word-of-mouth marketing, where and when they should be implemented and discuss a list of basic reasons why people talk. Sean will host the “Word of Mouth, Social Media & Community Building Roundtable” event (in a more intimate and interactive setting than the last 2 years of conferences he chaired) on September 22, 2009 at 8:00am to 10:00 am, venue: Toronto:TBD. See the link for further details and pricing of the event.

http://www.the-cma.org/?WCE=C=47|K=229024