BlogWorks: WOMBAT recap

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January 20, 2006

WOMBAT recap

By David Binkowski

The Word of Mouth Basic Training (WOMBAT) conference in Orlando is wrapping up today, where I had the pleasure of presenting at two sessions (How to Sell Word of Mouth To Your Boss and How To Create Great Blogs That Get People Talking). The turnout has been fantastic, with over 450 attendees learning, interacting, teaching and, yes, schmoozing.

My first presentation, How to Sell WOM, was on Thursday with Dan Buczaczer from Reverb. The presentation was centered around four types of resistance you might encounter when trying to present a WOM campaign or idea to your boss. Dan presented a case study for a WOM campaign that helped launch a new whole grain-enriched white bread from Sara Lee. The strategy was to make people think of more than white bread, to focus on their children's health. They created a microsite within the allrecipes.com web site, sponsored by Sara Lee. The site was an online community that accepted and posted recipes submitted by users of the site.

Our session triggered several questions that allowed attendees to get specific, expert advice and answers to help them sell WOM. Very successful.

The second panel was on Creating Great Blogs, hosted by Michael Wiley, Director of New Media at GM (and FastLane blog fame). The panelists included PR/media/blog expert (and famed Micropersuasion blogger) Steve Rubel, Jason Woodmansee of Taylormade adidas Golf, and me.

Steve's presentation focused on his firm’s approach to creating a blog. Here's the Reader's Digest version of their four steps (longer version here;)

1. Find - Seek out conversations online / identify your influencer online evangelists. Technorati's a great place to start.

2. Listen - What are they saying about you? Be an active listener. Steve touched on a company's higher holy calling (see: white bread & kids health) Formulate your strategy for step 3 here.

3. Engage - Pretty self explanatory -- launch that blog!

4. Empower - Use the blogosphere to empower your evangelists to tell stories.

Jason's story was pretty amazing -- he started a no-holds-barred blog without corporate permission that six months later became an accepted corporate tool to connect with their customers. He went through the evolution of their blog (which, technically, started as a blog before there were blogs) and gave some extremely positive testimonials that were posted on the blog.

I presented our "lessons learned" from the FastLane blog (including other examples of great blogs, like Steve and Jason's blogs) and went through a list of components that all great blogs have in common.

After finishing the presentations, Michael moderated an active Q&A session that involved questions about maintaining blogs, content creation, earning blog comments, comment spam and fake blogs. I’ll post a link to the audio once it’s available.

Posted by staff at January 20, 2006 01:56 PM