Come to an upcoming BlogWell: How Big Brands Use Social Media conference in San Francisco or Seattle to hear brands like Adobe, Symantec, SAP, Mattel, Microsoft, MillerCoors, Boeing, and Intel share 8 great case studies on corporate social media.
You’ll learn how to get started, get past roadblocks, and make your social media program phenomenal — all in one afternoon, for just $250.
You’ll get practical, how-to advice on creating great content, getting management buy-in, educating employees, simple and ethical disclosure, and engaging fans. You’ll ask questions, discover new ideas, and get answers from people who have been there, done that — all in four hours.
…and you’ll experience a bunch of great case studies, like this one from our BlogWell in New York:
If you could get just a few more people to share your website every day, how many more people could you reach in a year? Get started by focusing on these basics:
1> Put a tell-a-friend form on every page
2> Host your content elsewhere
3> Make everything easy to steal
1> Put a tell-a-friend form on every page
Tell-a-friend forms are still one of the easiest ways to make it simple to share your content. We’re fans of both SocialTwist and Spreadable, and there are tons of other off-the-shelf tools you can embed that don’t require much HTML experience. Just having the forms visible on your site has its benefits too, as it gets people thinking about telling their friends.
2> Host your content elsewhere
If you’re still using your own proprietary tools to host your company videos and presentations, you’re probably creating headaches for the people trying to share them. Embrace SlideShare for slides, YouTube and Vimeo for videos, and Flickr for photos. There’s a reason we all use these tools in our personal lives: they work great and they’re easy to tell friends about.
3> Make everything easy to steal
As a word of mouth marketer, your job is to remove all the barriers your fans have to overcome when they want to take and pass along your stuff. When people land on your site, it should be easy to grab, forward, share, and re-use your logo, product images, copy, descriptions, etc. If it takes too much effort to take it, lots of potential talkers might give up.
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You don’t need an advanced degree to be an amazing word of mouth marketer, you just need to focus on being great at the fundamentals. Regardless of your budget or your available tools, don’t forget these basics:
1> Use the tools everyone knows
2> Put it in an email
3> Keep it simple
1> Use the tools everyone knows
When putting your content out there for the world to discover and share, use the tools everyone is familiar with. Put your videos on YouTube, put your photos on Flickr, and put your presentations on Slideshare. Burying your content deep on your corporate website and hosting it on your weird proprietary platform only serves to make it impossible to find and annoying to share.
2> Put it in an email
Email remains the fastest, most portable, most effective word of mouth tool ever invented. Share coupons via email, start a newsletter, and get in the habit of creating email versions of everything you hope to spread. Retweets and re-postings on Facebook are wonderful, but nothing beats a personalized endorsement from a fan delivered straight to the inbox of a friend.
3> Keep it simple
As a word of mouth marketer, your job is to make it easier for conversations to take place. Use simple topics and simple technology. If whatever you’re doing is making it more complicated for a fan to tell a friend, why are you doing it?
Come to BlogWell: How Big Brands Use Social Media on November 9 to hear SAP, SunGard, American Express, Scholastic, BlackRock, Johnson & Johnson, The Hershey Company, and Pfizer share case studies in corporate social media. You’ll learn how to get started, get past roadblocks, and make your social media program phenomenal — in one afternoon, for just $250.
You’ll get practical, how-to advice on creating great content, getting management buy-in, educating employees, keeping lawyers and regulators happy, simple and ethical disclosure, and engaging fans. You’ll ask questions, discover new ideas, and get answers from people who have been there, done that — all in four hours.
In his BlogWell case study presentation, “Finding the ‘Voice of McDonald’s’”, McDonald’s Manager of Global Web Communications, Joe Curry, explained the social media details behind their American Idol-like internal competition.
Joe shared how they got their employees involved, how they used different platforms to spread the word, and the amazing numbers and results from the competition.
This is GasPedal's blog about all things word of mouth marketing. We cover everything from the best word of mouth case studies to the latest research, focusing on the practical ideas you can use to get your fans talking about you.
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Come to an upcoming BlogWell: How Big Brands Use Social Media conference in San Francisco or Seattle to hear brands like Adobe, Symantec, SAP, Mattel, Microsoft, MillerCoors, Boeing, and Intel share 8 great case studies on corporate social media. 
