Building Authentic Customer Communities: American Express & Meetup
From Meetup.com During the WOMMA Summit in Las Vegas last week, I attended a session with American Express OPEN to learn about their nation-wide Meetups geared toward bringing small business owners together to learn, share and grow. With over 7 million registered users, American Express OPEN Forum is an online “trading po

Tweetsgiving: What Are You Thankful For?
Leave it to social media to alter the time tested traditions of football, family and food comas on Thanksgiving. Epic Change, a non-profit that helps amplify the stories of changemakers and social entrepreneurs to help them raise needed funds, is in the midst of their second annual “Tweetsgiving”. TweetsGiving is a global celebration that seeks to change the world through the power of gratitude by encouraging participants to express their thanks using online tools and at live events. The Twitterverse has been abuzz these past fe

Finding Passion with Aquaphor
With so many great insights and case studies at this year’s WOMMA in Las Vegas, it’s hard to sum it all up in one post. We saw a number of trends in insights, bringing to light the best practices from top WOM marketers. Many of these best practices were incorporated in the Team Aquaphor campaign with Active Marketing and Beiersdorf (leading to it’s success). Active Marketing Group works w/ teams of ambassadors (or their list of influencers) who apply for specific brand engagements/positions made available through Active Marketing Group. Featured at WO

Patagonia: Selling a Story
From Rob BonDurant, VP of Marketing at Patagonia – from today’s WOMMA Summit. Patagonia… Uses business to inspire and implement solutions to the sustainability crisis Believes passion cannot be created Is a non profit thinly disguised as a company Makes money so they can demonstrate their business model works, and donate more money to their 1% Earth Tax Designs its products and communications to adhere to the natural law of simplicity – things are done when there is nothing left to take away Always has an answer to “Who we are? How did we get here? Where are we going?” Is driven by story te

Shifting Search Trends
Neatly six months after the feds officially dropped the “Swine Flu” term in favor of the scientifically-grounded “H1N1″, web users are finally showing signs of following suit as evidenced by recent shifts in keyword searches. According to Google’s Insights for Search tool, worldwide searchers for the first time since the outbreak have searched for “H1N1″ in greater numbers than “Swine Flu.”