Thumbing through the Site library, we came across some nice pointers given by Andy Sernovitz in his Word of Mouth Marketing of 2006:

• Reply and respond.
• Thank people who say nice things about you.
• Fix problems and make people happy.

Puts to mind advice from a marketing trailblazer of another era, Dale Carnegie. First published in 1936, How to Win Friends and Influence People seems as relevant today as ever. Leafing through our – ahem – 1980 print edition, Mr. Carnegie’s advice is spot on for anyone engaged in word of mouth, buzz marketing or social media marketing today:

• Become genuinely interested in other people.
• Give honest, sincere appreciation.
• Be a good listener. Encourage people to talk about themselves.
• Talk in terms of the other people’s interest.
• Make others feel important, and do it sincerely.

Check out what Marketing Profs had to say about viral marketing. For once, the math looks right. 10 people tell 5, or a million tell 500K. So many expect the opposite – 5 people to tell ten each.

I also liked Dunay’s reference to Duncan Watts’ theory, also noted in Site’s Random Acts of Social Marketing post of a few months ago. Watts says it’s the network itself, not any individual contributor that makes the most difference in the successful spread of a virus. Today on MarketingProfs, Dunay rightly cites not the message content, not the viral mechanism, but the network properties of the “bored at work” segment as the determining agent in the spread of a meme.

Although, message content that includes information about a public figure with a personality disorder (Perez Hilton, W., etc.) does help!

More and more, execs are being prompted by their boards, their PR staff and their agency partners to blog. They know the importance of social media. They’ve seen the number of social media-focused panels triple and quadruple at their favorite marketing conferences from ad:tech to TED. They are beginning to listen seriously to what their customers are saying about their products and brands with social media monitoring tools and are even facilitating more consumer-driven dialog by building community platforms for customer feedback and ongoing dialog.

But when it comes to writing their own blog, marketing execs often are slow to start because they don’t know what they want to say.

I thought this recent post by the CMO of Prosper, an auction-based peer-to-peer lending site (and, yes, a Site client), was a terrific example of exactly what a marketing executive blog post ought to look like:

1) It’s timely. The subject of the post is an initiative Prosper was to launch that week.

2) It’s personal. The post speaks to Catherine’s personal and direct experience with the initiative.

3) It’s a gateway to more content. The post includes a number of links to other parts of the site giving readers a number of avenues for more content.

With all the pressure on CMOs today for accountable, metrics-driven, move-the-needle marketing, it can be difficult to justify pausing your bottom-line focus to write a blog post.

But to my mind, executive participation in social media is a crucial part of a comprehensive social media strategy. Even if we have the listening technology, analytical staff and community marketers to build a relationship marketing nirvana, publishing our thoughts about the business, the brand or the industry and inviting public comment should always be a part of our social media marketing plan.

An interesting debate about the nature of social trends has been launched by Duncan Watts, a network theory scientist who challenges much of Malcolm Gladwell’s assertions about social trends in his breakout best-seller, The Tipping Point.

Central to the debate is the relative importance of influencers – those critical dialed-in, friend-laden, early-adopters behind whom the rest of us tag along mimicking their behavior and consumption habits. Gladwell’s Tipping Point expands upon a several decades-old theory that puts extra weight on these anointed influential few who marketers and politicians love to court. Indeed, if we agree that “one in 10 Americans tell the other 9 how to vote, where to eat, and what do buy”, all we have to do is find and persuade that 10% and we’re home free.

Hogwash, says Watts. The emergence of a social trend is governed more by the social environment at the time than anything else, he says. Like a wildfire, if conditions are right, the meme spreads no matter who started it or who carries it.

Having cut my marketing teeth before the Internet was a twinkle in anyone’s eye, this view has appeal. I still recall with wispy reverence the hollowed maxim that “the job of the marketer is to find a gap in the marketplace between what exists and what is needed and fill it.” The implication being that the marketplace is more to be surfed than manipulated.

Marketers of emerging technologies, of course, can’t look around for appetites to satisfy, they have to create them. They champion technologies that no one ever has heard of let alone needs. The benefits of many Internet technologies – especially social media technologies – are a challenge to articulate in the early going because their utility depends upon wide-spread adoption. It’s like always being the first telephone salesman in town (“Tele-what? Who would I call?”). If I were that guy, I too would target the visible, the connected, the influential town elite and hope that telecommunication catches on in Peoria.

But I’ll tell you what else I’d do. I’d target a few people at random as well, because when it comes to pushing memes through a network, what I like most about what Watts has to say is that it’s the random connections that seem to make the most difference. Highly connected network nodes, or network influentials can connect you quickly to all the contacts in their particular cluster – the president of the Rotary or Junior League in our small town example. But it’s the random traveling salesman or church choir member who may not fit into a well-defined social cluster who spreads the growth of a trend to places you may never have imagined.