Blog for the "Word of Mouth Marketing Association."

Quoted: Word of Mouth Marketing Association is the official organization for the viral, blog, buzz, evangelism, influential, consumer-generated-media and word of mouth marketing industry. Events, newsletters, blogs and knowledge about word of mouth and word-of-mouth marketing.

A great piece on viral marketing. It uses the launch of Hotmail as a case study. While the web has come a long ways, it pays to remember that the right product, pushed fairly simply, can have a big impact and spread itself.

Some pretty funny development cliches which are appropos to software startups. My favorites are:

Quoted: Let's do a focus group, they'll decide. A focus group is supposed to focus you, not them. It's supposed to lay out ideas and issues that mean little to the group and plenty to you. If you're not prepared to focus, better to not go.

Quoted: We need a bigger marketing department. Probably, you need everyone in the organization to do the marketing... from scratch. More brochures aren't the answer.

A great post from Seth Godin which is quite appropos to our cuurent dialogs.

An article with 5 ways to write web copy that converts.

More on the value of tweaking from Seth Godin. This is a good post. As with most things, the ideal he speaks about is right on but the reality of these tweaks (and measuring them) CAN be much more complex. At Amazon, sometimes things that were "obviously" better would take months to come out because to instrument all of the metrics that needed to be captured to provie it was way more work than the actual code being altered.

Quoted: The opportunity, as the web becomes more sophisiticated and CSS gets implemented more often, is to figure out how to tweak a page while it's running and get 2% better response from that page. 2% isn't a lot--until you multiply it by a million page views.

They're trying to sell the ipod hat now. Interesting marketing photo if you're trying to sell a hat...

OpenOffice.org has a new set of ads targeted at Microsoft Office. They're putting them on Redmond buses...

Quoted: They're advertising OpenOffice, a free, open-source office software suite from Sun Microsystems. Other slogans include, "Stop giving a bully your lunch money", "Compatible with expensive, closed, memory loving software", and "Prehistoric reptilians welcome."

Now that's a great advertising idea - a sundial!

Quoted: (Crain’s) — McDonald’s Corp. is striking back in the ongoing fast food breakfast war with a new billboard in Wrigleyville. Designed by ad agency Leo Burnett with the input of an engineer, the billboard features a real sundial whose shadow falls on a different breakfast item each hour until ...