Pass it On: The WOM Meme

So we're ramping up to ASAE's Great Ideas Conference in Miami (three words: YAP Miami Vice), and Lindy and I thought it might fun - and useful! - to start a meme.

We were lucky enough that Lindy's interview with Andy Sernovitz, the master of word of mouth, got picked for the cover story of the January issue of Associations Now, and it has continued to get some good reviews since, and was also picked up by Acronym.

So, we thought, what a cool idea it would be to use word of mouth to talk about word of mouth!!

So here it is: The WOM Meme.

First things first. What's word of mouth? Here are some resources.

Sernovitz's simple lessons?

Make it easy.
Make it shareable.
Make it interesting.

Now, you might think this WOM stuff is only for marketers, or mar/com, or membership folks. But we think you can apply word of mouth to pretty much ANY area of association management... and we'd like to task our blogger buddies to prove it. Or, another way to think about it is that marketing and membership actually touch everything, therefore WOM can touch everything too. Let's see if that holds true...

So here's the meme: Please do a short blog post with an example of how you've seen WOM used in your work. Then tag a couple of [association/non-profit] people to do the same.

I'm going to tag a few of you here; Lindy will tag a few more over on the Springboard. The subject matter listed for each person is just an example, you can write whatever you want!

Peggy Hoffman - volunteerism
Jeff Cobb - e-learning
Jeff De Cagna - innovation
Matt Baehr - small staff association management
Margaret Core - events
Young Women Misbehavin' (Stefanie Gans) - advocacy, government relations
David Patt - governance
Dana Theus - membership marketing
Lynn Morton - community building
Acronym (Lisa Junker) - publications
Elizabeth Engel - consulting
Sterling Raphael - community design
Kivi Leroux - nonprofit fundraising
Wes Trochlil - business intelligence.

As Elizabeth would say, thanks for playing! :)



Image from Buzz Canuck