I gave a three-hour workshop on Audience Generation with David Robinson of Birch Studio for The Charlottesville Chamber of Commerce.

You can download the presentation here => Audience Generation - Social Media, Search and Email

REQUEST FOR RECOMMENDATIONS!  Get Your Recommendations Published in the Workshop Handouts

On Wednesday, April 15th David Robinson of Birch Studio and I will be leading a 3 hour workshop for the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce.  The workshop is titled: How to Cost Effectively Drive Audiences to Your Website.  And, I need your help.

Would you be willing send me your recommendation on how to cost effectively drive audiences to websites? I’d love to plug in your recommendations into the workshop materials we handout to attendees and that will be presented during the workshop.  It is also a great way to demonstrate the collaborative power of social networking to attendees.

Each person providing a recommendation will get a dedicated slide in the deck.

When you send over your recommendation, please include a photo of yourself, your company name, URL and either a Twitter link or blog URL so that workshop attendees can learn more about you.  Please email me your recommendation to todd(at)audiencemachine(dot)com.

The handbooks are going to be printed on Monday — that’s the plan as far as I know — so please send me your recommendation before Monday, April 13th.

And, of course, I’ll give you a copy of the deck.

Many thanks!

When you think of Twitter the first thought that pops into your mind is most likely not community destination but Chad Engle is challenging that concept.  Chad’s created Design Community Twitter Hours a Thursday night - 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm EST - online group that connects via Twitter at @DCTH to discuss graphic design.

I interviewed Chad recently to get his take on Twitter and community.

Audience Machine:  Let’s start from the beginning.  What was your inspiration for creating DCTH - Design Community Twitter Hours?

DCTH:  Sounds good. The inspiration came from a conversation one night with Adelle and Graham about the design community. We had a conversation in a forum type chat room and it was impossible to keep up and it seemed tons of people had questions about everything design related. So I decided that we as a design community needed a forum to talk to each other.

Audience Machine: When did you activate your the DCTH — http://twitter.com/DCTH  — account on Twitter?  And, and many Followers do you have?  What do you know about your Followers?  Who are they?

DCTH:  Believe it or not I did not even think about making a twitter account for DCTH. I ran it from my personal twitter account ( @chadengle ) the first few weeks and then Niki Brown was a co-host of #DCTH for a few weeks (and will be again provided she will help ) mentioned that I should have an account for it so I made one. At first I just let people follow it who were designers/creatives. Then I realized thats not really how I wanted to build my network, I wanted to make go after as many designers and creatives as possible. So I have started to follow them all because I want to build the DCTH community as big as we can make it. Its been great to hear all of the success stories and have the community support that has come from this. (more…)

In May of 2006, I published a research paper with Osterman Research highlighting the challenges brands would face as they embarked on implementing word of mouth marketing campaigns.  The study took 6 months to implement and eventually grew to 54 pages of content.

My goal was to provide organizations interested in, or even intimidated by, word-of-mouth (WOM) campaigns with data and guidance designed to help them integrate this exciting strategy into their marketing and media plans.

The study is titled Perceptions, Practices & Ethics in Word of Mouth Marketing.  And, I’m making it available again.  Is it still relevant?  Well, from a planning standpoint I think the topics are still as relevant today as they were two years ago.

I also turned the release of the study into an example of how to support viral marketing pass along.  The study was downloaded over 150,000 from May 2006 to February 2009.

Here’s how we did it:

1. We started with no marketing budget and decided to use a free e-book framework to drive distribution.
2. We became members of communities to hear what was going on and to gain qualified participants for the survey. This platform also allowed us to announce to relevant communities when the study was available.
3. Created a database. We captured the email addresses, names, and company names of all survey participants. We also included email requests for the survey that were appended to the database. There are 217 records in the database for email requests.
4. We communicated. We thanked individuals for participating.  And, sent them a link to pick up the results.
5. We said something important. The study took 6 months from formulation to publishing and we focused on giving readers valuable and actionable information. The content publishing focus was on tips and techniques.
6. We focused on co-creation. This is an important step. We reached out to 45 industry experts and competitor firms in our industry ten days before we published and, asked them for their feedback and insight. 38 individuals responded, and 17 of those people provided lengthy comments and insight that enhanced the quality of the work and required us to rethink some of the conclusions and rationale. Personally, I’m still thrilled and humbled that competitor firms say that the work is incredibly valuable and comprehensive.
7. We recognized the contributions of those that contributed feedback.  And, even asked some individuals for reviews of the study that we published as Accolades.
8. We did a blogged press release. Having a blog press release really helped to drive distribution.
9. We created a counter so that we could track downloads.
10. We provided links to relevant publishers that cover the WOM industry.
11. We talked about the study at industry events.
12. We commented on comments to be part of the conversation.  Thanking people for reviews gave us more content to reference in the form of lists of people who were talking about the study.  This became blog post content.
13. We shared our success by publishing download counts.
14. We published snippets of content from the study with additional insight on our blog.
15. Once it was added on Wikipedia — we linked to it.  NOTE:  If you feel the study is worth adding back into the Wikipedia article for Word of Mouth or Word of Mouth Marketing, I hope you’ll add it as a resource.

In addition to the 150,000 downloads, I was interviewed for a New York Time article on social media and generated $1.685 million in new business.

TAGS:  Word of mouth, word of mouth marketing, wikipedia, Osterman Research, Audience Machine, content distribution, viral marketing,

Audience Machine to provide unique social networking technologies and viral marketing services to Brands, Entertainment, Health & Wellness and Education Companies

Los Angeles, CA and Charlottesville, VA — February 17, 2009 — Los Angeles, CA and Charlottesville, Virginia - February 17, 2009 - Social networking and viral marketing expert, VBMA (Viral & Buzz Marketing Association) board member, and Perceptions, Practices & Ethics in Word of Mouth Marketing author Todd Tweedy today introduced, Audience Machine Inc., a unique technology company helping online brands who want to identify, cultivate and mobilize communities of individuals with shared interest across social networking sites to build their businesses using Audience Machine’s online marketing tools.

Guided by Tweedy, and video technology pioneer and advertising veteran Dan Bates, Audience Machine helps brand and product managers, chief marketing officers as well as ecommerce executives to establish new networks of social networking connections and dialog in support of purchasing preferences and participation in word of mouth referrals.

“Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are relationship amplifiers for brands, products and services that can have a profound influence on preferences, referral behavior, information consumption and internet usage if advertisers are prepared to listen to, act on and match the right technology and community practices to support a desired purchase outcome or subscription,” noted Todd Tweedy, co-founder and CEO of Audience Machine. “There is a natural migration of dialogs from offline sources to online social sharing sites. Marketing executives want to embrace customer-facing ad strategies and incorporate social networking processes in their firm’s online marketing DNA that can boost product perceptions and potential sales but many enterprises lack the expertise and resources to realize those objectives. Audience Machine was founded to give online brands unique technology solutions, community development processes, marketing services, analytics, and expertise they need to engage and collaborate with audiences.”

Audience Machine also announced that is has signed a strategic business development consulting agreement that will be led by Provident Financial Management, a prominent established leader in entertainment and media business management.

“Audience Machine is at the heart of an evolving consumer-facing marketing phenomenon that is transforming connections on social networks into a powerful audience generation channel. Led by an experienced executive team and founded on concrete business fundamentals with a number of high-profile clients already on board, Audience Machine is a rising star among our media and communication clients,” stated Craig Sussman, Business Development Director at Provident. We’re excited to support Audience Machine as they grow their technology and services business practices with customers that want and need to expand and sustain business growth by creating networks of social commerce.”

Word of Mouth Communications Opportunity
The eighth annual Burson-Marsteller/PRWeek CEO Survey published in November 2008, which surveys CEO’s about the changing influence of different types of media as well as plans for digital communications including social networking, reported that 60% of CEO’s noted that word of mouth has the fastest growing influence on business in the past three years but that just one-fifth of firms have used social media to communicate with stakeholder groups.

The proliferation of social networking and community sites has transformed viral and word of mouth marketing practices into a practical and necessary communication solution due in part to research findings that note that nearly 80% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know over all forms of advertising and marketing. These authentic and trusted voices serve an important role by distributing compete information for others to act upon across search engines and into indexes of shared knowledge that people can access along with advertiser-generated experiences and evidence whenever 1,463,632,361 internet users from around the world - based on Internet Usage and Population in North American data provided by Internet World Stats - need to research a brand, product or service.

Audience Machine Team
Led by Tweedy, who’s career started in the political grassroots mobilization arena working on Presidential, Senatorial, Congressional, Inaugural and issue-based public relations campaigns, the Audience Machine team has 35 years of combined leadership experience in online marketing, real-time communications, ASP development, video ad technology, viral marketing, search engine optimization, and community development practices.

Dan Bates, co-founder, president and COO brings a vast wealth of knowledge in community technology development, online video, online advertising and a decade’s experience in filmed entertainment and music. Bates previous served as CEO of Avant Interactive, an object-based video ad serving technology provider.

About Audience Machine
With offices in Los Angeles, California and Charlottesville, Virginia, Audience Machine is a provider of unique community technology solutions and online marketing services. Audience Machine works with online brands to identify, cultivate and mobilize communities of shared interest to establish social commerce that CMO’s, brand and product managers, and ecommerce executives can enlist to grow their business. The company is privately held. For more information, please visit Audience Machine’s website - http://www.audiencemachine.com, email us at info@audiencemachine.com, or call 1.800.573.1536. Audience Machine is presently engaged with several beta customers and will release its first product in Q2 of this year.

About Provident Financial Management
Established over twenty-five years ago with offices in Los Angeles, Woodland Hills, San Francisco and New York, Provident has become a leader in various entertainment and media business management practices. Provident recently established a strategic and business planning department to assist mid sized and emerging entertainment and media companies with their growth and business development needs. Provident Financial Management is part of RSM McGladrey one of the largest and most prominent accounting firms in the world. For more information on RSM McGladrey, please visit http://www.rsmi.com.