SimpsonScarborough: Intelligent Marketing for Higher Education

Does everyone know what WOMMA is? It’s the Word of Mouth Marketing Association and we should all be members. They define word of mouth as “the act of consumers providing information to other consumers,” and they define word of mouth marketing as “giving people a reason to talk about your products and services, and making it easier for that conversation to take place.”

Most college and university marketers would probably admit that word of mouth is critical to their image and reputation building efforts. Yet, I don’t know of any who have coordinated strategies for stimulating or harnessing word of mouth. That’s why I recruited Andy Sernovitz to speak at the 2007 AMA Symposium in San Diego this November.

Andy is the author of "Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking", former CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), and Lecturer at Northwestern University. He’s going to talk about finding the right people to talk about your school (influencers and evangelists), giving them something to talk about (viral email, samples, buzz, and more), creating tools to make it easier for them to talk to each other (blogs, discussions, tell-a-friend forms), participating in the conversation, and tracking and measuring results. Buy his book ahead of time and check out his blog to learn more.

-- Elizabeth Scarborough