A Bigger Ant Hill

Great news from the WOMMA Summit today – Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, co-authors of the book, Citizen Marketers have joined Sean O’Driscoll, Jake McKee and their fabulous team at Ants Eye View. The move expands Ant’s Eye View’s services by adding industry expertise in word of mouth marketing, digital strategy, customer evangelism and social media.

Ben and Jackie have been recognized as two of the web’s most influential marketers with over 120,000 daily readers of their Church of the Customer blog and best selling Word of Mouth Marketing books, Citizen Marketers and Creating Customer Evangelists. Forbes has described their work as “the word of mouth gospel.” As Ben says, "We're very excited to be part of a group that helps business get smart about being social. It's a good time to help convert that into action at a larger scale."

I am so happy for Ben and Jackie as I’ve found their books ignited my strong interest in word of mouth marketing and ultimately, social media. I met Jackie at my first WOMMA summit in 2005 when she keynoted and captivated the audience with her stories of customer evangelism. Her storytelling of the success of a YouTube Shakira video where fans danced to Hips Don’t Lie was captivating. By the end of the keynote, the whole room was dancing with Jackie. I was so inspired by Jackie’s speech that I made sure that Ben came to Seattle to keynote the annual Seattle Direct Marketing Association (SDMA) conference the following year. I think the association still has a few hundred books if anyone is interested. :) Last year when I was laid off, Jackie wrote a blog post which helped bring much needed visibility to my job search. Needless to say, I am grateful for their support and friendship.

I’ve known Sean for a similar amount of time. Rather than boring you with more minutiae, let me just say that Sean is one of the most outstanding individuals that I know in Seattle. In addition to his superior drive, integrity and intelligence, he is forthright, helpful and very humble. A true leader that anyone would want to go to battle with. In a short year, Ant's Eye View has built an impressive roster of clients like Cisco, Apple, Pemco and a bunch of others. I am truly delighted to see these talented individuals team up together.

Sean and Jake’s goal has been simple, “to field the most experienced and capable team in the industry to serve their clients.” I’m confident that this announcement delivers on that promise and more!

Congratulations and best of luck to all.

Twitter Presentations

Last week at the WOMMA University conference, I was one of the leaders of the workshops focused on optimizing your Twitter performance.  As a takeaway for the attendees, I sent links to a few Twitter presentations that I had created. 

A few months ago, I presented Become a Twitter Ninja at a webinar sponsored by The Society for Word of Mouth.  The webinar and presentation seemed to be quite popular, especially on Slideshare.

Become A Twitter Ninja

View more presentations from Warren Sukernek.

 

As a follow-up to that presentation, here is Become a Twitter Grandmaster.  This presentation has already been a featured presentation on Slideshare as well.

Become a Twitter Grandmaster

View more presentations from Warren Sukernek.

Feel free to download the presentations and let me know if you have any questions.

WOMMA rocks South Beach: Inside the numbers

I returned from a great WOMM U. social media and word of mouth marketing training event put on by WOMMA in South Beach. It was a great event and I got to lead a few workshops on Twitter. You can find those presentations, Ninja and Grandmaster. We’ve all experienced how Twitter enhances events via note-taking, sharing, reporting, and meeting others and that was certainly in evidence here. John Moore did a great job organizing and curating the conference tweets. Using our Radian6 listening platform, I hope to show some of the analytics behind it. There were 2035 posts dedicated to the conference over the last week.

As expected, traffic spiked during the two days of the conference, peaking at 458 posts on Thursday, 5/14 with just a few less, 426 on Wednesday, 5/13. Of the 2035 posts, the majority, 95% were tweets. The remaining conversation took place in blogs, videos (mainly from Co-Brandit) and pictures (primarily from Josh Hallett). There were 432 retweets, with the majority occurring on the two conference days (157 on Wednesday and 214 on Thursday).

You can see a sample of the detailed posts below.

The tag cloud below shows the most popular subjects on Thursday’s busy day.

As you can see, Facebook, Myspace and Disney were popular presentations. The trend chart below shows the most active conference conversations as Yelp’s presentation was most popular on Day 1 and then the big three of Facebook, Myspace and Disney made up 69% of the activity on Day 2.

To better understand why Facebook was the most popular subject, please read John Bell’s excellent blog about the MySpace and Facebook face-off presentation, providing great insight into how marketers can work the platforms.

I loved the WOMM U conference, and as you can see from the graphs, so did the other attendees.

Become a Twitter Ninja

Today I was fortunate to present a webinar with the great folks from The Society for Word of Mouth, Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, Become a Twitter Ninja. We had a great crowd on the webinar, all excited to learn more about taking the next step on Twitter and engaging with their audience. That was exciting to see.

Feel free to download the presentation.

Become A Twitter Ninja

View more presentations from Warren Sukernek. (tags: webinar swom)

AS you would expect from a Twitter webinar, there was some great dialogue/ feedback on Twitter. Here are some sample comments: