And while it’s different for every brand and every group of talkers, there are a few core forms of content that fans typically love to share.

What you should try:

• Content about them. If there’s one thing people love to talk about — online or off — it’s themselves. Try initiatives such as group projects, featuring customers’ work, or posting photos or interviews of your fans.
• Exclusive content. If everyone knows it, there’s no reason to talk about it. But content that nobody has seen yet — new products, sneak previews or insider news — has natural viral potential. We love being the first to tell our friends about this stuff.
• Fun stuff. It’s hard to talk about serious business all of the time. That’s the reason goofy, off-topic and funny content can be such a powerful word-of-mouth tool. Try simple stuff such as photos that show employees’ personality, hiding a few Easter eggs in your products, celebrating an obscure holiday or doing a wacky stunt.

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Whether you’re getting started or looking to boost buzz about what you’re doing, there are a few simple steps you can take.

Here are a few ideas to try.

• Share other people’s content. This is counterintuitive to a lot of marketers, but to make your Twitter stream more interesting, it’s important to share content from people other than you. In testing this, social media strategist Mack Collier saw a significant increase in traffic when he mixed in tweets promoting his content with tweets promoting others’.
• Pay attention to timing. Did you know you have the highest odds of getting a retweet at 5 p.m.? That you can get a higher click-through rate by tweeting one to four times per hour? Of course, it all depends on your talkers, but you’d be amazed at how much research is available to help you get more people sharing your Twitter content.
• Share behind-the-scenes stuff. Try tweeting photos, videos and links to content that fans don’t normally get to see. Fans who actively follow you on Twitter are doing so because they want more than the stuff you share on your website and blog, so this is your chance to give it to them.

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This is the challenge facing Chris Obray and his team. And at our recent BlogWell event, he walked us through a small portion of Cargill’s overall plan to use social media to actually get people sampling the product. Here are a few of his recommendations.

• Find your advocates to introduce you. Cargill partnered with Her Campus — the No. 1 online magazine for college women, by college women — to do photo contests, giveaways and weight-loss challenges, all leading up to local events and opportunities to sample Truvia.
• Be conscious of your bias. Obray loves Foursquare and originally planned a check-in contest as part of the project — but found a significant portion of college women avoid location-based networks, because of stalkers or ex-boyfriends — so he and his team substituted a photo contest instead.
• Certain platforms drive certain behaviors. In planning this social strategy, Obray and his team broke each social network down by its ability to support awareness, consideration, product trials or post-purchase follow-ups.

Watch Obray’s case study. Slides are available.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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To demonstrate this shift, Deluxe launched Project REV, a yearlong marketing lab in which nine small-business owners were given $5,000 in Deluxe marketing products and services as well as expert consulting. In his BlogWell presentation, Deluxe’s Nathan Eide walked us through the program and explained how social media played a critical role in its success.

A few of Eide’s big ideas:

• Personal stories create the most compelling content. Eide and his team found that the most interesting content for readers and the media were personal stories, such as the business owner who talked openly about the difficulties of filling out a creative brief for the first time.
• Take advantage of public feedback. Participants in Project REV shared a problem with one of the products, so Deluxe asked for more opinions on its Facebook page. Not only did the company get priceless input on how to make the product better, but it also got many customers engaged in the process.
• Incorporate customer ideas into your business. In wrapping up Project REV, Deluxe asked for ideas on what it could do better for small-business owners, who ultimately came up with four business offerings for the company.

Watch Eide’s case study. Slides are available.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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In their BlogWell presentation, Itron’s Michelle Jung and Dawn Shrum walked us through how they took a grassroots social program started by a few employees and turned it into an official, companywide initiative.

A few of their key takeaways:

• Start by listening internally. One of the first things Itron did was distribute an internal survey asking employees where they were already engaging online and where relevant industry conversations were taking place. This helped them quickly focus on places to listen and engage.
• Share the conversations with everyone. Each week, Dawn and Michelle’s team send out a “Chatter Report” that outlines key topics being discussed online and the status of social projects. This helps build buy-in and participation, and it gets important information spread throughout the company.
• Search for the internal evangelists. By listening to their employees and sharing social media findings with the company, they’ve had a number of internal evangelists and talkers come forward as volunteers wanting to help in online participation.

Watch Michelle and Dawn’s presentation (slides available here):

Click here to view the embedded video.

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In his presentation at our BlogWell conference, Microsoft’s Nestor Portillo outlined how the company is creating a network of credible, independent influencers to help it reach a wider, more diverse audience.

A few of his key take-aways:

• Influencers help you scale. By giving resources and authority to influencers, Microsoft is able to connect with customers in markets and languages that it doesn’t have the ability to otherwise reach. This is the only way Microsoft is able to scale its program to engage with all necessary people.
• Participation rewards drive more participation. Microsoft recently introduced a program in which it rewards regular community participants with a “Microsoft Contributor” status. These talkers get a special badge and a private community where they can talk to one another. Since rolling this out, the company has seen a significant increase in participation from recipients of this status.
• Bring them home. Throughout all of their engagement and influencer programs, Portillo and his team work to bring them back to Microsoft’s owned properties, allowing them to control the end-to-end experience.

Watch Portillo’s presentation. Slides are available.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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This loyalty, along with the nature of REI’s business — stores in Texas have a much different sleeping-bag selection than those in Alaska — became a big motivator behind the company’s recent push to take its social strategy from a national focus to a local one.

In his recent BlogWell presentation, REI’s Jordan Williams walked us through how the company developed this plan, how it trained its staff and a few early results and take-aways.

A few of his great ideas:

• Focus on the market level. Instead of going to every store with a strategy, Williams and his team broke it down by 53 regions, each of which has its own Facebook page and Twitter account.
• Create a central hub to direct people. With so many accounts serving so many regions, REI needed a single place to promote and direct customers. The company did it with a simple directory on its corporate website at REI.com/connect, making it easy to promote all of its social media profiles at stores and in traditional media.
• Train them on the do’s and don’ts. Through this project, Williams and his team trained more than 300 practitioners with a “201” class, and they offered an optional “101” class. They focused on the basics: copyright law, covering local topics, being responsive and how to reach out to local social media influencers, such as nonprofits, parks and outdoor enthusiasts.

Hear all of Williams’ great ideas in his presentation. Slides are available.

Click here to view the embedded video.

P.S. To see more great case studies such as this live and in person, check out our upcoming BlogWell conference in Dallas.

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But because you know it’s going to happen, you can prepare for it. Smart marketers know how and when to respond to negative word of mouth. Not all of the negativity will be worth your attention, but when it is, here are some important things to remember:

• Don’t waste time. The faster you respond to an upset customer, the better your odds of converting them into a happy fan. Even if all you can do is let them know you’re listening and that you’ll have to get back to them, a quick response can help calm them before they have the chance to further complain.
• Speak like a real person. The easiest way to turn a little negative word of mouth into a full-blown crisis is to respond like a stilted, corporate public relations robot. When you respond, put a human face on your company by speaking genuinely, identifying who you are and making it easy for them to follow up with you.
• Point to independent sources. You want to do everything you can to avoid a debate, but sometimes it’s important to explain your side of the story. When doing this, you’ll get the most credibility by pointing to independent, third-party sources. This was a key strategy UPS used to defend its brand during a PR crisis around new industry legislation.
• Write for the record. Above all, you need to always be conscious of the scale of the audience when you’re responding to negative word of mouth online. Even tiny blogs in obscure corners of the Internet have the potential for things to get picked up and blown out of proportion. But if you respond like a human with a sincere attempt to fix the issue, everyone will see that you acted in good faith and tried to do the right thing — regardless of the outcome.

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Like any tool, you should make sure your fans are actually using Foursquare before you invest time with it. But, if they are, there are many ways you can use it to create word of mouth.

A few things to try:

• Encourage people to check in. When people check in to your location, it’s a good thing. Their Foursquare friends are notified, and many users also share check-ins across Facebook and Twitter. Try testing a few incentives to get people to check in: a sign to remind visitors, discounts, specials or charitable donations.
• Bring in groups of talkers. A variation of encouraging individual customers to check in is to encourage groups of friends to do it. Try a promotion that gives a group discount if friends check in together. Not only will you get an online word-of-mouth boost, but getting groups into your business means more offline conversations, too.
• Promote your biggest fans. It’s not always easy to identify your biggest talkers. But if you see a Foursquare user regularly checking in and leaving useful tips, that’s a talker you want to support. There are tons of experiments to try, but some to explore are naming a dish after your Foursquare mayor, incorporating user tips into your menu and having a reserved parking spot for big Foursquare talkers.

How are you using Foursquare?

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In his recent BlogWell presentation, Clorox’s Greg Piche walked the audience through this “co-creation” process.

Though it’s still early in the project, Piche was able to share great ideas and take-aways based on what the company has learned.

• People love to do this. Piche and his team have found that when asked, people love to share ideas, and they feel valued when they’re encouraged to do so. They’re eager to talk about features that frustrate them, things they like and how something could be made better.
• This works best in private, owned communities. Clorox created a private community in which it invites members to participate in co-creation projects. Here, it’s easier to manage the conversation, meet legal requirements and post “challenges” that generate idea submissions.
• LinkedIn is a great tool to find co-creators. Clorox recruits a diverse base of fans to join its co-creation community from Twitter and Facebook — but the company has had the most success with LinkedIn. Using LinkedIn’s filtering tools, Clorox is able to find designers, artists, MBAs, Ph.D.s and other folks with passion and training that make them great at collaborative design.

Watch Piche’s presentation. (slides available here)

Click here to view the embedded video.

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