Word of Mouth and Communications

So I was recently tagged by Lindy Dreyer over at SocialFish to participate in the WOM meme that has been going around. I was excited that I was asked to participate, and hope I can provide some nuggets of wisdom below...

My example relating to word of mouth comes from something I am working on right now. We are integrating word of mouth into our communications efforts to help push and promote our upcoming Convention this summer.

We have developed a blog for our Convention where we are pushing people for the most up to date information, interesting thoughts about past Conventions, and even little tidbits about the events that we are planning this year. We have also asked a number of regular attendees to share "Why I attend the Convention" guest posts that we'll be using throughout the run up to the event. This is not only an opportunity for us to get some faces and well-known names out to potential attendees, but also an opportunity for them to hear firsthand accounts of things that these folks LOVE about the event - hopefully building the word of mouth buzz about it. We are then going to ask the people who are guest posters to pass along the post that they did to people they know in order to push that message out to additional potential attendees.

In addition, as an all men's organization, throughout the year we are mostly promoting our events and services to men. However, for the Convention, we also want our alumni to bring their spouses and guests. So, this year we have also asked one of our regular spouses who attends to provide a guest post to talk about why she LOVES attending hoping to hit the potential spouses of attendees. By having the potential attendees share that perspective with their spouse who might be hesitant to attend, it will hopefully be another way that we are enhancing the expectations and attendance numbers for the big event using word of mouth from someone like them who has attended in the past.

Anyway, we're compiling the guest posts now and will begin posting soon. Hopefully the word of mouth that this tactic creates helps as we push our registration for this exciting event!