Communications strategist Caroline Kealey has, over the past 10 years, marched to her own drum as the founder and chief executive of Ingenium Communications.

Her consultancy has carved a niche for itself in the nation’s capital and across the country in the “art and science of communications and marketing strategy” providing, in addition to its strategic communications and marketing services, facilitation, training and organizational development.

As with so many other consultancies, regardless of their discipline, this meant that Ingenium’s intellectual property resided almost entirely within the grey matter of its people, and especially of its leader, Kealey herself.

Six years ago, Kealey decided to change that. Despite being a busy single mother with a full-time business, she set out to lever the insight and expertise developed over a 20-year career into an educational resource for professional development and training. The Ingenium team, with a substantial amount of goodwill and in-kind support from friends and allies, set to work. The outcome is the Results Map, deemed by its creators to be the most comprehensive online tool for strategic communications planning available in the world.

Kealey took the time to share her thoughts on the tenacity required to launch her new venture, the challenges of bootstrapping, and the strategic marketing that has turned a largely local consultancy into a global play within a matter of weeks.

Q: Where did you get the idea for Results Map?

A: I think the idea came from my experience in having written now close to 400 communications strategies across a wide range of sectors and clients. I realized that much of the process is quite repeatable and that we had quite a lot of expertise in this specialized area. I also realized that, while seemingly a bit odd coming from someone who makes her living as an external consultant, optimally this process is most beneficial if it’s done in-house. So, I came up with the idea to package what we’ve learned from experience and create a methodology that communicators can easily apply within their organizations, tapping into their unique knowledge and experience with their subject matter and audiences.

Q: How did you go about validating the idea?

A: This whole project has been bootstrapped on the back of our traditional consulting practice and therefore integrates hundreds of conversations as part of regular client engagements and workshops. We carried out extensive market research to establish if there is anything like this … we looked at comparable solutions for other disciplines and went through an extensive process of one-and-one interviews in 2008 with people in different facets of the industry – academia, public, private, para-public sectors. We used all this to map out a business plan and worked with a focus group of 30 people to validate the concept from both a business and marketing point of view.

Q: What key challenges did you face turning this into a commercially available product?

A: This was far and away the most significant and complex project I have ever managed. The process has been ongoing over a six-year period and has been self-financed. The sheer tenacity and the focus required was a major challenge since the project had to run alongside our regular work and business development. Stitching this together into something coherent with an end goal in mind was a very significant challenge. This is not for the faint of heart.

Q: Where did you turn for sources of funding and other support to develop and launch Results Map?

A: One of the most extraordinary experiences throughout this process has been the generosity of the community in providing expertise (and) resources and offering to make valuable connections. I was really moved to the extent to which people are willing to support an entrepreneur who has a dream. That was a big part of our success - tapping into a lot of local in-kind support, and connections. We wanted to self-finance as much as possible, but did call upon the BDC and a private investor, both of whom have been extremely supportive.

Q: How do you characterize your experience, as an entrepreneur, in trying to secure funding and other key pieces of the puzzle?

A: As is often the case, it’s hard to appreciate the sheer volume of work and energy that this has required. In terms of lessons learned, you can’t underestimate the time and effort that isn’t immediately visible when you set out - the complexity of translation to another language, finding an online payment solution that works, developing a marketing plan, and addressing innumerable technological challenges. It all takes deep consideration, analysis and quality decision-making to position the company for success, and adjust in real-time to dependencies and changes in the development plan.

Q: What key entrepreneurial lessons did you learn through this? What would you do different next time?

A: If you roll back the clock, this could have gone in many different directions. Early on I became concerned by time-to-market and that other people would come in and scoop us. But that was fairly short-lived because I had trouble imagining that there would be too many others who would have the passion to drive through such a difficult task … call it stubbornness or stick-to-it-ness, it was clear that it was the road less travelled.

Most of the development work I did on this was between 5 and 7 a.m. before I got my kids up to get ready for school; that’s obviously not everyone’s cup of tea.

The technical development of the product took place over six months. This was very aggressive and in hindsight could have been done more comfortably over a year or 18 months. However, we had committed to complete and present by June 2010 at the International Association of Business Communicators World Conference in Toronto. As a result, we licensed our training platform from Telesto, a local development firm. Again, my whole orientation was on niche expertise, not on developing a tool in-house, from the ground up. This proved to be a good decision because the time and cost required to create a platform from scratch would have been prohibitive.

Q: What has been the market response to Results Map?

A: A few weeks ago I was running a local consulting company. Now our technology is on four continents and we are writing proposals for Fortune 500 companies … We have reached into some spheres that would not have been possible two weeks ago. We even have the government of Tanzania interested in our methodology.

This is precisely what we wanted to do with this product, have a global impact, and so far it’s off to the races.

Q: How did you take advantage of your attendance at the International Association of Business Communicators World Conference to launch of Results Map?

A: We had a whole strategy to make a splash at that event to capitalize on the fact that there were 1,500 communicators there from around the world. We ran a Twitter contest, a guerilla marketing campaign, exhibited with a booth, and I was a speaker. We very much took our own advice on having a plan and executing against that plan on a shoestring budget. People told us we were one of the highlights of the event, and that is entirely the result of our careful planning in terms of marketing, planning and positioning.

Now the challenge is chasing down all of our leads. The scope of our business has exploded in the space of a couple of weeks so while I’d thought the product development was the end of a goal, it really is just the beginning.

Technorati Tags: marketing, startup, entrepreneur, Results Map, Ingenium, Telesto, online tool, Fortune 500, strategic communications, communications strategy, bootstrap, BDC

It’s clear that we’re bad summertime bloggers. Sorry about that.

Occasionally there have been topics that have crossed my path in the last month and a bit that I thought could be ruminated on in a blog post, but when the spirit struck, it was usually when I was unplugged completely for a week-plus (No phone, no internet, no email, no television … heavenly!) or too swamped with client commitments to dedicate the time required to write it up. As I recently Tweeted, I haven’t blogged in so long that I suffered a brief case of performance anxiety about picking up the virtual pen once again.

I’m over it now.

I’ve been doing significant outreach in the UK for one of our clients and I’m noticing that journalists over there are far more eager to have a phone conversation with me than many of their North American counterparts. At outlets big and small, I’ve been greeted with enthusiasm, courtesy and appreciation for the information I’m providing, rather than being avoiding altogether, relegated to voicemail hell or, at worst, berated or abused because I deigned to call. All this latter negative experience has been all-too-common with some North American journalists I’ve dealt with in my decade plus as a PR practitioner. This has been a lovely experience and has resulted in some tangible and impactful coverage for my client.

Many of these same editors and reporters weren’t at all responsive to my emails, a distinct change from my experience in North America where calls and voicemails predominantly go unanswered and unresponded to, but emails fare far better. It was refreshing to have so many productive phone calls that resulted in good things for my clients.

I’d posit that the phone calls themselves went so well because we pride ourselves on building out a media list of pertinent, relevant and interested media targets so that we know all of the angles and all of the data points that are likely to result in coverage of our client. Or perhaps I just seemed exotic with my North American accent and that’s why they were so nice to me, eh?

Having had such a good string of calls, I was particularly interested about the articles I read this week about the death of the phone call. At least that’s the snazzy spin that’s put on the article, but the content rather suggests a more integrated communications approach - using the multiple channels available to us to best communicate with one another. The latter resonates strongly with my daily experience, while the former is hyperbolic and not at all what’s truly going on.

In my recent UK experience, I had indeed sent emails to the folks I later spoke with on the phone. For some, they’d read my email and highlighted as something to follow up at some nebulous point in the future, while others fully admitted that they hadn’t read it. That they had it in their mail and could call it up as we were speaking was very useful as they were provided with more information than I could succinctly deliver on the phone.

The rumours of the telephone call’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Telephone calls still play an important role in the PR practitioner’s day-to-day practice; I will agree that their ranking in the grand scheme of all of the tools available may have slipped, but make no mistake - there’s nothing quite like speaking to someone to get your point across. Whether it’s through Skype or an old rotary dial or anything in between, don’t count the phone call out just yet.

As an aside, there’s an interesting corollary to this phenomenon in the world of popular music. When I was growing up, there were scads of popular songs that highlighted the importance of the phone call - from Blondie’s “Call Me”, Phil Collins’ “Don’t Lose My Number”, and Tommy Tutone’s “867-5309.” The only popular song of late that references the telephone (at least the only one that’s coming to mind at the moment) is Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” with the repeated chorus of “stop calling, stop calling, I don’t want to talk anymore.” Pop music’s just reflecting our shared experience and indicating that the honeymoon’s over when it comes to our love affair with the telephone.

Technorati Tags: Telephone, phone calls, voicemail, email, media relations

I used to be in the music business, many moons ago, and so it was with mild interest that I tuned into the Juno Awards, Canada’s national music awards show, last Sunday evening.

They were, in my humble opinion, a dreadful mess. Bieber Fever meant that viewership was up 31 percent over the previous year, but many an 11-year-old heart was broken and, no doubt, many a fervent angry letter-writing campaign begun over the fact that the Canada’s own teenybopper sensation left the awards empty handed. CARAS, the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the outfit that puts on the Junos, should hang its head in shame that those 1.6M viewers had to stomach such dreck.

Whether it was a cost-saving measure, I don’t know, but the program had no host. No stalwart Canadian comedian to lighten the mood between the handful of on-screen awards being doled out, no Canadian music superstar for viewers to ogle, no nothing but a whole lot of, “Who is that?” and, “Have you ever heard of this performer?”

Which leads me (mercifully) to my point: the importance of gatekeepers.

Once upon a time, there were something called record labels that acted as the gatekeepers, marketers, distributors and more for music. Artists who were deemed worthy were taken under a label’s wing, polished and supported, and given the opportunity to put their best foot forward, all the while being financially supported by the label. Those days, in the main, are long done.

The fact that every Mac sold comes loaded with GarageBand, a bare-bones software that can make a recording artist out of anyone, means that if you’ve got a few minutes and the inclination, you too can release into the market your own, original music, no matter how crappy sounding. Upload it to Facebook, MySpace, YouTube. Tweet about your new song. Congratulations - you’ve just increased the noise in the signal to noise ratio and muddied the musical landscape! I couldn’t help but think of how the gatekeepers have been removed while watching a parade of such self-created unknowns at the Junos.

I’ve written before about music industry pundit Bob Lefsetz and his thoughts on how the vast amounts of media are making us more isolated from one another.

How does this apply to media relations? While I was bemoaning how wretched the Junos had been, @francismoran brought up a fair point about the removal of gatekeepers in the media as well.

Once upon a time, back when record labels did artist development, there were also lots and lots of publishers of newspapers and magazines that had editors and professional journalists and a whole bunch of other talented people whose very existence is now endangered. These professionals filtered the content that came their way and put together (most times, at least) insightful, informative, comprehensive news pieces.

Now, thanks to the Internet, blogs, microblogs and what have you, anybody can self publish anything. Want to write shoddy articles that haven’t been fact checked? Go ahead! Want to slag a person, company or product? Go for it! Care to distribute completely false information out of spite, lack of knowledge or poor journalistic standards? Today’s your lucky day!

Gatekeepers were there to filter the noise and ensure integrity of signal. It’s a shame that there is a trend toward eliminating these useful roles from so many industries. When gatekeepers remain in place in the media, as is written about in this fabulous article, the results can be positive for both the media and the consumer. New technology is incorporated into an existing information model, rather than viewed as a completely greenfield wherein everyone runs amok.

Technorati Tags: Junos, blogging, music, journalism

I’ll admit it. I fell for a couple of doozies this morning when reading my morning email.

The first one really had me. I subscribe to HARO, Help a Reporter Out, which is a free service where PR professionals are sent pitching opportunities from reporters. I scan these email reports several times daily to see if there’s anything suitable for my clients. This one caught my eye and infuriated me no end:

Summary: Why don’t PR people listen?

Name: April Phules (Business Magazine)

Category: General

Email: query-7cc@helpareporter.com

Media Outlet: Business Magazine

Deadline: 07:00 PM EST - 1 April

Query: I’m doing a story about PR people, and why they have a much lower ability to listen or follow directions than regular people. Is this something they’re born with, or something they learn once getting into PR? All answers welcome.

Okay, so the reporter’s name should have tipped me off, but I haven’t had my coffee yet so I’m a little slow.

Still fuming from reading that outrageous query, I clicked over to another newsletter from parenting site Babble, which suggested 10 ways to raise a genius. Putting little stock in such things, but curious nonetheless, I clicked through. Needless to say by the time I got to #4 I knew that something was up.

PRNewser tipped its hat to some of the best corporate April Fool’s jokes here.

Happy April Fool’s Day!

Technorati Tags: April Fool’s Day, Babble, HARO, Help A Reporter Out

This past week, the news was filled with stories about people behaving badly and reminders that electronic communications leave a digital paper trail a mile long.

Personally, I feel so badly for Sandra Bullock being humiliated as she was by her philandering jerk of a spouse, having recently pronounced in front of the world and Barbara Walters how he “has her back.” Well, he had someone else’s front, it seems. And she was happy to spill all her beans and text messages to the highest bidder.

Tiger Woods, whose shoddy attempts at reconciliation with his audience through the media have been ripped apart by PR experts, has just hired a renowned sports crisis communications expert to help him crawl out from under the recent release of his disgusting text messages to a porn star with whom he had dalliances.

The trustworthiness of tattoo covered strippers and porn stars really took a hit this week…

The chair of the Toronto Transit Commission, having already dropped out of that city’s mayoral race because of his affair, has now been discovered to have charged the city of Toronto for a cab ride he took to meet his mistress. Torontonians, already demanding his resignation as head of the beleaguered TTC, are now even more riled up.

While these particular individuals behaving badly have made many egregious personal decisions, it’s astounding to think that it never occurred to them that their text messages and receipts wouldn’t come back to haunt them. In this digital era, almost everything we do is recorded, logged and accessible to refer back to, especially emails, texts, blog posts, Tweets… More than once, this has been advantageous to me when a client or a reporter claims, “I never said that” or, “I never approved that” and I have the email to refer back to. (Thank heavens I’m an electronic packrat!) This can, as we’ve seen this week, work against you if you’ve got something to hide or if you’re trying to cheat the system in some way.

First, don’t be a jerk. Straighten up and fly right; if your moral compass is way off (personally or professionally) you’re bound to get caught sooner or later. Recognize the immeasurable damage that will be done to your brand, your professional standing, your employer and employees, and others if you make terrible decisions and get caught red-handed. Is it worth it? Really?

Second, don’t put anything in writing you wouldn’t stand behind later on. There have been plenty of misguided, poorly conceived reactionary news releases or statements made by executives that have haunted them for years. Don’t be that guy or gal.

Technorati Tags: Crisis communications, media relations, cheating, paper trail

While I was on maternity leave last year, inmedia went virtual, meaning we sloughed off the shackles of the commuter lifestyle and now all work remotely, communicating regularly by phone, email, Twitter, smoke signals… As such, earlier this week was a banner occasion when inmedianauts from around the country and across the globe gathered in Ottawa for briefings on a new client that we’ll be launching later this month. To most people, it isn’t novel to see one’s coworkers but for us it is. We’ve quickly established effective systems and processes that enable us to work as a cohesive unit, whether we’re in the same time zone or not.

Companies like ours have so many resources at their fingertips that enable telework to, well, work. With information in the cloud or on remote servers, we can all be connected to our data, and to each other, with ease. The telephone works well - we’re all talking to one another every day as well as to clients, prospects and media and analysts - as does email and Twitter and LinkedIn.

Should we actually need to physically be in one another’s presence, we can converge on a shared workspace like the CodeFactory, as we did earlier this week. As @FrancisMoran noted earlier this week, most of our clients never saw our office and there are multiple clients for whom we’ve done scads of work yet have never met face to face.

It was nice to see the rest of the inmedia team in person earlier this week, but it did remind me that while there’s something to be said for “face time,” we are pretty damn effective as a virtual unit.

Technorati Tags: telework, shared workspaces

Like many people, I rang in the new year with friends and loved ones at home, watching the famous ball drop in Times Square on television. With a little one at home, it wasn’t feasible to go out for the evening, and so when relegated to sticking around the house, it’s inevitable that we were drawn to watching one of the many new year’s eve specials on television.

We settled on Dick Clark’s Rockin’ Eve, not because of the entertainers appearing, not because of any particular allegiance to the network it was shown on, nor because the television happened to be on that channel. Rather, we consciously sought it out, so ingrained into all our brains is the brand that is Dick Clark’s new year’s eve special. When I think new year’s eve and television, I think Dick Clark. The fact that Clark has been felled by ill health that has impacted his ability to host the program itself and so foisted Ryan Seacrest upon the viewing public is sad, to be sure, yet we still tuned in. In our case, not to see what J Lo would wear, not to gawk at the ailing state of the iconic Clark, but just because the program itself is such an institution, has such a strong brand.

Before we settled on Dick Clark, however, we wandered the proverbial dial, seeing what else was on. A lackluster performance by Britney Spears in a fountain in Las Vegas was the only game in town, television-wise, from 11pm when Fox started its terrible programming. Some would argue that terrible programming is keeping in line with Fox’s established brand, but I digress. It was sad to see Spears performing amidst a line-up of nobodies. Though it was a boost to the ego to think that they were letting just anyone perform on live television like that; maybe I’ll whip up a song and dance number for next year’s special. Stay tuned!

The other channel we had the misfortune of stopping on was CNN, the most trusted name in news. While Gawker has a thoroughly cheeky recount of the night’s events, to me this programming was the most egregious mistake by a big-name media company on a night full of trainwrecks. CNN has branded itself “the most trusted name in news” yet the buffoonery of a raunchy comic and a respected anchor was far beyond good taste. I wouldn’t trust Kathy Griffin to cross the road, let alone entertain people to ring in the new year. While Gawker points out that CNN, which is struggling in the ratings, needs Kathy more than Kathy needs CNN, it’s unfortunate that the network felt it had to corrupt its branding so flagrantly in order to attempt to lure viewers. As we’ve written about previously, poorly conceptualized stunts like this don’t work, rather, they tend to turn people off.

We’ve been marketers long enough that we’ve helped guide companies through rebranding and new identities and what we’ve learned is that your true brand is not what you thrust upon the marketplace but rather how your customers and the public at large identify your company and its offerings. That’s where Dick Clark got it so right for so many years and CNN got it so wrong. When you deliver something expected, customers are pleased. Likewise, when you provide something totally antithetical to what they’ve come to know from your company, they’re confused and put off. Valuable lessons to learn for all of us.

Happy new year to all! Best of luck for 2010; may the year be healthy, happy and prosperous for everyone.

Technorati Tags: new year’s eve, Dick Clark, CNN, Fox, branding

My husband and I went to see Avatar over the weekend. Wow. The visually stunning spectacle has been director James Cameron’s pet project for more than 10 years, his last major theatrical release being a little movie called Titanic. The movie is in 3D but it’s so unobtrusive and simply enhances the story without going for corny effects, a novel approach to an older technology, enhancing rather than interrupting the storytelling process.

It was an inspired move by Cameron to hire virtual unknowns in the lead roles, but a mistake, despite her considerable talent, that he cast Sigourney Weaver in the film because, more than once, it felt like I was watching Aliens or even Gorillas in the Mist. For the same reason he put faces to those with whom we have had little or no previous associations in the lead roles, he should have cast an unknown in Weaver’s role; this was the only distraction that took me out of the marvelous world of Pandora and back into North America, circa late 2009.

I don’t want to spoil the storyline of the movie for anyone who hasn’t yet seen it but plans to, but suffice to say that while the movie is well worth seeing and elements of the film’s story are absolutely creative and novel, the vast majority of the plot is well trodden territory. Thematic elements are very reminiscent of [SPOILER ALERT!] this, and this.

There’s nothing new under the sun, they say, and the same is true when it comes to marketing. While it’s true that in the realm of technology, there are truly revolutionary products being released, there are also a slate of products that are only slight modifications on existing offerings or have very little if anything unique about them, rather they are “me too!” propositions. That’s okay - consumers need options at different price points with different feature sets, and other distinguishing attributes, however small.

The challenge becomes how to market your offering when the basic story (of your product, your company, your industry …) has been told many, many times before. Take a page from James Cameron’s book and find novel ways to tell a familiar tale, use new technology to do so and make it compelling to your audience. In our terms, this means to use novel marketing approaches like social media to communicate your key messages to your prospects and customers, providing them with the information they need in a format that’s interesting to them and that will get them talking to other prospects about why your offering is the one to see and why your marketing campaign is better than that of your competitors.

Technorati Tags: Avatar, James Cameron, marketing

Let me preface this by saying that I love Garth Brooks. I think that truly, beyond being a spectacular entertainer, he’s an exceptional human being, devoted father and just seems like an all around wonderful person. I’m very excited that he’s announced his un-retirement and wish him every success in all his future endeavors. I saw him in concert and sat way in the back, but it was one of the best live shows I have ever seen - and I’ve seen hundreds, if not more than 1,000 shows - and he rocked the socks off every single person in that stadium.

Yet, whomever is counseling him on PR tactics dropped the ball in a big way earlier this week when he announced his coming out of retirement. One would hope that, given there were years to plan an announcement such as this, the fact that the news media is instantaneous and voracious wouldn’t slip by whomever planned his announcement. An announcement of this nature, from the most successful solo artist of all time, the man who’s sold more records than anyone - including Elvis, the Beatles, and Celine Dion - since they started tracking record sales with Soundscan, was bound to attract unparalleled attention. And they flubbed it.

My understanding is that he did a news conference in the morning, at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, to announce that he’s coming out of retirement. What he didn’t announce was any plans to do, well, anything specific. (Aside: he did, however, talk about neighbouring rights for performers, copyright issues, how downloading is killing the industry and that musicians need to rise up and regain ownership of their works–all issues near and dear to me. Swoon.)

Having watched some of the news conference, I understand that Garth wanted to announce it to those particular reporters in that particular room first, as they’ve always supported him and he wanted them to be the first to know the big news.

The media world jumped on the story and immediately it was all over the news, web sites, etc. Some of the coverage was sarcastic, saying “Garth Brooks comes out of retirement to do nothing.”

Herein lies the problem.

Later that same day, Garth announced from Las Vegas that he’s signed on for a bunch of shows at a casino, a la Celine Dion. Great! Amazing! However, half the news media is reporting that you’ve come out of retirement but got no plans. Big problem.

In my humble opinion, this two-tiered approach to his announcement was a huge PR misstep. It could have been avoided by employing one simple tactic: embargo.

You want to give the scoop to those journalists first? Fine, great. How very thoughtful. But make sure that the footage and coverage doesn’t get out until after you’ve done the second press conference, announcing your comeback shows. Otherwise, you’re in the position we’re in now, trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

The Internet is littered with articles with snarky headlines, and clumsily added “updates” that say, “oh, I guess he is doing something after all …”

A visit to his official web site confirms that it hasn’t been updated in more than a year. There’s absolutely no mention of this new stage in his career, nor of the upcoming shows, ticket information, etc.

I’m a bit flummoxed, truthfully, at how clumsily this whole thing has been handled. Because he’s been retired, perhaps he’s without management at the moment, or lacks a full-time publicist to counsel him on how best to manage something of this magnitude … That’s the only explanation that makes any sense. But still, surely there is some communications professional that’s responsible for this debacle. I’m certain that Garth is an eminently reasonable man who would face a pile of sarcastic press clippings and shrug them off, but frankly, whoever was in charge of this announcement really screwed up.

What can we learn from this episode? Careful planning is required when making important announcements. Don’t rush it, don’t go off half-cocked, make sure that you’re providing your targets with the information that they need, when they need it. Remember that the media is instantaneous - there’s no lag, no lead time on breaking stories. As soon as it’s out of your mouth, it’s in the media, the public record, and there’s no taking it back or qualifying it. It’s a lot harder to refine a message once it’s out there.

The tickets for Garth’s comeback are sure to set records in terms of how quickly the shows sell out, and rightly so. Let’s hope that he uses some of the proceeds of the concerts to get proper communications counsel on staff.

Technorati Tags: Garth Brooks, retirement, press conference, neighbouring rights, #PRFail

This Thanksgiving weekend, my family attended a pottery sale just outside my husband’s hometown. There were lots of beautiful pieces and the weather was perfect to wander in the outdoor tent, watch a potter at work and debate whether to buy this piece or that for Christmas gifts. How did we hear about it? We have good friends who attend every year and, having admired their bounty from this sale, we finally managed to attend this year. I expect it won’t be the last time we do so.

Similarly, we attended a pumpkin patch to select a gourd worthy of being our Jack-o-lantern. How did we select what patch to go to? We had a recommendation from friends about one they’d been to and liked.

As ardent movie fans, especially of the horror genre, my husband and I eagerly await the showing of the new horror movie Paranormal Activity in a theatre near us. The movie is reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project in a number of ways, but for this blog’s purposes the most relevant is the huge word-of-mouth marketing campaign that the movie has undertaken, and the large numbers of people flocking to see it because they’ve heard from their friends and other taste-makers that it’s a rollicking, scary good time. The folks behind the movie used the internet to best advantage, asking for 1,000,000 votes to secure nationwide distribution for the film. It passed that mark on Friday. There’s nothing like a good horror movie around Halloween, so here’s hoping that the movie makes it to Ottawa in the next few weeks.

In today’s day and age where the proliferation of marketing channels and media messages is at an all-time high, it’s interesting to note that our purchasing decisions are still so heavily influenced by word of mouth. The best way to ensure good word of mouth is by providing excellent goods and services along with superior customer service. If you have these elements well in hand, your customers will happily spread the good word.

Technorati Tags: Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity, word of mouth