As for me, I packed a bag and headed Midwest for my first ever WOMMA event. WOMM-U was three days packed with Professors of WOMM sharing expert insights and examples of successful Word of Mouth Marketing online and in real life.  Not so unlike my freshman days at the University of Michigan (Go Blue!) I spent the plane ride pouring over the schedule, highlighting the can’t-miss sessions and agonizing over how to fit it all in.

So did I make the grade? Without any embarrassing underclassmen moves? Join me for a quick WOMM-U review session to find out.

Class is in Session

“Social Media Across the Enterprise” moderated by Spredfast’s Jordan Slabaugh with Aramark’s Tom Carusona and Whole Food’s Natanya Anderson was packed—with attendees and with valuable insights on how to operate a social business at scale. Tom and Natanya offered complementary insights on the topics of reigning in a far-flung social footprint, training employees to engage socially, and expanding social efforts beyond the marketing department. At Whole Foods, that means including the produce department, the floral department, and other in-store experts that can share valuable content with followers. According to Anderson, “The key to efficiency in social is using more people with more expertise.”

Cafeteria Comedians

On day two, a team from Second City stopped by during lunch to school us on “The “Second City” Approach to Content Development & Reaching an Audience” They shared how they use comedy to spark innovation and create great content. When, inevitably, they called for volunteers from the crowd, I ran (yes, literally) up to the stage. What ensued was a Will-Ferrell-in-Old-School-esque blackout—so much for avoiding any freshman follies! You can hear my thoughts on the session, captured by WOMMA, here.

Many, Lightweight Interactions

One of my favorite sessions was led by Paul Adams, Facebook’s Global Brand Experience Manager. In his keynote on how the web is being redesigned around people, Adams covered the nature of networks, the concept of homophily (people like others who are similar to themselves), and the process of forming relationships: through many, lightweight interactions over time.

Adams advised brands using Facebook to design the story, not the app, first. By sharing the brand story through brief, newsfeed worthy content, brands lay the foundation of many, lightweight interactions upon which deeper engagement via brand pages and custom apps can be built.

Great Content: The Americone Dream

WOMM-U closed with Brain Traffic CEO, Kristina Halvorson, speaking on, “The Content Strategy Imperative Bringing it all together the Content Journey.” Halvorson opened by likening the hoards of content littering the web to the mountains of trash covering Planet Earth in Pixar’s Wall-E. Great content, Halvorson explained, stems from a content strategy that incorporates both content and people components.

Halvorson led the room on a tour of Ben & Jerrys digital presence to examine the consistency, usability, and appeal of their content. I can only imagine that Ben and Jerry’s was the subject of study because of its status as unofficial late-night study snack of college students everywhere. Scooping into the content revealed the good, bad, and ugly, which Halvorson used to demonstrate the importance of proper workflow, governance, and content substance and structure.

My first WOMM-U was a hit, I met great people and learned a ton. While I couldn’t make it to every session on my list, I left with an arsenal of new knowledge as a Student of WOMM.

What I want to know, speaking of Word of Mouth, is how many of my fellow WOMM-U attendees departing out of Midway felt compelled to stop by Ben and Jerry’s for a quick scoop on the way to the terminal. What other sweet insights did you pick up at WOMM-U? Share them in the comments.

Today’s post is by Jason Falls, CEO of Social Media Explorer and author of No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide To Social Media Marketing. Register for Spredfast’s upcoming Spruce up Your Social webinar on May 15th to hear Jason talk about Creating and Using Great Social Content.

The challenge most social media practitioners face in terms of their content efforts in today’s social media world is concocting the perfect balance of true engagement — posts that are audience-centric and conversational — and business drivers — posts that lead an audience to calls to action that help the company quantify success from their social media channels. Granted, there are those companies who use social media marketing for awareness, customer retention or service or other strategic purposes that aren’t primarily focused on the bottom line, but those are few and far between in our what’s-my-ROI driven world.

The answer is an enigma of sorts. There’s no formula, regardless of what the gurus and experts say. One in 10 can be about you? One in eight? One in five? No one knows unless or until you implement complex testing of the variables to see what your own audience will tolerate. Even companies that complete that step and decide on one-in-whatever quickly find that audiences change and with them, so do the thresholds of me versus you content.

Sadly, it doesn’t seem that even the top social brands have paid attention to the anecdotal recommendations of the guru set. I recently set up filtered circles and lists of the top 20 or so consumer brands according to the Dachis Group’s Social Business Index on Google+, Facebook and Twitter. Scrolling down through each stream, my analysis of the posts can be summed up as follows:

“Me, me, me, me, me, support our charity, me, me, me, me, me, me, me.”

Through about 80 or so posts, I found three that I thought, “Cool! That’s pretty interesting for the audience.” Congratulations to Coke, Ford Trucks and Sony for breaking through the noise of self-promotion with something decent.

But there has to be a balance if companies are going to leverage social media for bottom-line effecting business metrics. Ford Truck’s post, asking who was going to win the World Series as baseball’s opening day commenced, needs to be accompanied by product information or other incentives for the audience to actually want to buy a Ford Truck or the stream becomes less social media marketing and more community service. If most companies treat social media as the latter, guess what gets cut come budget time?

So how do we know how much “me” is too much? Unfortunately, the answer is (as it often is), “It depends.”

Ask yourself a couple of questions to level-set the expectations:

• Why is our audience following us here in the first place?
• What did we promise them when we asked them to like, follow or fan us here?
• What business reason are we using this platform or channel for?
• Do we have other, more effective, channels for other business functions at play?

If your audience followed you because you promised them a weekly coupon, then they’re an audience that is there for the appeal of the deal. You can be more commercially oriented, if not totally deal driven. If you’re using the platform for customer service, and measuring customer service metrics through it (issued resolved, cost savings from diverting call center activity, etc.), then maybe smacking the audience in the face with “buy my stuff” posts isn’t a good ideas. If you have the automated deal or coupon feed on Twitter or a special email list, remind your fans of those channels for deals and focus on more true engagement around product feedback, fun uses of the product and the like.

Still unclear about the proper mix? Ask your audience. A really engaging post might be, “We’ve got the opportunity to share deals and coupons with you here. Is that something you’d be interested in? Should we focus more on sharing fun tips and tricks? How do you want us to use this channel to make your experience with us better?”

And then you can, of course, test. Go two weeks with a 10:1 ratio of “conversation” or “engagement” oriented posts to calls-to-action. Measure the click throughs, comments, Likes and so on. Then go two weeks with a 5:1 ratio to see if the results change. If they don’t, dial it in to a 2:1 ratio and see what happens. Read and react based on your audience’s activity. But don’t assume the ratio you land on is always the rule. Remember you’re measuring human reaction. Humans are fickle and change their minds and attitudes daily. I’d suggest repeating the ratio test every 3-4 months until you get comfortable with a pace that works for your audience.

As much as measurement and quantification can give you a good idea of how often you can mix the “buy now” posts with the “how are you” ones, I’m still a big fan of using simple logic. Look at your last 30 posts on a given channel. Would you want to see those pieces of content in your stream? Would your not-so-social-media-savvy friend? Put yourself in the mindset of your audience and just do a gut-check. “Is this too noisy? Too promotional? Is it interesting?” Just asking those questions can help you better understand where your recipe for success produces the best taste.

Just in time for spring cleaning, we’ll be kicking off a new series next week entitled “Spruce up Your Social for Spring.” The 3-part webinar series will provide insightful knowledge and share real world stories from industry analysts and leaders Jeremiah Owyang, Michael Brito and Jason Falls, as well as enterprise brands and agencies Intuit, Aramark and Social Distillery. From top-of-mind priorities to compelling opportunities and challenges for social business, the group will dive deep into the three areas where we most often hear companies expressing a need — creating compelling content in social, understanding and delighting social customers and operationalizing social media.

Pencil the following dates and times in on your calendars to get your dose of social ideas and inspiration over the coming month and a half. We’ll be using the hashtag #SocialSpruce to share information, curate insights and build out the conversation before, during and after the series, so follow along and chime in.

Utilizing and Creating Great Content in Social

Tuesday, May 15 at 11am PST

Jason Falls, CEO, Social Media Explorer

Kristen Sussman, President, Social Distillery

Ellen Westcott, Social Business Strategist, Spredfast

Knowing and Delighting Your Social Customers

Tuesday, June 5 at 11am PST

Michael Brito, SVP Social Business, Edelman Digital

Amy Kalm, Social Engagement Specialist, Intuit

Jordan Slabaugh, Director of Social Media, Spredfast

Organizing and Creating Social Program Processes

Tuesday, June 26 at 11am PST

Jeremiah Owyang, Partner, Altimeter Group

Tom Carusona, Sr. Director Digital and Social, Aramark

Jim Rudden, CMO, Spredfast

We’re looking forward to a great series with some of our favorite social leaders and inspiring customers!

Quick Background on the brands:

Whole Foods has incredibly high corporate brand awareness and history of locally-focused marketing in addition to what is done on the corporate and regional level.  At the risk of punning, the WFM social footprint grew “organically” with local stores having set up pages, handles, etc with little oversight from corporate.

Alternately, Aramark is a private company that (among other things) operates food services on 300+ college campuses – each  individually branded with campus-specific names.  Aramark is challenged to build & engage an ever-overturning collegiate customer base with no corporate brand social “halo” to provide cover.  Aramark is sparking much of their social activity from the corporate center.

Culture-Right Strategy – As Natanya puts it “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”  No matter how beautiful or theoretically desirable a particular social strategy might be, it can’t create value if a brand’s culture can’t absorb it. This adds some danger to the desire to copy the strategy of others without thinking through what truly works in your own organization.  Putting together a strategy that is right for YOUR organization is the foundation of any successful attempt to scale social as you will have to move past the “native” believers. Despite the differences in their journey to take social to the edges of the org, there are major lessons surrounding the pillars to social scale and how they are approaching:

Business-Meaningful Definition of Success – Notice I didn’t say ROI (which has a very crisp, narrow definition) here.  This could be driving awareness, mitigating risk, increasing collaboration, mitigating risk to your brand, improving customer service response, etc.

For both organizations, and for most of Spredfast’s install base, engagement is critical.  For Whole Foods, that manifests as activity taken within their large audiences – with special emphasis on shares.  WFM knows that highly engaged customers become advocates.  For Aramark, beginning from lower audience penetration and facing a shorter advocacy window, building audiences is a primary goal followed by driving engagement.  Critical engagement metrics for Aramark include likes shares comments and (particularly) photo uploads.

Ongoing Training – Both Aileen and Natanya are working within the training cultures of their organizations.  At Aramark, there has been great effort to detail and train campus marketers from the ground up on social – emphasizing how certification, training, and engagement fit in with their overall objectives within the organization.  WFM is able to weave social into a rigorous ongoing training regimen and existing infrastructure in the company. Both organizations treat training as continuous and weave social into the fabric of a participant’s job vs. making it “extra”.

Content Strategy – Both organizations provide some high quality content from subject matter experts from the central core, but local colleges are expected to keep up their own conversation calendars and plan at least a month in advance.  WFM empowers local store marketers to interpret content or messages from corporate in their own way and listens for gems from the local nodes to share.

Technology – Technology can play a number of different roles in operationalizing a strategy.  Even the most basic advantage of an SMMS – having a 3^rd party platform through which you can credential individuals in your organization to social accounts – can help protect you from the social risks involved with individual employees carrying native platform credentials around on their phones.  But technology can also help teams collaborate directly in a social platform, share content, route for approval or action, and respond to customer needs.

Agility & Evolution – As the organization learns & grows, and you learn what engages customers and sparks loyalty, you must be willing to frequently adjust and evolve your strategy to incorporate that data.  Aileen from Aramark lists opening up to a frequently evolving strategy as one of the most important and difficult steps in preparing for social at scale.

For more info from this group, you can follow @natanyap, @aramarknews, @chuckhemann, & @virginiamiracle. Virginia, Natanya from Whole Foods, and Tom from Aramark are also speaking at WOMM-U next week. Find out more about the event here.