Building Out the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Communication Schedule: Making the Class Topics Sizzle

After I've worked through my learning objectives and seen what I have to work with in terms of class meeting times, I now think about creating specific class topics.

In my past syllabi the titles for what we would do each day were a bit bland, like "Basic Principles of Topic X" or "Applications of Topic Y". This time around I'm trying to add a little sizzle. Here are some that I've come up with (I invite suggestions on other topics to include as well as jazzing up some of these topic titles):

• Consumer Generated Media and Word-of-Mouth: The Birth and Rise of an Industry

• What’s the Difference Between WOM, Buzz, and Viral Marketing? Who Says So and Why Should I Care?

• Learning to Listen: Wake Up! Consumers Are Talking About You… You Better Learn From It

• Learning to Let Go: What Control Freaks Need to Learn in a World of Consumer-Control and Engagement

• Kickin’ It Old School: Haven’t We Always Known About WOM? Tracing the History of Academic and Popular Press Ideas of WOM

• Influentials: Fact, Fiction, or Cultural Narrative?

• The Dark Side of the (WOM) Force: Why Obi-Wan Never Shilled and Yoda Never Went Stealth

• Avoid the Hype! Key Company Players in the WOM Space and the Concepts & Principles That Inform Their Business Models

• Evangelists, Ambassadors, and Bees: Exploring the Rhetorical Metaphors of WOM Industry Practice

• Why “WOM vs. Advertising” is a Stupid Idea (But It Sure Gets People Talking!): Integrating WOM Into the Media Plan

• Practitioner Principles and Frameworks for Organizing WOM [This one needs to be jazzed up some]

• Who Said You Can’t Measure WOM? Seeking the Holy Grail of WOM ROI

• Finding the Inner Anthropologist In All of Us: Why Understanding WOM May Be More Important than Measuring It

• Mapping the Conversational Geography of WOM: The Conversational and Relational Basis of WOM

• Learning from Consumer Communities and Online WOM [Important topic, but boring title -- need to change]

• Blogging Your Way to a Better Tomorrow: Using Blogs and Avoiding Synthetic Transparency

• Thiscompanysucks.com!: How To Deal With Negative WOM

• “I Never Though About It That Way”: Interrogating the Societal Effects of Peer-to-Peer Influence as a Marketing Strategy

• Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid: Understanding What WOM Can and Can’t Do For Your Organization

I'll need to sequence these on the schedule but before I do that I'll put some time into creating assignments that tie to the learning objectives and the class content.

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Tags: WOM word of mouth Word-of-Mouth Marketing buzz marketing viral marketing marketing communication