I had something fly through my inbox today and it reminded me of a great word of mouth strategy worth sharing. Free stuff attracts people! Kiehl's is one great example of a company giving away free stuff to build customer evangelism. If you walk into any Kiehl's store they will happily load you down with samples. This makes customers happy and if the product is good, it will leave them wanting more. At Microsoft we have express versions of some of our products that are free and this builds strong customer loyalty. And if you price your products correctly you bury the cost for the free stuff into your overhead. Whole Foods does this in my neighborhood. I'll spend $50 on stuff at the store because I truly enjoyed their sampling experience. I actually had Tom Douglas prepare me a steamed trout sample not too long ago at my Whole Foods. Now that's great customer experience!

Now, take note, only give away your product if it's good. This strategy does not work if you have a crappy product. They will try your sample, not like it, tell people you gave them a crappy sample and not come back.

Bottom line, make a great product, give it away and they will come back and pay!

 Today was one of the low-lights of my career as a parent. There are only a few time I can remember really feeling like I screwed up. One time was when I left my 6 month old daughter Taylor on the bed and she rolled off onto our hardwood floor. That was not a good day. Another one of those moments happened for me this morning.

My beautiful, precious son Christian lost a tooth last night. This is a big event in our house. It's his 2nd one. And he very carefully washed the tooth then put it in his special tooth fairy box, put the box under his pillow and went to sleep with dreams of the tooth fairy bringing him a prize in the morning. Of course 20 minutes after putting him to bed this completely went out of my head until this morning when when he came into the kitchen where I was making his lunch and he had the saddest look on his face I had ever seen. Clutched in his hand is his baby tooth the tooth fairy never claimed last night. Instantly my heart sank. I felt like the pond scum below the pond scum. The lowest form of human life.I had just crushed my sons faith in the unexplainable, the mysterious and the magical. I made up some story about how the fairy was confused by his bunk beds and maybe she looked under the wrong pillow. He wasn't convinced and actually asked me if I was the tooth fairy. At this point the little bit of my heart that hadn't broken yet was shattered.

These are the days I feel like no other job is more important that being a mom and I should stop screwed it up!

Brand Channel posted an interesting article today. The funny thing was I was skimming through it and didn't see anything of note I hadn't read before and was about to close the link when in the final paragraph the article finally got interesting.

The current marketing speak is all about consumers owning your brand. It's acceptable to talk about how you as a good consumer brand are letting your customers drive your marketing reach. It's a race to see who comes up with the best viral video on YouTube and how many hits that garners for your brand. BUT, you don't hear anyone talking about return. Does consumer driven campaigns really drive higher equity to your brand? Chevy Tahoe says maybe not.

From The Fanatic: A Brand's Best Friend?

Sometimes, though, consumers "stay on brand"—but not in a way that the brand would prefer. The "make your own commercial" website for the Chevy Tahoe was hijacked by the anti-SUV lobby and populated by some fairly derogatory clips.

It is mistakes like this that make Andrew Benett, chief strategy officer at Euro RSCG Worldwide, think twice. "There is lots of talk about consumers owning the brand—give control to consumers and you'll create loyalty," he says. "This is not our belief. Yes, engage consumers, but you cannot yield control. There is no conclusive evidence for or against consumers having control—social networking is too young. We visualize two overlapping circles. One circle is what consumers want to talk about, the other is what the brand wants to talk about. Where they overlap is where consumer evangelism takes off.

Now, I'm not so sure about the overlapping circle he refers to as being where evangelism begins. I still think evangelism is organic in nature. Company's can offer the tools to make it happen, but the love is either there or it's not and that comes back to the strength of the product or service you are offering. What I do like about what he points out is the lack of proof points. He's right. There is no clear evidence that says any of these 'consumer driven' marketing campaigns have a higher return than traditional campaigns other than through PR efforts. I would love for someone to identify some proof points. Anyone?

... you did something for the first time? This question was posed to a group of women I was a part of at a triathlon training session I attended last week. It gets exactly to the heart of why I'm doing a triathlon. Doing something new makes you nervous, excited, unsure and damn it ALIVE. That's how I want to be.

So I am already thinking about what goes on my list next for things I've never done after the triathlon is over. Here's a start:

1. teach a class
2. write a book
3. foster care a child
4. plant a vegetable garden
5. ride the Seattle to Portland race
6. speak in front of 1,000 people
7. be in a play

As you can see from the list I don't like heights and I'm not a dare devil. It doesn't make sense to put things on the list I would find no pleasure in doing like, skydiving, rock climbing, etc. The list has to be authentic and bring joy to me.

So ask yourself, "When's the last time you did something for the first time?"

I don't think I've done anything new or radically different, but I hired a blogger as one component of my Live Earth campaign and I couldn't be happier about it. I thought it might be interesting for some if I shared how I did it, why I did it, tips and lessons learned.

Why: Among other things, my product is a blogging platform. So it made sense to me to have a campaign that would showcase my product. What better way for people to see how the product works than to see someone using it. I believe in the power of blogging as a very strong viral tool. So even if my product wasn't a blogging tool I would have created a blog. But lesson is; whenever you can showcase your product as part of your campaign, do it.

How: I was lucky here. I put out the call to a few people asking if anyone knew a writer who would be interested in a short time gig. My requirements were;

1. they had to demonstrate a history of writing,
2. they had to be familiar with blogging tools and SEM techniques;
3. and of course they needed to pass the 'I searched your name and guess what came up" test. *

* all of these requirements are important but I think this one is the most important, particularly if you are working for a large, trusted, often scrutinized company like Microsoft. I had 3 different people do searches on different search engines at different times of the day. If you fail to do your homework read my post here to find out what can happen.

Zack has worked out great. When we first started the guidelines given to him were; stay on topic, no politics and no competitor discussions. The main reason for the two no's were both of those topics had the strong possibility of getting us into territories that would have nothing to do with the Live Earth cause and taking the conversation way off topic.  The other ground rule was he was to send me each blog entry before he posted it so I could preview it. This helped me establish trust with him. Zack lives in Australia so I knew it wasn't going to be possible to get a hold of him very easily and he and I had never worked together before. This was my way of assuring the blog was going in the direction I intended.

I am happy to say I never once edited one word of Zack's posts. And after a little more than a week I told him to still send me each post but that he could publish without waiting for me to approve. Zack has never let me down. He has been incredibly proactive in the viral growth of the blog. When we contracted the deal I indicated that 65% of his time would be writing blog posts and 35% would be reaching out to the community, commenting on other blogs, tracking back traffic to the Live Earth blog and doing general SEM tactics. Several times Zack has uncovered news about Live Earth that even our PR department wasn't aware of.

So there is how and why. Next I'll get into tips and lessons learned. Stay tuned.

A constant conundrum for marketers like me is how to get customers who are satisfied with their current product to switch. I love Diet Coke. I'm a completely satisfied customer of Diet Coke. What would any marketer do to get me to switch? Would a fancy ad campaign? No. Would a cheaper price? If we're talking pennies less, no. You have to have pretty high pain points for a customer to want to switch. That goes for any product that is basically a commodity.

But consider Trader Joe's. I've been in more than a few cities over the past few weeks and Trader Joe's is in almost all of them and they are packed! Did these people not grocery shop a year ago? Of course not. But they obviously had some unmet need that Trader Joe's has satisfied. And it's not based on price or convenience. If you want convenience you can do practically everything online. If you want price there's always Safeway. So what is it? Not ads, they don't have any. They did the most standard, text book marketing move. They offered a new, better product at a fare price. No multi-million dollar ad campaigns. No celebrities. It's a neighborhood experience, with better than average product and reasonable prices. And they let the satisfied customers do the rest by word of mouth.

That's good news for me because I don't have a celebrity or millions for an ad campaign. I'm inspired!

I've had several people ask me where all the posts have gone? Sadly, when I get busy blogging is the first casualty. And it's a shame because I really enjoy that part. But to redeem myself I wanted to share a part of what I've been working on. This Monday, June 4th Spaces is launching several Live Earth campaigns. I've had a really good time building these campaigns and hope they appeal to others as well. Here's the low down:  

Our first campaign, the official  Live Earth blog launched on April 27^th. The initial launch was entirely viral and got good pickup. The big coming out for the Space was on May 15^th when MSN announced the new Madonna song she has written just for this concert.It’s currently featured on the MSN Live Earth homepage.

  Spaces has hired 4 young environmentalist to travel from Redmond to New York City bringing awareness to local communities about what people can do in their everyday lives to become more eco-friendly. They will be traveling via trains, bikes and public transportation to highlight the need to leave cars at home. Over the five week journey the road crew will showcase their trip adventures on  http://spacesecotrip.spaces.live.com/ This campaign will be featured on the  Live Earth Community page and highlighted in a press release going out Monday, June 4^th. In addition, MSN is doing on-network advertising to drive consumers to the Live Earth Community page. As part of the MSN Live Earth contests consumers can win a trip to the concert in New York by adding themselves as a friend to the Eco trip Space . More details are highlighted today on the Live Earth blog.

WL Spaces Battle of the Bands contest is for music lovers of all genres. To enter bands create a Space and link original music and videos to their Space. Consumers then vote on their favorite band and the winning band in each market gets to create a professional music video. That music video will run on the MSN Live Earth Virtual Stage on 7/7/07  and continue to run on MSN Entertainment throughout July. This is the only campaign being offered globally and is currently being offered in the US, Australia and Canada.  Starting today there is a blogging outreach effort targeted at band communities to encourage bands to sign up. There is also an off-network media buy starting next week with a CTA for consumers to vote for their favorite bands. Battle of the Bands will be featured on the Live Earth Community page.

Sonny is the Live Earth Bot showcasing Messenger, Spaces, Maps, Soapbox and more. Here are a few things you will see from Sonny; Q&A – answering user questions about LE event, artists/venues, climate change, etc, LE blog highlights, Greenometer, Concert countdown, Live Earth map, Videos – using a Soapbox interface to display user-generated videos, as well as venue, celebrity, concert (post 7/7), and other videos, Tip of the day. Sonny will be available from the Live Earth Community page as well as featured on the Spaces homepage starting Monday.

So we'll see what happens. All of these campaigns are viral in nature and hopefully will strike a cord. I'll let you know in July what had success and lessons learned which I'm sure will be more than a few. As cheesy as it sounds I feel lucky everyday to have the opportunity to do creative, non traditional marketing. I know not everyone is so lucky and I encourage all marketers to push themselves 'Beyond the Banner'. In fact that may be the name of my book.... someday.