Viral marketing (word-of-mouth marketing) is a really cool thing. Just think about it… instead of spending an insane amount of money on newspapers ads, TV commercials or banner ads, you spent nothing - and let your fans do all the work for you.

With viral marketing, your campaigns will suddenly get a life of its own - and start to spread like a virus. Everyone want to see it, and when they do, they all want to share it.

It is immensely powerful, usually having 500-1000 times greater impact than what you get from regular advertisements.

But how?

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The Chartered Institute of Public Relations has just published its draft [.pdf] for consultation of its proposed code of conduct for social media.

Via A PR Guy’s Musings.

“Hear first hand the “inside story” from Accenture employees about working in the Consulting, Accenture Technology Solutions and Outsourcing workforces. Subscribe and listen to our podcast series on their personal experiences using cutting edge technologies to deliver innovative projects for some of the world’s highest performing companies.”

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Via Micro Persuasion.

Do your clients or does your company have a crisis communications plan? Hopefully the answer is yes. But if we thought crisis communications was a challenge before, think again as we (fear) factor the blogosphere into our plans. Talk about controlling the message. It was one thing when your worst nightmare (on Elm Street) was a 60 Minutes ambush interview. Now we along with 60 Minutes must worry about bloggers ambushing from multiple fronts as Dan Rather experienced with President Bush’s National Guard record in the 2004 Presidential election.

To get some perspective, Dan Greenfield recently spoke with Erin Byrne, managing director of interactive at Burson-Marsteller for the past 8 years. If anyone should know about crisis communications in the interactive age, it is Erin. Her PR firm helped write the book on crisis communications as they helped Johnson and Johnson through the Tylenol scare.

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Although the idea may not yet be considered mainstream, many corporate executives and marketing gurus believe corporate blogs are useful tools that can bring companies closer to customers and generate interest in products or services. But is there a way to calculate the return on investment from blogs? Two analysts at Forrester Research Inc., Chloe Stromberg and Charlene Li, believe there is. Stromberg and Li began researching the topic earlier this fall and hope to publish their findings by the end of the year.

Computerworld’s Thomas Hoffman spoke with Stromberg and Li, both of whom work at the research firm’s Foster City, Calif., office. Excerpts from that interview are available here.

I almost missed this good piece on internetnews.com: Why Wikis Are Conquering The Enterprise.

Along with Gartner analyst Kathy Harris’s prediction that by 2009, 50% of U.S. companies will be using wikis, vendors started to actively develop enterprise-ready wiki solutions. There are the big players such as IBM and Microsoft, wrapping wiki functionality in their so-called collaboration solutions, respectively Sametime and Sharepoint. Smaller vendors like JotSpot (recently aquired by Google) and Socialtext offer their own stand-alone solutions.

“In almost every big corporation, some group is already using a wiki.” Andrew McAfee, associate professor of technology and operations management at the Harvard Business School

Behind the trend, there is a strong need for companies to stimulate more innovation and to provide the proper ground for their employees to easily and naturally expose their thoughts and findings.

80 percent of CEOs see collaboration as being critical to growth, according to a survey conducted by IBM last March.

Jeff Nolan, the former head of venture capital at enterprise software vendor SAP, agreed that enterprises are struggling to find ways to stimulate innovation.

“Large enterprises are at the barrier of how they can create new ideas.” Jeff Nolan

Very much like dark blogs, wikis also help address another problem companies have struggled with for years, which is how to collect and retain knowledge that is in people’s heads or in unstructured documents like e-mail.

Finally, “wikis provide a social incentive to share knowledge,” according to Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield. “People don’t like filling in forms, but they enjoy telling stories about their day.”

… Forward-looking blogging efforts spearheaded by the likes of Microsoft and Sun haven’t been widely replicated because many companies remain uncomfortable engaging their customers in conversation, preferring instead traditional modes of marketing, where the information flows one way. It’s hard to imagine, for example, Apple CEO Steve Jobs mixing it up with Apple customers about iPods and iMacs in the same way that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz carries the torch for Java and grid computing.

There is evidence that blogs represent a viable marketing channel. Some 12% of North American online consumers read blogs at least once a year, and 40% of consumers overall have read a blog at least once, according to Forrester Research. The audience is listening - or reading. Still, many businesses prefer the safety of the public relations cocoon to freewheeling engagement with the online masses. However, blogging tools also have valid internal uses and companies are starting see that blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, and the like make online collaboration easier.

“The conversation has shifted toward internal blogging and that has started to make a lot more sense to enterprises,” says Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic. “Blogging is a very malleable communication channel. It’s not like some of these enterprise content management systems where you have to follow these very strict rules and you’re not even allowed to publish content yourself.”

Another reason companies are looking more closely at blogging software, Schneider says, is that increasingly, new hires are themselves bloggers and are comfortable with blogging tools. The same can’t as easily be said about traditional enterprise content management systems, which often prove so complex they drive users back to familiar applications such as e-mail for collaboration and project management.

Via InformationWeek.

Stowe Boyd gives a few ideas on how the blog could be used in a large company in order to “increase social awareness, decrease wasted communications, and of course provide a continuous stream of information about what’s going on in the business.”

“… imagine a large enterprise (10,000 or so employees), where all white collar employees are given blogs, and they are asked to post a stream of their thoughts and observations as they are involved in various activities and projects. Imagine again that the enterprise has invested in developing various widgets that are embedded in the employees blogs, such as a projected timeline for travel and meetings, like the 30 Boxes plug-in on my blog, a plug-in that shows the current status of projects that the blogger is involved in, or a Twitter-like current status indicator (”out to dentist; back at 2pm ET”).”

Via Collaboration Loop.

“… corporate blogs are still in their infancy, particularly in the UK [...] Although many companies have internal blogs, corporate blogs are estimated to account for fewer than 5% of total numbers.

In the US, 40 of the Fortune 500 corporations are now blogging, according to the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Index. That is just 8% of the total but it has risen from just 24 companies, or less than 5%, six months ago.

[...] just as no company now could afford to be without a website, the corporate blog is rapidly becoming a necessity. In time, blogs will replace static, brochure-like home pages.”

“Blogs make a company more human. They can also be a great recruiting tool.

If you want to be seen as a cool place to work, then you need to have a blog. And it’s not just about being cool; it shows that you believe in being open and transparent. Customers also prefer to deal with a company that is not just a faceless entity.

They are also a powerful, low-cost way to get found by the search engines…”

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Via BlogWrite for CEOs.

“Many companies want to get involved in social media. Some see the promise of building closer relationships with stakeholders (customers, employees, partners, etc…). While others are excited about new marketing methods they must try.

[...]

So, not all companies should jump into this space. If your organization does not see the value or cannot imagine the value in engaging in these types of conversations and inviting your stakeholders in behind the PR/marketing veil, then perhaps they should wait. Jumping in and “pretending” for the sake of a press release is just not worth doing. And it could lead to criticism from those who do take social media seriously. It took a lot for Dell to bounce back from it’s Dell Hell debacle which was not just about customer service but also about listening to social media.

Here is an informal score sheet you can use to determine your company’s current appetite for engaging in social media. They are simple YES/NO questions.”

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“… the value of Office 2.0 is less about making AJAX-based clones of Microsoft Office and more about enabling ad-hoc collaboration without regard to the arbitrary organizational boundary known as the firewall.”

Via Moonwatcher.

The survey service Zoomerang says 79% of marketers aren’t even aware of the term Web 2.0. On the other hand, some clearly do, judging from a definition offered by one marketer:

“Hot air used to describe a massive technological leap in how the internet is used.”

Via The Tech Beat.

The New York Stock Exchange has a blog which has been up for about a year, and has comments turned on.

Via Micro Persuasion.

Morgan Stanley provides a link to the presentation delivered by Mary Meeker at the Web 2.0 conference taking place November 7-9 in San Francisco.

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Reuters has started offering its media customers a feed of high-quality blogs for display on websites alongside more traditional newswire feeds.

In a further sign of the importance of online diaries, or blogs, in adding knowledge or interpretation to news events, Reuters has taken a stake in Pluck, a media start-up that specialises in blog syndication and other forms of user-generated content. Pluck recently closed down its public RSS reader to focus on B2B services and has raised $7 million in second round of funding. Reuters was joined on the deal by Austin Ventures and Mayfield. It now has raised around $17 million in total VC funding since its 2003 inception.

Reuters plans to extend this service to its clients, with strong demand seen initially in the UK and the US.

Via paidContent.org.