We had a terrific Word of Mouth Media discussion today. I was joined by Addy Tseng, Rebecca Happy and Geary Morales and on the hot seat today was our Book Club Member Tiffany Topcik. We began today's discussion with a recap of last week's program and since we couldn't have an interactive discussion due to technical difficulties last week, we had some dialogue about the tools from last week's program - Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo and Facebook. We then shifted to talking about how these new sites could potentially displace the old traditional web sites for companies and why this could happen. We had some spirited discussion about how some companies will resist the interactive nature of what is happening in Word of Mouth Media™ versus the one dimensional aspects of most web sites. We do all agree that static communications will ultimately morph to dynamic conversations and that to have a sustainable marketing strategy in the next decade, social marketing is a must have component, whether you are in a not-for-profit arena, a corporation or you are an entrepreneur. We talked about using Word of Mouth Media™ to establish yourself as an authority through Blog sites and through various article marketing sites, versus the approach that many take to simply "retweet" the content of others. Those that are simply acting as aggregators are in many ways acting like the newspapers and magazines of old, just pulling together interesting content written by others, versus being the "Editor" with their own column. We talked alot about live streaming and microblogging and the benefits and drawbacks of these tools. It is important to think about the mental reactions of "that's good to know" versus "who cares", the latter of which happens all too often. We also talked about some of the tools that makes the use of microblogging products much more useful and productive, such as tweetdeck and twello. Simon U Ford mentions many tools in the section of the book 2.0 Engaging Your Audience. We highly recommend trying each one and determining whether each one fits into your social media strategy. We discussed the importance of relationship and interaction with those that you connect with on social media and the notion of quantity versus quality connections online. We also touched on the importance of article marketing and using products like Squidoo, ezinearticles and hubpages.com to syndicate your expertise in article form. Next week we will be digging deeper into content sharing and syndication as we explore Digg, Stumbleupon and the use of video through YouTube. You can join us again this week on Tuesday night at 830pm ET on www.blogspot.com/solutionzlive for our PM Edition, hosted by Geary Morales. If you would like information on ordering the book Social Traffic by Simon U Ford that we've been discussing, see www.wordofmouthmedia.blogspot.com. Also feel free to join our Facebook Group. http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=80387452682