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Reading this post from Activating WOM reminds me of listening to one of my SEO friends describe the challenges facing his business, not all that long ago. As I listened, realized that the initial SEO arms race is basically over. Everyone has a full stockpile of the exact same weapons from the last failed war. There is simply very little opportunity for meaningful marginal differentiation left between SEO providers. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, many of the same people who stand to gain most from the new social media arsenal, also seem to be largely ignoring some of the most refined new tools; or waiting for someone else to go first. Doesn’t that open the door wide open to gain an early mover advantage? “Yeah early,” you might think, “but isn’t it still too early?” That answer depends on where you want to position your company, brand, product, or service. There are already growing numbers of important benchmarks and Case Studies that bear out the effectiveness of word of mouth (WOM) methods that emerging super tools like PeopleBrowsr have instantiated. These tools are rolling out of production and into the active theater, right now. One representative example is the PepsiCo SXSW campaign that continues to evolve as Pepsico Zeitgeist. My very mention of these here is another testament to its ongoing success, because I personally get nothing, nada, Zilch from Zeitgeist! Yet, the brand just got more exposure. Moreover, if you wait until all these examples are all published in the HBR,  McKinsey, or whatever, you’ll be far too late. Again. Why not strive to become that Featured Case Study, this time? Many brands — from the emerging local to the renewing global — will do just that by Activating WOM in 2009 and following suit in 2010. IMO, what Kevin and Jennifer are talking about is not just a trendy new way, but perhaps The Very Best Way to begin defining a more meaningful, practical, and personalized brand value differentiation; one that richly engages a target audience, right down to the core of individual customers. This would be a welcomed departure from recent decades of Death From Above, Business As Usual, during which, the very principles of brand differentiation have been largely hijacked by myopic, perspective-skewed supply-siders. Today’s sophisticated, would-be brand advocates and ambassadors see right through all that noise. Companies that seek to achieve brand loyalty through mass robotic SEO alone, should not be surprised with robotic results that include unenthusiastic, bar-coded, cookied, QR’d, numbered customers who only respond to the next brute force stimuli, come-on, or gimme-half-off gimmick. That’s far too labor intensive and costly to maintain over the long run. If brands want to win hearts and minds for decades at a time, to nurture and grow Legacy Grade brand loyalty, they have no choice but to win them over One At A Time; and the best way — nay, the only way — to do that is through Relationships that are built upon Authenticity and Trust. Toward that end, WOM has a long history of being the highest integrity, least obnoxious, and most reliable conduit for conveying those human values. Period. OTOH, learning how to create a sustainable, scalable WOM marketplace is not quite so straightforward. That’s where companies need all the help they can get. One drawback that I worry about is that if WOM devolves into a pure popularity contest that merely shifts existing resource skews around without enabling an ever more even flow model. I personally think that would utterly miss the mark. Thankfully, none of the credible business leaders exploring and exploiting such methods have ever said that such changes would be quick or easy; only that they would result in steady, sustainable growth of Longitudinal Brand Loyalty. Personally, I further suspect that the most innovative companies and brands will be those that demonstrate how to generously and proportionately allocate the direct financial benefits of this Conversation As Content across the entire value communication spectrum, including the social conveyers of those values themselves — from the most casual mentioner, to the most enthusiastic brand ambassador. These innovators will be numbered among the new banner brands of the post Great Recession economy, and services like Seesmic could have started to realize these disruptive revenue generating opportunities this long ago. Maybe Seesmic did listen to the community way back when (and even farther back) and we just haven’t seen the results, yet. I know that this is saying a mouthful and may be an attempt to compress too much into too small a space; I promise to try and do better to unpack in greater detail in a later post. In any event, these new business methods and models do eventually come full circle in a way that disrupts the old hardened categories and empowers new human capabilities by measured, pragmatic steps. We might also take some small comfort in the reminder that back in the day, people used to call a combination of slightly discomfiting cognitive dissonance and palpable possibility, the meandering, iterative path of progress. Onward!