Links do Dia: 14.05.08

• The 3 Philosophies of Word of Mouth Marketing – Influential Marketing Blog

As WOM emerges as a notable branch of marketing (and by most reports at WOMM-U, it has already done so with nearly a billion dollars expected to be spent on WOM this year alone), people start to take different approaches to defining it within their organization and to their peers. The most interesting thing for me from WOMM-U was that three core philosophies seemed to emerge for how people were defining word of mouth, and they each have some interesting lessons for you if you are planning to start a word of mouth effort or need to justify one to your boss

• These Brands Build Community – Brian Morrissey in AdWeek

For Tony Hsieh, CEO at Zappos, meeting up with a customer at a bar in midtown Manhattan was perfectly natural. Most execs with 1,600 employees and doing over $1 billion in annual sales would probably pass on having drinks with an individual customer, but Hsieh is not your typical CEO. In the past week alone he had given away shoes on Twitter, sent out an open invitation to a company barbecue and solved a service problem a customer left in a blog comment. If this seems exhausting, Hsieh sees it as part of a larger strategy to build Zappos into a brand on par with Virgin.