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“It’s an English basement.”

That might not mean much to you, but it probably made you chuckle if you fall into one of the two groups:

1. Current or former D.C. residents
2. Viewers of Sh*t People In D.C. Say

Of course, this video is one of many variations of the Sh*t Girls Say series - which has a cumulative YouTube viewership of 20+ million and growing. You know the premise: Stereotypical expressions from people of a certain ilk, organized by gender, hobby, lifestyle, or geography. There are takes on skiers, hipsters, suburban moms, and even sh*t nobody says (a personal favorite) and the meme’s ’success’ reminds me of basic marketing program goals: generating word-of-mouth, stimulating co-creation, and targeting segmented audiences.

$1,400 for a converted sunroom? Not bad - better than an English basement.

First: Why do we care about sh*t other people say?

As a meme - both intentionally and by accident - these videos satisfy several of the 7 Drivers of Word of Mouth synthesized from Emmanuel Rosen’s work: there’s a good story, people can show their involvement, there is an implicit invitation to participate through their involvement, ’supporters’ can be creative, and, most crucially, there’s a clear value offering - comedy.

The power of these elements is not only clear in the 20+ million video views of the original - and millions more on the variations - but the number of amateur aueters who created their own. An absurdly unscientific calculation using YouTube shows 200+ videos using a basic search - let’s safely presume 50 are duplicates and 50 are spam. Even at 100 and with absolutely no prize, that’s higher participation than most branded video submission challenges get - save Survivor applications and Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl.

What’s the lesson?

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Check out the video below to see who won the free conference pass to WOMMA’s WOMM-U in South Beach on May 13- 14!

Thank you to everyone who participated. There were truly some great entries. Congrats to Robert Fields who wrote about a WOM campaign he is currently working on with the Salvation Army’s National Food Drive to push teen involvement within the community. You can read his entry and check out others in Kaitlyn’s post here.

See you in Miami, Robert! Please send your email address to tanya.chadha@ogilvypr.com. Thanks!

WOMMA (we are members, I serve on the board)  has just released revised ethics guidelines covering the best practice ethics for word of mouth marketing.  WOMMA pioneered WOMM ethics with its “Honesty ROI” which was the source of best practices around full disclosure and other principles.

We recently updated the policies by transforming them into a “Living Ethics Guidelines” via a collaboration at our last event and online where we solicited ideas about how they should be refined. This process will continue and lead to periodic updates.

Any brand or marketer who cares about effective and ethical use of social media and word of mouth marketing should take a look at the ethics policies. They respond to some phenomena happening from incentives to bloggers to FTC concerns about endorsements.

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