Author Archives: virginia.miracle

I am a passionate Word of Mouth Marketing practitioner. The juxtaposition of my experiences in WOMM vs. my time in the trenches of one of the country’s most voluminous direct marketers has given me firsthand understanding of the power of customer conversation and the relative inefficiency of shout and interruption marketing.

Currently, I am the Director of Word of Mouth Marketing at Brains on Fire, a national Identity and Word of Mouth marketing company. There, I champion the client services group and intimately shepherded the Fiskateers crafting ambassador program for the first 18 months of its existence. Brains on Fire is a supremely creative and intuitive company. If you ever are in search of examples for how to make every customer touchpoint express your true personality, try calling the Brains on Fire front desk.

I was first turned on to the power of conversational marketing through a role I was asked to tackle during my 4 years at Dell, Inc. in Round Rock Texas. I began my time there in Corporate Strategy and rolled through various roles in consumer marketing including word of mouth marketing manager (believed to be the first WOMM title at a F50 company) and leading the company’s online advertising to consumers and small businesses. Before that, I was a proud member of the late-90s phenomenon Trilogy Software and earned a BA in English language and literature from Princeton. I am a member of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s Board of Directors.

I am also a new mom, a mean Scrabble player, and a (formerly closeted) Bruce Hornsby superfan. I recently completed GH3 for Wii on Medium, but secretly doubt if I’m going to get good enough to go through it on Hard. I’m not sure how many more times I can listen to Metallica’s “One”, anyway.

Target’s Newsweek Innovation

Whilst perusing Inc. Magazine’s nest of blogs, I came across a great example of innovative marketing environmentalism. Tom Szaky, CEO of Terra Cycle and author of the Eco-Capitalist blog, sold Newsweek magazine and Target on a unique promotion for their April Earth Day cover. The idea is something he calls “upcycling” - using […]

Teddy Bears Have Ears

Vermont Teddy Bear picked up my rant in their Google alerts and reached out to me through Facebook to explain the situation (it was an affiliate, not them) and shared their desire to investigate.
I just posted the full scoop on the Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence blog here.

DM 2.0: Comment Spam

When I began this blog, I thought that Direct Mail was the height of marketing clutter. It was the tail end of the holiday season, and even though I did end up purchasing a few items from the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog, I felt deeply annoyed by the sheer volume, poundage, and paper waste in […]

Motivated Mii

I never thought that a brand relationship BENEFIT from telling a customer in graphic detail that he/she is a fattie patattie.
On Friday, however, that very scenario took place when our hotly anticipated pre-ordered Wii Fit arrived. The first activity for all users of the Wii Fit is a “body test” that uses your ability […]

Top 5 from WOMM-U

There is an advantage in the tardiness to this wrap up post from WOMM-U in Miami: the following highlights have already stood the test of staying with me for a full week , these are observations that have at least held up through a full week of work, media consumption, deep thoughts and Twitter. […]