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.

Making Time for Social Media

Brother Ian over at Flagged For Follow Up recently touched a nerve on a recurring theme in my life - those uninitiated to social media claiming they can’t get involved because they don’t have time for that stuff.
I have no problem with anyone who doesn’t want to participate in social media. I don’t […]

Viral vineyard vines

As the Miracle clan prepared for our beach trip this week, I moved from mildly amused by the colorful new vineyard vines store in Georgetown to borderline obsessed. While I had admired the slice of Martha’s Vineyard life offered in the store since its opening and had even directed visitors staying with us […]

Nau’s Remarkable Second Life

At the end of last week, Nau announced that they’re back. They’ve been acquired by another remarkable company - Horny Toad - who has agreed to handle their financing issues and has wisely supported Nau keeping its distinct and remarkable brand personality in tact.
One of the reasons they decided to hunker cited in their […]

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.