Agenda
| Date & Time | Events |
|---|---|
| Night before 6-10pm |
Dinner Please join us for an over-the-top feast at Costa's, our favorite restaurant in Chicago's Greektown. A chance to have some fun and meet your teammates before tomorrow's big day. |
| Crash Course 8am |
Welcome! We’ll get settled in at Catalyst Ranch, have some breakfast, make all the formal introductions, and go over our battle plan for the day. Prepare for a day of intensive learning and practice, not for lectures about theory and conjecture. Get ready to draw up an action plan that you’ll want to implement tomorrow. |
| 8:30am | Word of Mouth Marketing: 5 Simple Steps This is where you learn how word of mouth works, from start to finish. You'll learn how to:
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| 9:30am | Kickoff Brainstorming Exercises: The 5 T's Our first intensive hands-on exercises, applying the concepts we’ve discussed to get in a WOM state of mind. Break through traditional marketing mindsets to develop a new perspective of your customers. |
| 10:30am | Break This is intense stuff. You'll need to catch your breath. |
| 10:45am | Talkers: Finding and Feeding Evangelists Identify the folks most likely to talk about you and your business. Learn new ways to look at groups of people and how to motivate them into becoming something more than just buyers. This is where you turn Joe Customer into an evangelist for your products and services. |
| 11:45am | Topics: Delivering Reasons to Talk Now that you know who your talkers are, let’s give them something to talk about. Learn exactly where to find or create the things that get generates buzz. Develop the thought process so you can earn that conversation from your customers – and your employees. |
| 12:45pm | Working Lunch: Talkers & Topics Exercises Roll up your sleeves and put these lessons to the test. Over a nice lunch, brainstorm with teammates to find Talkers and Topics in various scenarios. |
| 2pm | Tools: Word of Mouth Techniques Time to create avenues for all that talking about your topics. We’ll cover tons of ways to make it easy for people to talk about you. Everything from real-world conversations and tell-a-friend forms, to online tools like blogs, social communities, and networks. |
| 3pm | Taking Part & Tracking: Responding and Participating Once the conversation about your company's products or services is underway, you need to be a part of it. We’ll teach the proper, ethical ways to insert yourself into the dialogue while avoiding the common (but easy-to-make) mistakes. Learn how and why your employees should play a role in these conversations – and what to do with the feedback you get. |
| 4pm | Break What a workout! Collect your thoughts before we pull this all together. |
| 4:15pm | Your Company's Action Plan Now that you know the right way to WOM, you’ll want to get started. We’ll put together an action plan, shaping the specific concepts that work for your company. We’ll include ways you can integrate word of mouth into your workplace, how to find the right employees to help you carry out this mission, and how to make this a sustainable, regular part of your marketing strategy. |
| 5pm | Adjourn Prepare to put your lessons into action! Your brain is going to feel very, very full. We’ll line up cabs to get you where you need to go. |