Opened in 1962, Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD) served 24.7 million passengers in 2007 and offers 88 non-stop domestic destinations and 42 non-stop international destinations.

Standing on the 86th Floor Observatory at 1,050 feet, the view of Manhattan and beyond is a breathtaking sight.

Along with Jake McKee, I was one of the official conference bloggers. Being a designated blogger is a very different experience that being a regular attendee or even a speaker, and having now worked in that capacity, I have a much deeper respect for what goes into such a seemingly easy task. Aside from the typical challenges of racing from one session to the next, making sure your computer battery doesn’t run out of juice when there is no available plug, being flexible with program and panelist changes, and writing without the luxury of reviewing and editing what you’ve written, there is the responsibility of trying to record the highlights of the covered sessions in such a way that readers are able to get value from what you’ve posted.

Without questions, for me one of the highlights of the conference were the research and measurement sessions. Not necessarily because they were the most entertaining (I’d put the lunch keynote by Richard Tait, Grand Poo Bah of Cranium Inc., the keynote by Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking or the session “No Fans, No Band” in that category), but because they provided the oh-so-important hard data validating the effectiveness of word of mouth.

Between the Research Symposium and the Summit, there were over twenty sessions on research and measurement. Additionally, attendees received the excellent Measuring Word of Mouth: Current Thinking on Research and Measurement of Word of Mouth Marketing, WOMMA’s third annual research volume (available for purchase as well) that contains over twenty papers covering a wide range of topics with a particular emphasis on the influencer model.

What’s also useful within the research volume is the section on WOMMA terminology, which aims to “provide a unified framework for describing and measuring word of mouth marketing.” It provides definitions of word of mouth (”the act of a consumer creating and/or distributing marketing-relevant information to another consumer”), work of mouth marketing (”en effort by an organization to affect how consumers create and/or distribute marketing-relevant information to other consumers”) and WOM Episode (”a single occurrence of word of mouth communication, which includes Participants, Actions, WOMUnits, Venues, and Outcomes”), among other things. There is also an excellent visual summary of what happens during a WOM Episode, along with the associated qualities thereof — namely a participant taking an action on a WOMUnit in a particular venue that then results in an outcome.

What’s particularly interesting, though, is social media’s broader ability to quickly share and disseminate critical information when things go wrong, wrong as in threatening, dangerous, and frequently life-altering, which we’re seeing right now with the California wildfires. CenterNetworks points to some of the recent coverage of the fires on sites such as Flickr (see the search term "california fires"  for recent images), YouTube ( see the 2000+ results for "california fires") and Wikipedia (see "California Wildfires of October 2007") among others. CNET reports how microblogging site Twitter is being used by news organizations such as KPBS and L.A. Times and individuals Nate Ritter to give updates. And Ustream.tv is showing live coverage of the fires.

Meanwhile, on-the-ball international organizations such as the American Red Cross are using social media tools to help serve as vital and up-to-date information sources — see the  Online Disaster News Portal, as well as the Red Cross and the Safe and Well Twitter accounts.

My prediction is that within a relatively short time frame, say perhaps three years, the majority of disaster relief organizations, both government and private, will fully implement real-time information dissemination  via text messaging, microblogging and an assortment of additional tools and social networking sites.

“We Must Scrupulously Guard the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of All Citizens…” Franklin Roosevelt Memorial, Washington D.C., United States

We’ve also relaunched the Voce Nation blog, so go check out the new cool multimedia design.

Yes, so this is a feel-good, rah-rah post… and I’m ok with that.

Today is Blog Action Day, where thousands of bloggers — over fifteen thousand and counting, with millions of combined readers — write about a single important topic: the environment.

Well, "protecting the environment" has been a buzz phrase for a very long time now, and just as there are many people and organizations who understand that environmental protection isn’t antithetical to business and can go hand-in-hand with it, there unfortunately are detractors who are more comfortable being cynics than taking steps that, on a combined scale, will make positive long-term change. Fortunately, important events such as Al Gore’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, lend great credibility to the importance of environmental causes and place them on the global stage.

Ultimately every action starts with an idea, though. And so, I’d like to share, in his own words, what a very special young boy, with the wide-eyed innocence of youth, suggested we can all do to "help the earth." 

• Watering your lawn and watering your garden.
• Feeding wild birds in the winter.
• Cleaning up your toys.
• Picking up garbage outside.
• Don’t burn tires, or don’t use your car too much since that can pollute the air.
• Keeping the lakes and rivers and oceans clean.

If a six-year old can come up with ideas and get excited about how he can contribute, surely the rest of us can too. 

The first thing I noticed were pictures of a little girl who looked like she was only a few years old. The second thing I saw was the Twitter bio, "has been abducted in Plaia da Luz, Portugal." I made "Madeleine" my friend and read her website where I learned that, as of today, she’s been missing 116 days after being stolen from her bed.

In learning more about Madeleine’s case and wondering what I would do to help find my child if he or she were missing, I saw the impressive efforts to keep attention and help collect information about the abduction –  the Bring Madeleine Home website, the Twitter site, a Live Spaces page, a MySpace page, many YouTube videos (as well as the YouTube channel Don’t You Forget About Me that aims to reunite children with their families), the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre’s Help Find Madeleine McCann page, electronic posters in multiple languages and desktop wallpapers, as well as an online store that helps raise funds to assist in her search.

While Madeleine’s father, Gerry McCann, implied that he is concerned about the case becoming too sensationalistic and may return home to the U.K. with the rest of his family, one hopes that the strong online attention will soon help lead to a break in the case.

Tags: social media, children,  law, abduction

The internationally recognized Golden Gate Bridge is one of the longest suspension bridges in the world and the subject of countless photographs. It receives about nine million visitors a year.

The big day arrives, we walk in and get started. Within minutes we knew that the company had fallen in love with one of the earlier presenting agencies, and was only going through the motions with us. No, it didn’t actually say so, but after you’ve been at this for a while you can tell. And the occasional yawns and other stuff that came later simply solidified the team’s initial impression.

Yeah, you win some and you lose some. Happens all the time, and the sooner you get used to that the better. But here’s the deal: Even if a company’s already picked a favorite, there’s no need to be obvious about it until everyone’s finished — there’s time enough later to make it official.

Barring genuine interest, at least fake it until we’ve left the building.   

Tags: business pitch, public relations, PR