I have the pleasure of speaking at WOM UK‘s next espresso briefing on Thursday 25th March, where I’ll be with Drew Ellis discussing two things from a very likeminded angle:

1. How spreadability is beating reach. How did the music industry get punk’d by a hacked up Facebook gathering? How did a conference get international attention without any marketing spend? We’ll look at how neither had direct reach, but both had spreadability.

2. How teams of people are beating factories of employees. How are we changing in the way that we work to move from mutual benefit to shared benefit? How do businesses begin to think socially about their staff and their customers?

WOM UK (Word of Mouth UK Association) is the elite squad of forward thinkers who are basically spearheading the Social Communications movement in the UK. They are partnered with WOMMA in the US (whose president is John Bell, one of our Like Minds alumni and MD of Ogilvy’s PR wing), and their UK council is headed by another Like Minds alumni in the form of Molly Flatt from 1000heads.

It’s on Thursday 25th March, from 8:30am to 10:30am. We’ll be at Peter Novelli, 31 St Petersburgh Place, London, W2 4LA. More details from WOM UK’s site is available here.

Best of all: It’s FREE, breakfast is included, and it will be attended by people you want to meet. Make sure you come and say hi to me before or after.

Archived Comments

  • http://twitter.com/Sam_Ford Sam Ford

    Hi Scott,

    I’d love to hear more about how your talk went, particularly in regards to point #1. I am working on a book with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green at the moment based on work the Convergence Culture Consortium (a research project we’re all affiliated with) has done to think through how content spreads online and how “spreadability” works vis-a-vis concepts like “viral.” Here, your distinction between spreadability and reach intrigues me, as you point out the difference in needing to create an opportunity to reach the audience you want directly versus how content might spread in circles that gets the content into the hands of that audience as part of a process that involves a larger swath of the culture. In any case, just curious. Thanks!

  • / Scott Gould

    Hey Sam

    Isn’t this serendipity! I just found Henry Jenkins’ website yesterday when searching “spreadability”

    This book must be awesome that you are working on. I am working on a manuscript at the moment, called “Social” looking at some of these things, plus other models I’ve created.

    The talk went well. A video of me being interview afterwards is here:
    /creating-conversation-arou…

    And then the slides of the presentation are on slideshare here: http://www.slideshare.net/scottgould/spreadabil…

    I’m keen to talk more!

  • http://twitter.com/Sam_Ford Sam Ford

    Good timing indeed! Our research on the concept of “spreadability” started a few years ago (back in 2007). Some of our team wrote up a white paper out of the Convergence Culture Consortium on the topic in 2008, and we’ve been developing this book project over the past couple of years. In the process, we’re excited to see some of the language get picked up, inasmuch as it makes people think about the inherent issues with terms like “viral” or an online media plan based solely on the value of stickiness, at the detriment of thinking about how content spreads amongst communities. In any case, thanks for putting up the slides. I’m going to share it with Henry and Joshua as well. Stay in touch about what you’re working on with the social book project!

  • / Scott Gould

    Sam would love to talk more if possible – let me know if we can

  • http://twitter.com/Sam_Ford Sam Ford

    Absolutely, Scott. Shoot me an email at samford@mit.edu