Being conversation-worthy, having consumers and clients talk about you. That’s pretty high on the agenda of most brands and organisations. Being conversation-worthy isn’t only about remarkable ads (hey, advertising still works), it’s also about acts. It isn’t only about a smart activation campaign on a social network, but it’s also about really integrating conversations in everything you do as a company.

Over the last couple of months, we’ve worked hard to implement conversation-thinking in several companies, ranging from Unilever to Telenet and KLM to Puratos. Some takeaways:

• Brands with a purpose (a commitment to something that adds value to people’s everyday lives) have more potential to build long-term relationships and fuel a year-round conversation. E.g. Dove’s commitment to real beauty is more easily translated in a long-term conversation than a random cleaning product.
• Being conversation-worthy is about paying carefull attention to earned, owned AND paid media. No earned media without a decent owned presence. No reach without a smart use of paid media.
• Martin Kloos introduced me to the concept of a ‘Social media voice‘, a translation of the brand/company values in an online persona/voice. It’s a simple concept but helps companies define the right tone of voice and actions within the social media space.
• In every consumer interaction, think how this interaction could lead to the consumer telling someone else, whether it is offline or online via social meda. E.g. the Il Giglio d’Oro bed & breakfast in Firenze stimulates every customer to write a testimonial on Tripadvisor.com (read more).

We have translated our learnings into a first draft of our model for being conversation-worthy on every brand level. Let me know what you think.