Zócalo Group drives both offline and online Word of Mouth and recommendations - fueling the positive and neutralizing the negative. And we engage the right experts and individuals to holistically promote and protect your brand - across all new media, social media, traditional and offline channels.

Whether launching a new product or service, revitalizing an existing brand or defending against brand detractors, we take the time to understand your situation, your competition and your unique value proposition to ensure that we employ only the smartest, most relevant and most critical tactics necessary.

Each Zócalo Group program may include some or all of the following online and offline tactical elements, tailor-made to your needs:

Click on headings below for more information.

• Online Footprint Analysis/Index (Measurement/ROI)

  • With blogs, microblogs, message boards, online communities and other online resources, we can explicitly see the naked language consumers and experts use to talk about brands, competitors and industries. Marketers can forgo the focus group and get an invaluably real and incomparably raw understanding of what people are saying and why they are buying - today and tomorrow.

• Sharable Story Mapping

  • Many brands have a good idea of their positioning, tagline or marketing message. But have you formalized a word of mouth strategy around how you want people to actually recommend your brand? Have you gone beyond your tagline and translated your brand's boardroom value proposition into actual consumer language? If you don't explicitly know how you want consumers to recommend your brand, is it really surprising that they're saying something else? While we cannot control conversations and recommendations, we can definitely shape and influence them. It's critical for brands to craft the story they want told, and then provide the information and opportunities for influencers and advocates to experience and share the brand. In a half-day session with your team's key decision makers, we'll uncover your brand's "story" in a way that your target embraces and shares.

• Eminent Identification and Engagement (Industry Experts)

  • Through detailed research and a proven screening strategy, Zócalo Group identifies and then helps your brand engage with the experts, individuals and groups (on a national and/or local level) that are most critical to driving recommendation. And with the robust, proprietary ZócaloNet on-line portal, you always have current information on any engagement with your Eminents or topics that they are talking or writing about.

• Digital Word of Mouth/Social Media Engagement Strategy

  • Zócalo Group knows how to listen and connect with individuals and groups online. From blogs, microblogs, message boards, news groups, social media sites and photo/video sharing platforms, our team is dedicated to building online word of mouth marketing campaigns that help brands maximize the exposure and understanding they get online.

    The proven Zócalo Conversation EngineSM ensures that your brand is consistently and accurately included in those conversations and engagements that are going to do the most to build visibility, relationships, feedback and sales.

    • Brand Protect ^SM
      
      Is your brand under attack or are you being unfairly targeted by determined detractors? Perhaps the existing conversations about your brand misrepresent who you really are? Our word of mouth and social media marketing strategies take control of the conversation and aggressively promote and protect your brand through Zócalo Group's Brand ProtectSM. We relentlessly monitor online conversations to ensure your brand is talked about in the right ways. And when it is not, we set the record straight directly and/or by enlisting and engaging your brand's biggest supporters to go to bat for you. We apply this same approach to your brand's Search Engine results, Wikipedia page, Twitter URL, and in every other critical online community where your reputation is at stake.

• In-Market Influencer Identification and Engagement

  • Although online conversations and recommendations are key drivers of the purchase decision, the vast majority of Word of Mouth still occurs offline. We are experts at identifying and engaging in-market influencers who have natural networks. With a proprietary database of in-market community and special interest groups and leaders (ranging from PTAs and Garden Clubs to running clubs) we can get your brand in front of and engaged with those who matter most. And our Zócalo Influencer Index gives us the power to screen existing databases or compile and validate custom market databases to identify individuals most likely to embrace and share your brand.

    Our team of experiential marketing experts creates off-line word of mouth strategies and executes in-market events as well as sampling programs that bring together and inspire influencers to recommend your brand.

• Media Relations Multiplier

  • Zócalo Group knows how to integrate media relations into an overall approach to word-of-mouth marketing success. Our proactive media outreach and multi-media news release generates coverage in both traditional and online media. That's just the start. The Zócalo Group strategy then "multiplies" the impact of the coverage by ensuring that the news gets shared and talked about by industry eminents, brand evangelists and other influencers across every critical social media channel. Using a variety of social media tools and channels, we ensure that media relations success shows up wherever and whenever someone searches out information on your brand or category.

• Social Media Optimization

  • Where and how your brand shows up in Search Engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo, Ask, Live, etc.) directly and dramatically impacts if and how people talk about and recommend your brand. These word of mouth campaigns go beyond the basic PAID search placement to ensure that the best EARNED conversations, news articles and recommendations of your brand, product or service are appearing highest in Search rankings.

• Brand Protect (Corporate/brand crisis preparedness and defense)

  • Is your brand under attack or are you being unfairly targeted by determined detractors? Perhaps the existing conversations about your brand misrepresent who you really are? Our word of mouth strategies help you to control of the conversation and aggressively promote and protect your brand through Zócalo Group's Brand Protect ^SM. We relentlessly monitor online conversations to ensure your brand is talked about in the right ways. And when it is not, we set the record straight directly and/or by enlisting and engaging your brand's biggest supporters to go to bat for you. We apply this same approach to your brand's Search Engine results, Wikipedia page, Twitter URL, and in every other critical online community where your reputation is at stake.

• Zócalo Squares (Online Communities)

  • Many brands are realizing the insights and advocacy they can gain from an expertly moderated and managed online community. Our scalable community platform gives brands an unprecedented opportunity to rally and share insights with their employees, their biggest fans or industry experts. Others use private communities to gain real insight on marketplace trends and consumer needs that will help them gain significant competitive advantage.

• Social Media Monitoring and Reporting

  • Through a proven mix of proprietary, subscription-based and open-market tools and techniques Zócalo Group helps brands explicitly monitor and measure how they are being talked about and recommended in any and every social media channel online. Our daily updates and weekly "Word in the Square" reports give your team the information and insight needed to effectively manage your brand and drive the conversations and recommendations that will build sales.