Meet Your WOMM-U Faculty: Clayton Closson of Quicken Loans

WOMMA is thrilled to welcome WOMM-U Faculty member Clayton Closson, who is the website content manager for Quicken Loans -- the nation's largest online mortgage lender. Clayton is responsible for the flagship Quicken Loans website, as well as several smaller partner sites including his beloved DIFF blog -- the Quicken Loans employee blog. Clayton led the team that launched the DIFF -- Quicken Loans' first venture into blogging -- and he's never looked back.

Clayton is also charged with all Quicken Loans off-site content, including the WOMMIE Award-winning Yahoo! Answers Knowledge Partner program, regular content for Yahoo! Real Estate, blogger outreach, and all Quicken Loans' WOM projects. He's extremely proud of the pro-bono blog/site that Quicken Loans created for the non-profit "A Ride for 3 Reasons" (www.3reasons.org), which raised almost a half-million dollars for charity.

Clayton is an avid supporter of WOMMA and loves the challenge of making something as unexciting as mortgages WOM-worthy, and pushing hard to sell the benefits of WOM to Quicken Loans senior team leaders. It's all in a day's work for this (sort of) young man, who is a former soldier, opera intern, purchasing agent, government publicist, webmaster, and SEO dude. He's extremely proud to add "WOMM-U facilitator" to the list. Though he still holds that being an opera intern and dressing up like Mozart, running around parties drinking wine and talking to old ladies was really fun. Even for $5 an hour.

To meet Clayton and other WOMM-U Faculty members, peruse the agenda, check out the keynote presentations, or to register, visit:
http://www.womma.org/wommu

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Avoiding Over-Indulgence in Social Media: Filter and Prioritize

In response to claims that social media is producing too much "filler" content that isn't really adding enduring value, and that information needs to be filtered by an outside source, Andy Beal counters that carefully picking for yourself which bits and pieces of social media you're going to participate in will go a long way to curbing the overload. The idea that it's social media's fault that you're inundated with information misses the mark. Beal encourages social media users to exercise a little discipline and be pickier about which platforms get their time and attention.

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Encyclopedia Britannica Gets Web Savvy with Widgets and WebShare

Instead of ceding the online encyclopedia battle to Wikipedia entirely, Encyclopedia Britannica has begun to embrace a slew of Web 2.0 tools -- from its branded widgets and Twitter feed to its newly launched "WebShare," which is offering free access to its content (typically a $69.95 price tag) to bloggers and editors. The free content offered to bloggers has the potential to spread across the blogosphere as bloggers use -- and cite -- the content found on the Britannica site.

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Tip: Give Your Fans the Means to Broadcast Their Brand Love

Inspired by the small, affordable, and easy-to-use Flip video recorder, Mark Goren suggests some ways companies could get a lot of mileage from relatively little investment by getting these recorders into the hands of all of their biggest fans. From branding the Flip recorders themselves with company-emblazoned skins, to creating contests around videos that brand enthusiasts upload, Goren generated a handful of unique ideas for how to leverage this one, little piece of technology to get WOM flowing.

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