Cross posted from the WOMMA Blog. The standard live-blogging caveats apply....excuse any initial typos.

WOMMA always comes up with some great lunch-time speakers. Back in January of this year at WOMBAT we had Scott Ginsberg...you know the guy with the name tag. This year was no exception with the lunch activity being led by Doug Walker, Managing Director of the World Rock Paper Scissors Society (are you a member?)

How is Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) relevant to a WOM audience? The entire RPS program is very WOM based. There are four basic principles:

Authority: The web site was stated in 1995 and they made the claim that they were the authority of RPS. Soon they became the authority. Other cultures began to share their versions of the game. This combined with a message board built up an amazing RPS content base. Soon there were competitions based upon RPS sprouting up.

In 2003 they had the opportunity to write a book. The Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide.

Mutation: Other opportunities soon evolved. Competitions, t-shirts...a brand formed. Internally they all wore many hats. In 2004 FOX Sports produced a TV show based upon the RPS competition. Now there is competition in the organization space. Have you heard of the USARPS?

The question now becomes how to make it relevant. What's funny is that at least once a year there is a story that involves RPS, that gives them the opportunity to insert themselves into the story. RPS will often provide commentary around these stories.

Participation: RPS takes people off the streets and makes them athletes. That's a powerful thing. They treat it very seriously. When there is something this silly and you treat that seriously there is a great deal of humor in that. They make the winners C-level celebrities and book TV appearances and other 'events' for them. They would often turn journalists into players, this would evolve into great first-person stories.

RPS also provided attendees the tools to run their own event, in essence extending the brand.

Accretion: Once a few people get involved it continues to build and WOM is a result.

Recently RPS launched an article titled 'How to Beat Anyone at Rock, Paper, Scissors'. Social media sites, specifically Digg and Fark listed the entry and it ended up sending a tremendous amount of traffic to the RPS. This of course blew up their web server. They estimated that the outage cost them around 100,000 possible impressions.

Three days after the launch of the article, Google showed 18,600 unique links to the site.

Doug wrapped up his presentation and then introduced the group exercise. The entire audience would take part in a RPS tournament. Each attendee was given $4 in RPS currency and started by challenging their tablemates and then as they collect RPS dollars move around the room.

For the next 10 minutes the WOMMA conference looked like a kindergarten playground.

The goal was to get four finalists on stage that would battle it out for the WOMMA RPS crown.

Becky Engel from Edelman was the winner! (shown above)