10 Things learned at WOMMA

I learned a lot at WOMMA. Much of it about the nature of the World of Word of Mouth (WWOM) - what companies are doing, what technology is emerging, what challenges lie ahead, what's wrong with this picture. I won't go into it all but here are 10 useful (I hope) nuggets:

1. Word of Mouth Marketing (WOM) is not new. It is more popular today because trust in media and traditional marketing is down, TV advertising is in jeopardy (sometime in the future.....), and the emergence of new technologies that facilitate WOM.

2. We need to adopt a common language about WOM to make it easier to collaborate. The WOMMA folks are doing that. Here is a sample:

• Word of Mouth (WOM): The act of a consumer creating and/or distributing marketing-relevant info to another consumer
• WOM episode: A single occurence of WOMcommunications which include participants, actions, WOM Units, venues and outcomes.
• Organic WOM: natural conversation between consumers which occurs as a result of their positive experience with a company or product (their can be negative organic WOM)
• Amplified WOM: WOM which occurs as a result of a campaignspeciufically run by marketers to affect the way in which consumers share information with other consumers
• WOMUnit: a single unit of marketing-related information shared by a consumer

3. We do not have a solid measurement model. Some are trying. Some are trying too hard. We really haven’t solved this in general PR beyond expensive benchmarking/impact studies or impressions/clip analysis. It is too early to expect WOM to have a sewn-up measurement model.

4. Most WOM happens offline – 80%, in fact. This is Dave Balter’s position and one that is widely shared. Still, many people focus on facilitating and monitoring WOM online. Probably because it is possible.

5. Cymfony, Umbria, MotiveQuest and others have very interesting and powerful monitoring and measurement tools. The time to use them and get familiar with what they can tell us is now.

6. A lot of “experts” don’t really differentiate between understanding WOM and understanding PR or Marketing. Several presenters were far too basic in their approach. Anyone who had spent the money and time necessary to attend didn’t need to hear they should “listen to their customers/detractors/stakeholders.” This happens because WOM has a lot to do with traditional PR and its impossible to describe it without hitting the points of PR 101. In some cases, it happens because there is a land-grab by so-called experts out there. Some just aren’t really experts.

7. Bob Garfield really is funny but not for the obvious reasons. He is insightful because he is smart. He is funny because he lets you in to his personal life. A certain training program (good one, too) that I participated in called this expanding your “arena” or allowing for intimacy. I have been intimate with Bob Garfield. And it was funny.

8. Lots of agencies are doing good work in this space and committed to figure it out. Beyond Ogilvy PR and Cooper Katz at the conference there was Ketchum, Edelman, Golin Harris, Grey Direct, Weber Shandwick and several smaller agencies and interactive shops. Where each of these are in their abilities to integrate and execute WOM campaigns is not clear.

9. Gary Spangler from Dupont has a very practical approach to working WOM in the B2B space and selling it inside Dupont. In all fairness, they are a client of ours. But his session was a breath of "let's-get-to-it" air, client or not. Here is how Wombat blog sums up his preso:

"5 Tips from DuPont's Gary Spangler

"Because word of mouth is a new concept, people need to see it work in a small, controlled way," says Gary Spangler, eBusiness Manager for DuPont. "You're not going to get a big budget until you can demonstrate results." Here, Gary shares his five tips to sell WOM internally.

Tip #1. Declare and promote yourself the WOM expert
At large companies, in particular, nobody yet thinks of word of mouth as a practice. If you declare yourself the expert, nobody will challenge you.

Tip #2. Mine online conversations for insight and direction
Follow conversations online to track what people are saying about your products, your company, your brand, and your competition.

Tip #3. Pilot ideas online first
Start small and smart. Pilot a campaign online so that people can see it work in a small, targeted way. Then you can increase the scope and commercialize your success with a bigger budget.

Tip #4: Sell to individuals first, then a steering group
Never introduce a new concept to a big group. Before trying to sell your concept to a committee as a whole, sell it to individuals in private first. You can then adjust your approach as needed, and each person's concern won't poison a whole group.

Next, identify managers who make sense to be on a steering team and create one. Schedule regular meetings. Have them monitor and review the progress of the work. Act as though the committee exists and begin treating the members as such. They're not going to say no.

Tip #5. Enlist the experts (but don't lose control)
Once word of mouth campaigns are an accepted part of your job, you can bring in practitioners. Beware of taking an expert's experience and assuming it all applies to your company. The champion within the company (you) needs to adjust what the practitioner proposes to make business sense for the company. If you give up the sense of expertise to the practitioner, you run the risk of being eliminated as the expert within the company."

10.  A solid ethical approach to WOM is critical to its survival as a credible discipline. I credit the WOMMA folks with having this well in hand. Thomas Pahl from the FTC verbally endorsed the WOMMA guidelines in front os several hundred folks which I know thrilled the WOMMA leadership. Most people at this conference are jazzed about WOM because it demands more transparency, more authenticity and more value to the consumer. So, it is really those folks not at the conference we need to be careful of.

11. WOM in service to social marketing causes has not been newly defined. We, at Ogilvy, have been working WOM, third party influencers (I can't use "influentials" any more as it now has a service mark from Ed Keller who was at the conference) and so forth. Virgil Simons from Prostate Net showed a great case study where he used barbershops as the hub of conversation about men's health. We use WOM all of the time. But I think it's up to us to define how to make it more measureable and more of a pillar strategy.

I know I said "10 Things" and I gave 11. I didn't learn all of this at the conference. Some of it we have been working on for a while now under the banner of 360 Degree Digital Influence and our tradtional PR practices. That being said, I doubt many of the clients and agencies in attendance at this years' WOMMA Boot Camp will deliver a communications campaign without a WOM strategy.

Comments

[Flemming Madsen]

It is possible to measure and monitor WOMMA online.

Stakeholder’s influence on topics, brands and issues can be calculated quite precisely using citation analysis.

This technique has been used for over 30 years in the academic world to measure the influence of journals and universities.

However, the ability to include off-line publications, TV, Radio and PodCasts in the online monitoring will increasingly become available with the steady improvement of automatic transcription.

But already now we can do a lot. When you can monitor the online world you can monitor the offline world if you can establish the relation between offline and online metrics. For lots of topics that relation is straight forward but for others (especially online services) it is not.

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