Notes from WOMMA Summit

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association staged its 3rd annual summit last week in Las Vegas. Some random thoughts and observations from the three-day event:

* Nearly 500 people attended - a far cry more people than just a few short years ago.  That’s testament to the growing strength of this organization and the outstanding vision and hard work by the WOMMA Board and staff, especially Interim CEO Peter Waldheim. If you don’t know Peter, you really should.

* One of the great things about WOMMA events (beyond the people who attend) is it attracts professionals from a wide variety of different disciplines, from CMOs, to marketing VPs, to brand managers, to corporate communicators, to market research analysts and many others.

* A dominant theme throughout the event was the notion for brands to get out and participate more in word of mouth activities and go beyond just monitoring what’s going on in blogs and social networks. The always interesting Ed Keller, CEO of Keller Fay, in fact went as far as to say that conversation is the future of successful marketing.

* I had heard and read a lot of good things about Lionel Menchaca, Dell’s chief blogger on Direct2Dell, but until you meet Lionel in person and get a sense of his approach to the business you really don’t know how special he really is. Dell could not have tabbed anyone better for the job and I’m not just saying that because we do some work for Dell, which is also blogging in Chinese, Spanish and Norwegian. These guys are light years ahead of others in social media strategy and measurement.

* If you’re looking for some great word-of-mouth case studies take a look at this year’s Wommie award winners from Affinitive, Converseon, Fanscape, and Quicken Loans. All are great, but I still think Nintendo takes the cake this past year for the WII launch.

* One of the best answers I heard during the show was “I don’t know,” from Bruce Ertmann, Corporate Manager for Consumer Generated Media at Toyota, when asked what was the ROI resulting from his online efforts. Too many people are hung up at the moment at thinking they have to have a comprehensive ROI model before getting involved, while smart brands know they don’t need a methodology to have an honest one-to-one conversation with their customers.

* If you’re interested, you can download the presentations from the event. Hope to see you at the 08 summit.

Mike Spataro