Day 2 of the WOMMA - WOMM-U Miami conference started off at 8am after a nice breakfast. The first presenter was Bob Pearson of Dell, who delivered an energetic presentation on what Dell has learned about word of mouth marketing so far…

Obserations:

1. The online world is going through the most significant change in history
2. The number of conversations is exploding - 2010 988 Exobytes of digital data online
3. Customers want to speak with us in their first language - only 1/3 of the conversations are in English
4. New countries have formed hat are not being treated with the full respect that their nation’s population deserves… i.e. MySpace
5. Watch out for content pushers… (traditional marketers)
6. Your new home page is cool… but do you know where it is? - Google
7. If we build it, they do not come. The traffic that matters is not abbout you. Get the right keywords.
8. Less than 1% of a person’s time online will be spent buying a product

Key Learnings and Actions from Dell

1. The most important things you can do is help customers with their technology problems
2. Blogging is global… blogging is multilingual…blogging is by a community of passion…blogging is not ‘one blog’
3. Would you rather do a focus group with 10 people or listen to 100,000 people debate ideas for a few months and ask them questions throughout the process? - Ideastorm over 12,000 ideas, with 120 ideas in action externally.
4. Customers are partners and partners join together to make a difference
5. Communities are more powerful than individuals. Communities want to help each other improve.
6. The online experience at work should be similar to the online experience at home
7. Join your customer’s communities and become part of the solution
8. You can see in real time if you are relevant to a topic or conversation
9. If you are dealing with an issue be truthful, transparent and diligent in updating your customers
10. Your customers are people not lines of business, and they can belong to many different communities.
11. Measurement requires thinking outside the box. Don’t try to fit old thinking to the new environment. Conversations and communities matter.

Following this presentation, which ran over by 10 minutes (no complaints from the audience), was a case study on Carnival Cruise Lines.  This provided a deep contrast in presentation styles and content, which means that I’m not going to even mention it beyond this paragraph.

Then it was back to the brainstorming sessions for each of the three charities from the day before.  Over lunch each of the charities presented the results from these sessions, which each showed different ways of thinking and crafting solutions for different problems and organizations.

Following the presentations, it was back to the breakout sessions.  I attended the Tools discussion, which was interesting, and like the latter ones from yesterday, would have been served better by extending the time period to an hour.

Then it was back to the final case study, and presentation given by Jen Gulvik VP of Marketing at Houlihan’s Restaurants.  She talked about how they created a community of passionate Houlifans and ambassadors to help them know what was going on in the minds of their customers.  The biggest change that the group made was when Houlihan’s discontinued the fajita.  Franchisees were happy, as it required more work to make, and corporate were completely behind the decision.  Then the community began to revolt, and they listened.  against the menu planning committee’s wishes the fajitas returned.  Since that date the fajitas have increased in popularity.  People listened to the fervent supporters who brought it back, and became interested enough to try it.  Before it was removed it was the 14th most popular item on the menu, now in some restaurants it’s challenging for first.  This truly is the power of Word of Mouth.

So ended the conference.  I would have to say that I enjoyed it, and because it was in warm climes (I hardly got to leave the hotel), it was interesting to hear viewpoints and perspectives from more traditional marketers. If I had to sum the conference up in 4 words it would be this:

Listen

Be Transparent

Participate

4 words that any person contemplating a social media or word of mouth campaign should take to heart.

Making a well rounded video program, no matter the length, is a lot like preparing your best dish for a dinner party. Every step of the process needs an equal level of precision and applied fundamental understanding. Lack of attention to detail anywhere in the regiment can turn your five-star tiramisu into a deflated pile of broken mascarpone dreams. A professional videographer/producer can tell you the real value of your piece comes from good pre-production.

Let’s begin with a hypothetical situation: you have just been asked to produce a 1 minute spot for your employer or client for over-the-air broadcast (a majority of your productions will be for broadcast).

As a videographer, your first job is to take the concept handed to you and, using that as a guideline, begin developing your program. Naturally, you’ll want to jump right in and start shooting footage, but that’s a pitfall many will make and good planning is the key here.

The day started out with welcome and introduction to the conference, with the tagline “Join the Conference”. Word of Mouth Marketing is growing, over the last 5 years WOM has grown 30% annually, to end up at 2007 with a $1 billion spend. Over the next 5 years the annual growth is expected to exceed 30% annually, reaching an annual spend of $4 billion by 2011.

This was swiftly followed by a keynote speech from Joseph Jaffe, CEO & Chief Interrupter of Crayon - author of “Join the Conversation” (one of two free books handed out in the nifty little conference backpack). He uses his title as a conversation starter. “Most of advertising is criminal for lies and misrepresentation” - i.e. smoking. Word of Mouth has been around since we could talk, but the recent growth has been amazing. Use anything to start a conversation. Marketing can be a conversation, in and of itself. It is no longer a spectator sport, you have to participate.

1. Listen
2. Participate
3. Join
4. Catalyze
5. Start talking

How do you seed a new idea to a skeptical and marketing weary universe of influencers? Not all influencers are necessarily original participants. Word of mouth is not bought it is earned.

Don’t

1. Lie and fake it
2. Manipulate the conversation
3. Try to control the conversation - T-mobile sued engadget over their use of the color magenta…
4. Dominate the conversation
5. avoid the conversation

Next up was Jeffrey Graham of the New York Times, whose main point of with the amount spent on Word of Mouth Marketing compared to other forms, WOMM forms the butt crack of advertising.

You can find my writeup of this session over at Search Marketing Gurus.

Following on from this was the first of the breakout sessions. An interesting concept, 12 tables were set up for 6 different topics, with specialists at each table. As each person walked in they were given a starting table, and a suggested route. So I started over at the basic social media table, and headed over to the advanced social media table after 1/2 hour. I didn’t find that these sessions worked all that well, which may have been down to either the moderators, the other participants, or just the fact that we only had 1/2 hour and up to 12 people participating at each table.

The conference didn’t even stop for lunch, once you grabbed your sandwich (assuming you weren’t a vegetarian, although to be fair an hour later they did have a vegetarian option) you went back to the main conference room for a presentation by Judy Stonefield of OPI cosmetics and Fiona Petruiski of SheSpeaks. They discussed how SheSpeaks has a network of 50,000 women that they use as advocates and testing grounds for various products and services, and created a private social network for OPI. On average each member of the network told 10 friends about the OPI product, each of those friends told 4 friends on average, giving a reach of 40 people per network member.

After lunch the interactive case study section of the program began. 3 different nonprofits presented their organizations, and discussed their challenges and goals, each member of the audience then selected one of the nonprofits to help by walking into the room for that particular nonprofit. I went into the room for The Wilderness Society where we brainstormed for the next hour.

Following that we had the last keynote of the day from Carla Hendra of Ogilvy.  She went through a number of case studies, which you can read about over on Search Marketing Gurus, but the big takeaways were the same concepts that have been constantly hammered in throughout the conference.

1. Listen
2. Be transparent
3. Participate

After that we finished up by heading out for more of the breakout sessions. This time it seemed that people had decided to either take advantage of the Miami sun, and headed out to the beaches or pools, as only 6 of the tables were filled. This time I hit the “Buy, Build or Create social communities” session, and the “Reputation Management in Social Communities” session. I have to say that these sessions worked a lot better, and actually left me wishing that both had been longer than 30 minutes, again it could have been the moderators, the rest of the crowd at the table, or maybe just the fact that we’d gone through concept earlier that day and were more used to it.

Thus ended day one of the Womma Wommu conference, more tomorrow.

Today marks the first day of the inaugural WOMMU event from WOMMA. The Word Of Mouth Marketing Association made the decision that they wanted to mix theoretical, practical, and hands-on experience together at their next conference, so the Word Of Mouth Marketing University concept was launched.

Since we were interested to see how different this conference is to the usual conference, I drew the short straw and ended up in Miami… (slight jest there, but it’s not that easy to get around on crutches).

The first challenge was to find the conference. Throughout their site, they refer to the conference in Miami, but don’t give an actual location. They did list a hotel as a partner site, so I asked at the front desk…they weren’t sure, but said they’d had quite a few people ask. After having other people ask me where the conference was going to be held, I finally got hold of a hotel employee who knew that yes, it is being held in this hotel. I then told others, and let them know the floor to register. On second thoughts, maybe this was intentional… what better way to let people know about the conference location than through word of mouth.

The conference today runs from 7am to 6pm (with several networking events to follow). I’ll post a daily recap here today and tomorrow, with observations on the tracks that I’ll be following (either Social Media or Word of Mouth Marketing), so stay tuned to this channel.

Upon discovering that a blog is an appropriate marketing channel for your company, you need to build the site. Designing a blog for a company is not a great deal different from building out any other part of a site, or creating a new corporate site.

Tip #1: Do not use a generic template through Blogger/Blogspot or Xanga.

If a blog looks like a hundred thousand other blogs, how is that branding the company to people who come to the site? The word “Official” cannot enhance a bland template. Templates can be your friend if they are tailored to the corporate colors and can include official logos. Including graphic elements that tie into the corporate site can allow the blog to retain its uniqueness while still being professional.

Tip #2: Determine the target audience.

Using the same template as the rest of your site may be appropriate for reaching corporate partners, but it may not be engaging enough to put a personality on the company to engage future customers, clients, or shareholders. By focusing on audience segments, one can determine whether the blog design should have featured articles in various categories in a magazine-style, or whether it will be one column of chronologically dated posts.

Tip #3: Develop a wire frame. No, really!

It is generally easier to start a blog with three columns than to add a column to a two-column design. When drawing up a wire frame, create mock-ups for both the homepage and the internal pages.  They need not be the same. This is particularly important if the homepage is not going to include any full-text articles.  More posts may fit above the fold in the homepage, but an internal page would focus more specifically on an individual post.

My Best Suggestion:

When designing a corporate blog, take inspiration from sites that work aesthetically and functionally -and morph them with the corporate image. A blog should stand on its own merits apart from the corporate site.  Its design should be carefully crafted to be official without saying it, and unique enough to have its own brand.

In marketing, like many things - it is easy to get into a routine, to narrowly focus your attention on one theme.

Despite the fact that there were a lot of us, our parents chose to focus on the single theme, names that start with ‘J’

This is especially true of pay-per-click. It is not uncommon to have a small list of keywords that perform okay for you. Overall your pay-per-click is relatively profitable. So, why bother changing it?

What differentiates the average marketer from the marketing ’super-stars’ is the initiative (and the know-how) to take pay-per-click to the next level.

It is possible in many analytics packages to see which ad groups are performing well (as long as your destination URLs contain tracking parameters.) But, that does not tell the full story. It is very likely that within the ad group, there are some keywords that are performing very well, and some that are performing very poorly.

Armed with that knowledge, you can try to improve the poorly performing keywords by creating new ad groups and writing better, more relevant ads.

To take the campaign to the next level, you should shift your spend away from the keywords that just won’t perform and focus on the ‘long tail’ keywords.

It is easy to find these keywords, especially if you can segment out our ‘converted’ traffic. What you’ll probably see is more ‘generic’ terms drive a high volume of conversions.

But, the ‘long tail’ keywords will provide interesting phrases that you probably had not thought of.

You can also use average time to mine keywords that may have not yet resulted in conversions, but do drive quality traffic of visitors who stay on your site for a long time.

Once you’ve found these keywords, you can create new ad groups and write new ads for these ‘long tail keywords.’

One final note, broadening your focus from a single theme and finding the long tail keywords does take some time, as does setting up the new ad groups and writing new ads. But, it can make the difference between a marginal ROAS and an outstanding ROAS.

Does your Website have problems?  Maybe it does and you don’t know about it because it’s not active enough.  Not having enough traffic to your site can hide broken funnels as statistical anomalies, or maybe not even funnel people down them at all.

As you know, here at Serengeti Communications, we’re a fairly fit bunch with one or two exceptions.  I, myself, am a recent convert having started my ‘get fit’ regime in December 2006.  Before I started running and playing soccer, I’d had the occasional bout with a gym, and had experienced some mild knee discomfort, but nothing more.  Once I actually started running, I started to really get knee pain, so I cut back and let my knees heal up.  A few months ago, I started getting some aches in my calf during and after soccer.  I’d leave it for a few weeks, then start up again, and back would come the pain.  This continued up until 2 weeks ago, when I played a game with no discomfort whatsoever.  “Great” I thought, everything’s fine.  Then, the next game my calf tore and I’m now looking at 3 weeks on crutches.

So, what could tear on your site and leave you on electronic crutches?  Maybe it’s your shopping cart?  Maybe it’s your contact form?  Maybe it’s your product pages?  It could be any of them, and until your site truly gets some exercise / high traffic volume, you’re not going to find out.

How can you be prepared for it?  Well, you can run automated testing packages.  They’ll help you test load, and ensure that your site flow runs the way you expect it to.  “The way you expect it to”… that’s the key phrase.  Users typically don’t use a site the way that an architect or developer expects them to, so automated testing systems won’t point out unexpected problems.  But, that’s where analysis of your data comes into play.

In running, soccer, and other forms of exercise, advice that’s typically given is to make sure that you listen to what your body is saying, the same is true of your site.  Listen to what it’s saying, examine your logs, pore over your analytics systems, and avoid that long term pain.

Google AdWords recently updated its Conversion Tracking tool with the ability to track multiple actions. This had been the biggest drawback with Conversion Tracking as most sites usually have more than one successful action that a visitor can take. Previously, you could not differentiate between a site’s different actions. If you decided to use Conversion Tracking, all the actions would be lumped into one bucket. Therefore, using Conversion Tracking had become prohibitive because generally, each action was going to have a different value to your business.

This update changes that and also will potentially make reporting and optimization much easier for those who decide to use the tool. Plus, using Conversion Tracking will also give you the ability to use Conversion Optimizer. This allows you to set a CPA goal and have your keyword bids automatically adjusted to meet your specific goals.

The one area that is still an issue is for businesses that have multiple AdWords accounts which utilize the same “thank you” pages. You can still use Conversion Tracking, but you will have to place the unique code snippit for each AdWords account on your pages. This will only affect a small percentage of advertisers. For the vast majority - the Conversion Tracking update should be a welcome change.

What exactly is the difference between teal and turquoise? How about purple and violet? I’m sure there is an art school answer, but the point is - color is subjective. My teal could be my client’s turquoise.

At Serengeti, I work with clients on designing their home pages, emails, ad campaigns, and more. Since we all see the world differently – purple vs. violet - this can be tricky work. The more I can guide the creative design process…the better. Below are my rules for driving effective, productive design development:

• Ask clients to provide a list of sites they like and don’t like. Just like bringing a photo of Jennifer Aniston’s hair to your stylist when getting your hair cut; having real world examples to work from helps narrow the field of options for the designer. You can also use their list to manage expectations up front, illustrating why certain sites are successful and others aren’t.
• Always start with a comprehensive creative brief. This document gives the designer valuable background information and also makes the client explore what they truly want from the design, while also making them accountable. Be sure to clearly define the target audience and project goals.
• After reviewing the creative brief, move on to wireframes. By providing a wireframe prior to starting design, you can ensure that all key elements are accounted for. Some clients will have trouble visualizing with just a wireframe, but you’ll catch the most glaring omissions.
• Set the creative deadlines upfront and be generous with padding. Whatever delivery date the designer gives, add a day. This helps avoid disappointed clients.
• Some designers may disagree, but always ask for two mocks for every round of review. Providing multiple solutions to any problem allows the client to more easily define what they like and don’t like.
• Limit the number of revisions. Three or four is usually plenty. Otherwise, the design will die a death by a thousand cuts.
• Remember that you are the expert, as is the designer. Have an opinion and drive the client in the direction you want them to go. Do not allow them to just tear a design apart without also telling you what they like.

In the end, my purple may seem violet to my client, but at least when I follow my rules above - the end result is a strong design that we collaboratively agreed upon in a reasonable timeframe.

Here at Serengeti headquarters, I am seeing something nobody else in the office is: news, blog posts, and video displaying below the third result in Google’s SERPs.

Is anyone else seeing this?