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.

Filed under: Education and Training, Social Marketing on Friday, May 9th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine |
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