WOM UK

WOM UK President Molly Flatt hit Vegas last week for the annual conference of our US sister organisation, WOMMA…

Having arrived back in Heathrow at midnight, I’m still dogged by jetlag and trying to assimilate the great eclectic beast that was WOMMA’s 2009 Summit in Vegas, no less. With three days of keynotes, panels and case studies from some of the biggest US brands active in the WOM space such as Ford, HP and Coca-Cola, as well as research from the likes of Forrester Research, Nielsen and The Keller Fay Group, it was a mindblast of the latest theories and commercial applications of WOM.

Measurement was predictably high on the agenda. Clients are crying out for industry-wide standards, but there was an acknowledgment that meaningful metrics will be be different according to client objectives (visibility, sales, loyalty etc) and therefore project-specific education is still essential. Conversation relies on context, while most ad metrics are stand-alone and focused on scale alone. Consequently, the most successful examples of effective measurement involved a brand combining insights and figures from other departments (sales, eyeballs, customer services calls etc) with a broad range of qual and quant WOM data.

Internal ownership was also a massive issue, with some great sessions from IBM & Newell Rubbermaid and Mars on how they’ve integrated WOM listening and advocacy programmes into their existing structures and processes. This was related to an ongoing conversation about how Customer Services links with WOM. A panel including Pete Blackshaw from Nielsen, Frank Eliason from Comcast, Tom Asher from Levi Strauss, Denise Morrissey from Toyota and John Bernier from Best Buy looked at examples such as @TWELPFORCE and @comcastcares which fully integrate Twitter into CS. The main takeaway was: just try, keep communicating, and help employees learn and progress from their mistakes. Take the risk, and as long as your approach has integrity and strategy behind it, the benefits will be enormous.

Another highlight was Steve Knox from P&G’s Tremor using cognitive psychology to explain why customers talk – apparently if you disrupt their schema (the model in their head of how the world works and their assumptions about a brand) it’s WOM gold. And the panel of WOM academics tackling the toughest questions in the industry had some powerful messages, in particular the importance of overlooked visual, aural and offline WOM triggers; the need for research into geographical and cultural differences in behaviour; and the use of future visioning to sell in the value of WOM to brands: if we do or don’t engage this talkative customer, what will the impact be?

Steve Knox from Tremor on cognitive psychology. Spot me earnestly taking notes on my Mac…

On the flipside, some of the examples I saw were still too based around an old-school marketing approach. Isn’t a moderated, branded page or forum in an independent community (such as Tropicana for BlogHer) really just a microsite dressed up in social clothing? From a WOM UK perspective, it was interesting to observe the differences in approach between the US and UK. I’m not sure that some of the more gung-ho, blatantly branded adovacy groups such as the Feld Family Activators at Mom Central would gain much traction in a nation that tends to be highly sceptical of associating itself so strongly with commerce. And some agencies were even stipulating time limits whereby participants were ‘expected’ to talk in return for goods or experiences – where’s the spontaneous, independent and heartfelt advocacy in that?

Overall it was a rich and stimulating event and I’m sure more thoughts and observations will trickle through across the next few weeks. For more, check out my live tweets from the Summit @WOMUK, as well as video highlights here and photos here. And if you want a more detailed lowdown on insights and issues raised, just drop me a line and I’d be happy to take you through it over a coffee… or indeed a Vegas-themed cocktail.