Andrea Weckerle

Last week I was at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) Research Symposium and Summit 2007 in Las Vegas, which, in my mind, is one of the “must attend” yearly conferences.

Along with Jake McKee, I was one of the official conference bloggers. Being a designated blogger is a very different experience that being a regular attendee or even a speaker, and having now worked in that capacity, I have a much deeper respect for what goes into such a seemingly easy task. Aside from the typical challenges of racing from one session to the next, making sure your computer battery doesn’t run out of juice when there is no available plug, being flexible with program and panelist changes, and writing without the luxury of reviewing and editing what you’ve written, there is the responsibility of trying to record the highlights of the covered sessions in such a way that readers are able to get value from what you’ve posted.

Without questions, for me one of the highlights of the conference were the research and measurement sessions. Not necessarily because they were the most entertaining (I’d put the lunch keynote by Richard Tait, Grand Poo Bah of Cranium Inc., the keynote by Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking or the session “No Fans, No Band” in that category), but because they provided the oh-so-important hard data validating the effectiveness of word of mouth.

Between the Research Symposium and the Summit, there were over twenty sessions on research and measurement. Additionally, attendees received the excellent Measuring Word of Mouth: Current Thinking on Research and Measurement of Word of Mouth Marketing, WOMMA’s third annual research volume (available for purchase as well) that contains over twenty papers covering a wide range of topics with a particular emphasis on the influencer model.

What’s also useful within the research volume is the section on WOMMA terminology, which aims to “provide a unified framework for describing and measuring word of mouth marketing.” It provides definitions of word of mouth (”the act of a consumer creating and/or distributing marketing-relevant information to another consumer”), work of mouth marketing (”en effort by an organization to affect how consumers create and/or distribute marketing-relevant information to other consumers”) and WOM Episode (”a single occurrence of word of mouth communication, which includes Participants, Actions, WOMUnits, Venues, and Outcomes”), among other things. There is also an excellent visual summary of what happens during a WOM Episode, along with the associated qualities thereof — namely a participant taking an action on a WOMUnit in a particular venue that then results in an outcome.

Social Media’s ability to help businesses engage with their members, users and audiences is becoming increasingly more common, and something what many in the communications field have actively been encouraging their clients to do.

What’s particularly interesting, though, is social media’s broader ability to quickly share and disseminate critical information when things go wrong, wrong as in threatening, dangerous, and frequently life-altering, which we’re seeing right now with the California wildfires. CenterNetworks points to some of the recent coverage of the fires on sites such as Flickr (see the search term "california fires"  for recent images), YouTube ( see the 2000+ results for "california fires") and Wikipedia (see "California Wildfires of October 2007") among others. CNET reports how microblogging site Twitter is being used by news organizations such as KPBS and L.A. Times and individuals Nate Ritter to give updates. And Ustream.tv is showing live coverage of the fires.

Meanwhile, on-the-ball international organizations such as the American Red Cross are using social media tools to help serve as vital and up-to-date information sources — see the  Online Disaster News Portal, as well as the Red Cross and the Safe and Well Twitter accounts.

My prediction is that within a relatively short time frame, say perhaps three years, the majority of disaster relief organizations, both government and private, will fully implement real-time information dissemination  via text messaging, microblogging and an assortment of additional tools and social networking sites.

“We Must Scrupulously Guard the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of All Citizens…” Franklin Roosevelt Memorial, Washington D.C., United States