Next week, I’m off to the Bahamas for my first cruise in 10 years. Despite currently being on crutches, I’m still looking forward to the sun and fun. So last week, when I was at the WOMMA WOMM-U conference, I was interested to attend the Carnival Cruise Lines case study and see what they’re doing in this space.

As I mentioned in my write up of the presentation, I didn’t enjoy it.  But, I still thought it worth going over to check out. With cruises being an expensive proposition and no opportunity to ‘change hotels,’ it’s great to have a community out there to let you know what worked for them, what tours to take, what to look out for, etc.

From talking to a marketer from Disney Cruise Lines, their biggest challenge is getting someone to come back for a second cruise. If they get them to return a second time, then getting them to come back a third or fourth time is much easier.

Disney currently doesn’t have this kind of community support around their cruises.  I would suspect that it won’t be long before they do, especially since they already have an off-line loyalty club. The Castaway Club members will have the ability to interact which will benefit them in many ways that they may not realize until it happens – from evangelizing their product, to assisting with problems, to making suggestions for improvement, etc.

Royal Caribbean has tied their online club in directly with their off-line club, The Crown & Anchor Society.  This gives them the benefit of having a group of evangelists, but it also has the downside of being restrictive – in that you can only join the online club if you’re a member, and you can only be a member if you’ve cruised with them before.

So, while this may help them with getting a person over that 1 cruise hump, it won’t help them with getting new cruisers. What they may want to do is open the club up.  But, still have an exclusive area for C&A members.  This will help them retain the ‘exclusive’ feel and at the same time will help to pull in new cruisers.

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.

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.