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.