Last week I attended the WOMBAT 2 conference hosted by WOMMA (Word Of Mouth Marketing Association), at the San Francisco Hilton. The weather was great, most speakers were good, and some networking took place. We managed to take thursday to visit some areas around San Francisco, and ended…you guessed it…in Silicon Valley. More about this in another post.
The most expected keynote was that by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, on their book Naked Conversations. It was good, but way way too short. How can the organisers give their main keynotes only 45 minutes to speak, and almost zero minutes for Q&As? Specially at a conference where the topic is two-way conversations, and word-of-mouth. It was excellent to get my own copy of the book signed by both Robert & Shel – thanks guys!
Robert talked a bit about his new venture, I won’t go over it extensively here, as you can read a lot more about it in his own blog.
It was interesting to see an industry pre-worried about their future, as the last thing they want is to see word-of-mouth and viral marketing go down the dirty slope that email did. So, the first concept that was hammered into us was ethics. How to ethically get a blogger to talk about you, or how to ethically convice drivers to sell the vehicles you manufacture to their friends. Here are the main basic points on ethical WOM:
- Thou shalt not shill – i.e. pay a blogger to speak good about you.
- Thou shalt release good products – or risk having negative WOM blow you away.
- Thou shalt not deface or destroy property to promote your product (!?).
- Thou shalt not lie. Yes, you heard right. They want to convince marketers not to lie.
There are more, but these are the ones worth considering the most. It was actually very nice to see an emerging industry be so careful about setting the standard of conduct so early on.
What sucked most at the conference? No WiFi. Yes, you heard right. The Hilton wanted $24.000 to put an access point in the conference’s main hall, which the organisers refused. Eventually, people managed to get onto a rather weak AP that emanated from somewhere else in the building, and which gave you access to the internet after going through the hotel’s homepage.