Last week I had the privilege of joining a series of professionals at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s (WOMMA) education & insight conference, WOMM-U in Miami. It was a highly edifying experience in a variety of ways.

I was one of the few Brits there and before I went, I expected the US to be ahead of us in the word of marketing game, but once I got there I didn’t really find any gap to speak of. All the same issues we are working on are the same ones confronted by our colleagues across the Atlantic. It was also good seeing a variety of people, from Web 2.0 evangelists to traditional agencies to clients, all talking the same language and sharing a common understanding the landscape was changing.

The first major theme was moving digital and word-of-mouth from the margins into the middle. Jeffrey Graham of the New York Times couldn’t have been more explicit (or cheeky) with his lecture entitled “Word of Mouth - the butt-crack of marketing“. The metaphor refers to the tiny sliver the typical budget word of mouth will occupy in the much larger pie chart devoted to total marketing spend, despite it being the most effective form of message. Jeffrey went onto explain why many companies are unwilling to put more into word of mouth, mainly because of the following four “myths” that pervade marketing thinking:

1. You can’t influence Word of Mouth
2. You can’t buy it in scale
3. You can’t integrate it
4. You can’t measure it

From our own experience, all four of these myths are indeed false, although I wouldn’t use the word “buy” in relation to word of mouth - I prefer “earn” as a more accurate illustration as it is often an investment of time instead of mere cash (though of course, time is money…) to create and sustain relationships with consumers.

An example of bringing word of mouth into the lynchpin of your strategy was given by Carla Hendra, co-CEO of Ogilvy North America. A self-confessed member of old-school marketing, she talked about the incredibly successful Campaign for Real Beauty campaign Ogilvy have been operating for Dove. Setting up a community on the site, allowing women to blog and share content, and followed up by the hugely successful “Evolution” viral and the foundation of the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, the resulting total value is a phenomenal $1.2bn in brand value across all the associated campaigns during the past, making Dove third behind Google and YouTube in most transformed brands of 2007.

Carla emphasised honesty and clarity: consumers want facts and direct information without spin (and was one of many to mention the imminent change in UK advertising law); incidentally, her talk coincided with the allegation that Dove had retouched some of their photos for their campaigns, which she and the people from Unilever present were able to swiftly deny (you can see the official rebuttal here - a case in point of being directly and honestly engaging). Above all else, Carla emphasised that a brand must have a good storyline: “Storytelling is the heart of any successful WOM program, it should also be the heart of a brand. What’s the story of the brand? No amount of technology or production cost will save a lousy story, however good stories will always last.”

So far these may both sound a little wishy-washy, but both talks came from people working at the coalface of the business, and both know the reality that digital, while important, is not the be-all and end-all of word of mouth and that in reality people still receive messages offline as well as on; Jeffrey talked about the integration of word of mouth into media planning across all media, while Carla tacitly acknowledged the importance of involving other media - the Dove Evolution ad debuted during the US Superbowl and not online. Word of mouth is important, but an integrated approach is essential to make it a success.

Yet still it can be difficult to prove word of mouth’s effectiveness - something of increasing importance now we’re facing an economic downturn. Which is where the next theme of the conference - measurement - comes in. For effective planning and placement you need accurate metrics, but working in digital marketing & PR is both a blessing and a curse - you have access to far more detailed statistics and metrics for what you do than any of the traditional media ever could dream of accessing, far more cheaply, yet you end up with a spoil of riches that mean which metrics are actually reflecting your effectiveness are a mystery. What can be measured? How much value do you put on a conversation? Which metrics should we be using? Perhaps more controversially, should we be using metrics at all?

These are all good questions, and I’ll talk about these in my second WOMMU post tomorrow. In the meantime, you can catch some further insights into WOMMU over at the blogs of Virginia Miracle and Simon Heseltine, both of whom I met and enjoyed interesting conversations with.