Church of the Customer Blog
« Word of Mouth Marketing Summit, the final chapter | Main | Customer loyalty: The real focus »
April 14, 2005
Word of Mouth Marketing Summit, the final chapter
WOMMA has posted speaker presentations, audio recordings of the sessions, photos and more from last month's Summit here. (That's Ben in the picture at the left during the Customer Evangelism panel.)
If you missed our podcast from the event, you can download it here.
(Transparency note: Ben and I are advisory board members of WOMMA.)
Other blogs that reference Word of Mouth Marketing Summit, the final chapter :
I have to pay $250 to listen to the audio and my choice of formats is CD or DVD? Did we suddenly go back to 1998 or something? They need to take a page from IT Conversations and do the audio as free MP3s and make me interested. As it is, my only exposure to the conference is from your podcast. Their current plan isn't very good for word of mouth. :)
Matt,
I agree. Free access to the audio files would help in the post-conference word of mouth. It would help people who didn't go the conference get a better feeling for what went on, and would also aid conference attendees spread the word on sessions they really liked to colleagues back at the office.
I'll invite Andy Sernovitz of WOMMA to comment on the paid CD strategy.
Folks, we're a non-profit with limited resources. These conference aren't easy or inexpensive to produce. We put out thousands of dollars just to record the sessions.
We also offered all of the powerpoints for free.
There are a lot of industry conferences out there.
1. How many give away the presentations?
2. How many record them at all?
For most events, if you're not there then you get nothing. How about a little credit for the initiative we have showed?
With that said, WOMMA has done many free panels and webcasts, and we will be doing many more.
Andy,
You and the WOMMA team deserve tremendous credit for pulling off a conference of such magnitude in such a short time. The turnout of 350 people was just terrific!
That said, many conferences post the PowerPoints for free, nothing new there. There's a growing trend (albeit in the tech conferences initially) to also post audio from most or all of the sessions. Go to ITConversations.com and check out all the conferences at the upper left that have audio you can listen to.
Not to speak for Matt, but I think the suggestion here is "Napsterize the knowledge" from the conference to increase post-event word of mouth. We are the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, after all. I think folks expect us to model the best WOM practices for our own stuff : )
Exactly. I only heard about the summit from the Church podcast but from what I heard on their show, it was very interesting. If you guys were to maybe team up with Doug Kaye from ITConversations.com and provide at least some of the audio, I would be able to get a lot out of it and maybe attend next year. I'm sure going to O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference next year because I heard the audio on IT Conversations. The people doing the presentations would probably appreciate the boost as well.
Andy,
I wasn't going to respond; however, the more I read your reply to complaint, the more it bugs me.
It seems to me that blaming the person who is complaining is never the right approach. Did you put in lots of money to make the audio recordings? Sure. Did it take initiative on your part? Sure. Should the customer have to take that into consideration? I don't think so.
They want to hear the audio, but they don't want to pay $250 to do it. You basically had a customer who is interested in your product and you chose to put the blame on them for not being understanding of your operational issues.
So instead of trying to show how your approach to post-conference materials is better than other conferences or blaming the person for not appreciating your efforts, maybe you should examine why the person is complaining and try to resolve it (or at least do a better job of explaining it).
I don't think you'll create much positive word or mouth or gain any customer evangelists with your current approach.
Shawn Morton
