WOMMA

I mentioned in my last post that I’d been at WOMBAT (Word of Mouth Basic Training) in San Francisco. It was a pleasure to get a comment (my first!) from the author Jackie Hubba of the amusingly (to me, anyway) named Church of The Customer who gave a lunch time talk. This is covered in the WOMMA blog. For those of you new to the topic on WoM, you can listen to an interview with her here. I haven’t yet read Jackie’s book, but will after hearing her talk.

For those of you new to Word of Mouth, I’d recommend taking a look at the WOMMA site and think about signing up for some of their newsletters. I was surprised how far the science has come in a very short time, as a marketer measurement crops up a lot on the lips of my CEO. The emphasis on measurement and effect of actions was refreshing and long overdue.

I also loved the emphasis on ethical WOM – something we need to live and breath if we are to avoid the negative aspects – Andy Sernovitz compared it to the risk of email marketing, where we tend to think of all email marketing as SPAM. WOMMA has a code of ethics, please think about using it as your way of implementing WOM and ask your suppliers (better still include it as a requirement in your contracts).

What is YOUR view on the ethics statement? I loved it, think Womma members have done a great service to the industry.