In the past few years Houlihan’s has undergone a tremendous transformation. Spreading the word about this has been an interesting challenge. They’re not a national advertiser. While they are in some major markets, they don’t have the budget that many of their competitors do.

The task was to see if they could turn their customers into a marketing force. In the past many of their restaurants had established e-mail lists, it was one-way only. However they do receive a large amount of customer feedback, and this is increasing. She thinks this matches the trend of customers taking control of their brand experiences.

At a WOMMA event a year ago, Jen realized that they’re in an industry (food & beverage) that is heavily talked about. Why not take advantage of that?

First step was to determine who their brand lovers were. They created and sent out a survey. Some quick metrics: 114,949 sent, 18,695 received. From there they began to build out a program, an advisory group. This group would advise them on menu choices and other brand assets. They also developed a program for the HouliFAN’s.

The primary communication channel with the advisory group is the HQ, a password protected site that allows Houlihan’s to provide information to the fans. It also allows them to participate in coversations and get feedback.

One of the first things they did was ask the advisory group, what would you do? Early on they saw an issue related to the removal of fajitas from the menu, or as Jen said, a fajita-freakout.

Once the site was established with the advisory group, it expanded to the entire fan-base, the HouliFANs.

Soon afterwards they rolled out a new menu and used their fans and the site to spread the word. They found that 35% of the fans had spread WOM about the menu.

The program is still new and growing but they’ve been thrilled with the response and feedback they’ve received.

First up was The Wilderness Foundation. The goal was to create broad based support for the cause and pass legislation that would protect roadless forests.

Their priorities were to start with local awareness and then stitch this into a national campaign. They knew they had hand-raisers, the next step was the embrace and enable them.

For individuals the goals were to make it easy to donate or get involved, perhaps my using their talents rather than their money.

The core group of advocates would be the 500 “Wild Things”. These ambassadors would then push the message forward. They could segment them by Congressional districts to help drive/support legislation.

WOM programs might include:
- Collect videos of the wilderness
- Adopt an acre
- 60 Million Acres and a Cause
- Create a partnership with a CPG
- Establish a pool of citizen journalists
- Find the wilderness, geo-caching
- Create fan groups on social networks
- Out of office messages
- Trees everywhere…allow people to dress items as trees
- In-Forest story project

Tagline: Don’t Let Trees Become Roadkill

Other WOM tactics:
- Legislative forest
- I’m a Lumberjack viral video
- Tree stalkers

Next organization to present was Overtown Youth Centers. One of their issues is the tap into individuals donors rather than the traditional corporate donors. The other was field-trips to business centers to allow the children to be mentored by business leaders.

Currently, they were speaking more to a corporate audience…they needed to change this. They need to speak to individuals via simple, passionate stories. This will hopefully spurn pass-along.

Additionally the kids need to tell the story, since it’s from the heart. This also involved getting them involved locally.

With micro-donations, a small amount goes a long way. Part of this requires showing people what a a donation like $5 does provide. In other words, what’s the purpose/backstory of the donation.

For the business outreach, at first the concept was to take kids to businesses, but why not flip that around. Bring businesses to the kids. Could a business summit to be created?

A summit would allow for business to discuss topics such as urban redevelopment. This could also be a good media event.

The next challenge is how do you take a one-time experience and make it last? The goal would be to create a mentorship program. Could Overtown partner with a recent retiree group….providing a connection between recent business workers.

The final presentation was from 1Sky. During their initial brainstorm they talked about how global warming, is…global. This sometimes leads to some apathy, people thing that somebody else is going to fix the problem. How can they individualize the issue?

Rather than reviewing a list of concepts, they focussed on creating a single idea/plan that could quickly be implemented.

They began to focus on color, thinking of a box of crayons. What color do people think of or relate to when thinking about global warming.

Basic offline tactics could include sending a member of Congress a crayon along with your story. Advocates then could pass that crayon/color to friends and family.

Online users could develop content/video/blogs around their color. An option would be a partnership with Threadless to create t-shirts based upon colors. 1Sky would allow people to take their logo and remix/mashup as needed to create collateral materials.

Ted provided a quick intro about how Carnival is transforming themselves from a broadcast heavy model to a more interactive approach to marketing.

Jordan, opened up things with a video recounting the early days Carnival Cruise Line. Quick fact, the inaugural cruise ran aground. However the atmosphere of Carnival’s cruise ships became associated with ‘fun’….soon the line embraced the ‘Fun Ship’ line.

Carnival was the first cruise line to do broadcast television commercials, starting in 1984.

Fast forward over 20 years….Carnival launched Carnival Connections, an online site to help passengers plan their trips. It also allows Carnival to monitor/observe what their customers are planning/expecting.

The program was built on Community Server, which also allows for forums. They just turned them on and didn’t think twice. They really didn’t consult management, or formulate a plan…they just opened them up. Today forums are the most popular part of their web site.

Jordan said that customers are expecting more from a corporate site, they expect community and conversation. For Carnival, the forums and other communities are a strategic advantage over the competition.

Jordan quickly mentioned John Heald’s blog and the blogger cruise. John’s blog was originally launched to support the new Freedom ship. John’s personality came through on the blog and really resonates with readers.

Jordan showed the MonkeyHead Wasters…a group of people that are ‘fans’ of a particular drink on Carnival. There are currently 300 members and they are very passionate supporters of Carnival….and this all happens on the Carnival forums.

Some of the next steps for Carnival include embracing their fans even more. They recently have started work with Scrapblog to help customers build online scrapbooks.

The Dell Hell/Turnaround story is often cited at events and this one has been no exception. Bob likes to think that Dell has just finished Chapter 1. Of course in that chapter there were some things that Dell did wrong, but they’ve made some significant strides to fix things.

A few key points: First, obviously, we’re in the most significant period of change online.

Second, the number of conversation and data online is growing exponentially.

Third, customers want to speak with us in their language. English only reaches 1/3 of the world on a good day

Fourth, new countries have formed that are not being treated with the full respect they deserve. If you look at data, if MySpace was a country, it would be the 11th largest in the world.

Fifth, watch out for the content pushers. They want to create stuff and them dump it. People are looking for conversations and relevance.

Leaders will enter and become relevant in conversations every day in every language all around the world about their company and product.

Six, your new home page is Google. The content and experience is being driven by the customer. What are they defining about you?

Seventh, if you build it they may not come. The traffic that matters is not about you. The search action is not brands, it’s broader topics.

Eighth, less than 1% of a person’s time online is spent buying product. The majority of the people visiting your site are looking for something else, what are you providing them?

What were Dell’s key learnings?

1. The most important thing we do is help customers with their technology problems. Dell has created blog response/support teams that go out and help customers with their problems. Only later did they launch their own blog.

2. Blogging is global, blogging multi-lingual, blogging is a community of passion, blogging is not one blog.

3. Would you rather do a focus group with 10 people or listen to 100,000 people debate ideas for a few months ad ask them questions through the process? This lead to Idea Storm. Idea Storm has generated 12,000 ideas, 120 of which are in action externally.

4. Customers are partners. Dell recently launched ReGeneration, a blog about their customers. Customers are driving it.

5. Communities are more powerful than individuals, communities want to help each other improve. Whatever we can do to empower our customers and communities, benefits everyone.

6. The online experience at work should be simulate to the experience at home. At Dell they gave all their employees complete access to the web, how many large companies do that?

7. Join your customers communities and become part of the solution. Think direct to customer Q&A. They participate in forums like Yahoo Answers.

8. You can see in real time whether or not you’re relevant to the conversation. Twitter is great for this.

You begin to ask, if you are doing all of this, why do you need to use something like a press release?

9. If you are dealing with an issue, be truthful, transparent and diligent in updating your customers.

10. Your customers are people, not lines of business. Yes we know that, but what do your customers do? What does your customer do, when they’re not your customer….i.e. their personal lives. How can you engage

11. Measurement requires thinking outside the box. Things like awareness and activities are easy to measure, but what really matters are conversations and communities.

Customers are looking for facts, by this she means raw information that hasn’t been spun, they’re looking for a trusted source. In cases this might come from brand loyalists, and not the brands.

Authenticity is key.

Carla moved into a quick review of the recent Dove Real Beauty campaign. The goal was to get women involved. The content was contributed by the fans, and they helped spread the word. The movement spread beyond discussions about health and beauty.

Oprah also became an advocate, and as we know, her WOM is rather powerful.

Carla thinks this campaign could not have happened without the digital and community aspect.

The evolution of the program was the the Dove Self-Esteem Fund. The initial commercial ran on the Super Bowl, but it was quickly reposted on YouTube and other Oprah did a show specifically about the self-esteem and young girls.

So, the conversation evolved and continued to grow.

Next up was the famous Dove Evolution video. Created on a shoestring and posted on YouTube. Estimates are that 500 million people have seen it. $1.2 billion in brand value.

The campaign shows that if you can tap into deeply rooted it can be a very powerful thing.

Carla’s message is to let consumers create the content. In the case of Dove it was the women that wrote the stories.

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.

Of course we must start by listening, not by talking.

A project that Ogilvy works on is the Sleep Number bed from Select Comfort, they are taking this approach, listen…then talk. They began my reviewing blogs, message boards and other locations where people were discussing their beds and sleep habits.

This ongoing monitoring lead into online customer service.

Authenticity is situations like this requires that brands accept and embrace the positive and negative. We’re still at a point where customer are amazed that companies are listening and actually doing something about it.

Next up, community building vs short term buzz. Yes we all like buzz, but it rarely does the entire job. A great example is the Nike+ program. Nike currently has over 700,000 engaged members online.

The entire experience is about sharing and stories. Like Dove, the conversation soon takes on different forms, sometimes not involving the primary product. Wise companies let this evolve and grow.

What Ogilvy has realized is that they’re in Perpetual Beta, things are always changing. If they waited till something was proven, the market would pass them by.

A fast good, beats a slow great every time.

Measurement is always a point of discussion. WOM, engagement, tone, recommendations, site activity, etc. Carla thinks and hopes the measurement tools will begin to converge and improve.

The speed with which things move requires people to give up some certainties. Carla showed her inner science-geek by referencing the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

In the future she thinks the smart people will be the ones who can adapt. They can be left brained and right brained at the same time.

The sub-groups will work today and tomorrow before presenting their ideas to the conference on Friday. We’ll post a recap of those tomorrow. For now, here are a selection of photos from the discussions.

For all conference photos, check out the official Flickr group.

Once again a great diverse group of people at the table from a variety of different experience levels and different perspectives.

Erin, like Rohit, broke down the discussion to a series of sub-topics:
- Proactive blogging
- Monitoring
- Blog Responding
- Blogger Relations
- Microblogging

If you’re an agency, how do you handle blogging about clients? Is there regulation/policy?

How does participation scale? When you have hundreds of conversations going, how do you participate in all of them? i.e. relevance, staffing, etc?

What about the evolution from a single corporate blog to a whole company blogging? What happens when people leave? What happens to their content?

Overall a great discussion.

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My first table was ‘Tools: Speed Trials’ with Rohit Bhargava as the lead. The table had a diverse group of individuals from around the world, Japan, Brazil, Phillipines.

Rohit broke the discussion down into two broad sub-sets: Measurement and Amplification.

First up was amplification…and obvious start was Flickr. A number of different participants discussed some of the pros/cons of some of the tools available, a few interesting points:

- If you create your own platform it might have more internal legal scrutiny, joining an existing, external platform might be easier

- If a photo is taken of a celebrity using a product by a fan and posted online many people can pick-up spread, however, if the product tried to spread it, then you have all sorts for legal/rights issue.

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First up was Judy from OPI. Judy started by questioning the norm of marketing. What if we are basing our marketing programs on truths that are false? Sometimes our truths are based upon skewed information. We have standard marketing research tools, but are they telling us what the customer really wants, and who that customer is?

OPI is the number one nail lacquer brand, but IRI reports don’t include OPI. IRI only measures food, drug & mass sales, they were looking at a flat world. One in every four bottles purchased is actually OPI. How to get that word out?

With new products, they looked to partner with SheSpeaks. OPI soon saw that the advocacy and sales generated by SheSpeaks dwarfed millions of dollars of traditional media.

SheSpeaks is a network of 50,000+ women who become advocates for brands. Who are the women? 75% are moms, 50% are employed full-time, 30% are connected, i.e. they blog/comment.

Nic Sticks are a new product developed by OPI, in partnership with SheSpeaks, they looked to build a successful WOM/sales campaign.

Their objectives were to raise awareness, gather consumer feedback, drive sales and measure ROI.

The first step was to define the target base, who were they trying to reach? The next step is sending out the product, followed by community and WOM engagement.

It all starts with the messaging, what we say, how we invite. This sets the tone for the campaign. They targeted women 25-50 with an interest in beauty products. Currently their response rate is 60-70% so they have a number of interested participants.

Once enrolled, the participants receive the product. They try to make sure the product receipt is like a gift.

Discussion boards and other content online becomes the focus point for conversation. The participants know that they can speak directly with OPI to provide feedback of the product. Of course OPI listens and takes this feedback to improve their products.

The women will often start discussion before they receive the product. The conversation varies in topic and tonality.

At the appropriate time they begin a series of evaluation surveys.

Their surveys show that a single SheSpeaks members has 40 product mentions during the initial phases of the project. They begin to take these conversations online and offline.

95% of members had discussed the product with others. 40,000 of the coupons provided were passed along (80%). There was a 220% increase in Net Promoter score. In-person conversation is the best way to pass along information, and is the most effective.

WOM/Viral Recipe for Succes: Create Community, Transparency, Brand Engagement

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