Clayton Closson of Quicken Loans

Clayton Closson is the website content manager for Quicken Loans, the nation’s largest online mortgage lender. Clayton’s responsible for the flagship Quicken Loans website as well as several smaller sites including his beloved DIFF blog – the Quicken Loans employee blog. Clayton (or Clay as his name became when he joined Quicken Loans because of a clerical error) led the team that launched the DIFF - Quicken Loans first venture into blogging - and he’s never looked back.

Clay(ton) is also charged with all Quicken Loans off-site content, including the WOMMIE Award-winning Yahoo! Answers Knowledge Partner program, regular content for Yahoo! Real Estate, blogger outreach, and all Quicken Loans WOM projects. He’s extremely proud of the pro-bono blog/site that Quicken Loans created for the non-profit “A Ride for 3 Reasons” (www.3reasons.org), which raised several hundred thousand dollars for charity.

Clayton is an avid supporter of WOMMA and loves the challenge of making something as unexciting as mortgages WOM-worthy, or pushing hard to sell the benefits of WOM to Quicken Loans senior team leaders. It’s all in a day’s work for this (sort of) young man who is a former soldier, opera intern, purchasing agent, government publicist, webmaster, and SEO manager. He’s extremely proud to add “WOMMU facilitator” to the list. He still holds, though, that being an opera intern and dressing up like Mozart, running around parties drinking wine and talking to old ladies was really fun. Even for just $5 an hour.

Tom Kehler of Satmetrix Back to Speakers Jason Anello of Yahoo!

WOMM-U: Day Two Case Study: Houlihan’s Restaurant

The final session of the conference featured a case study on Houlihan’s Restaurants, presented by Jen Gulvik, VP Marketing, Houlihan’s Restaurants, Inc.

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.

Clayton Closson of Quicken Loans

On the agenda

WOMM-U: Day Two Case Study: Houlihan’s Restaurant

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