WOMMA WOMM-U: Joseph Jaffe Keynote
Joseph Jaffe is the author of "Join the Conversation", and has been a leading voice in the area of Word of Mouth Marketing. His blog "Jaffe Juice" is one of the most popular marketing blogs on the internet today. He's also the president and "chief interrupter" of CRAYON.
For all the mis-representing that is going on, all advertising should fall under the new law that the UK has passed. Word of Mouth has always been around, but never ever at the race, pace and attitude than it has today. Anything can be a conversation, even a book.
The opportunity is so much bigger than technical silos. Our opportunity is how to re-invent marketing. Focusing on relationships is most important. Businesses would rather have impressions and are not subscribing to the fact that relationships are better. They don't realize that one relationship - bad relationship can bring down the company. Jeff Jarvis & Dell are great examples of this, as well as Comcast with the sleeping technician, and the possibility of the pictures in the Dove "Real Beauty" campaign might have been retouched.
You can't just expect WOMM to work and its not bought. Trying to buy the value of WOMM with one shot doesn't work. Word of mouth marketing requires conversation and conversations require trust, you really cannot buy trust. Joe shows his example of ooVoo and comparing it to Pepsi. Pepsi bought an advertisement on the Super Bowl, there was a spike in talking about them. He then shows conversations about ooVoo after a WOMM campaign was launched exceeded the talk of Pepsi and then also it went much longer. Pepsi just had one spike, ooVoo had several.
There are things you should do and Joe points them out in his keynote, but I think what was more important was the things not to do. These are things I've even written about here on SMG.
- Don't Fake It - Joe shows Sony's Flog as an example
- Manipulating - Joe shows Walmart's RVing across America as example
- Controlling - Joe shows the Deutsche Tele (T-Mobile) and Engadget example
- Dominating - Joe shows Frontier Airlines "Flip the Dolphin" blog
- Avoiding Conversation - Joe shows the guy who wanted to have a coffee in ever Starbucks in the world (basically Starbucks missed out on their "Jared")
Now is the time for experimentation, its the time for marketers to
become the "storm chasers". WOMM is the new "juice" of marketing.
Marketers really need to have the three "H's" Humanity, Humility, and
Humor and Joe points the audience to campaignagainstreallife.com as an
example. We as marketers need to embrace hatred, and accept &
learn from negativity.
Brands, companies and marketers need to be aware of WOMM and respond to it quickly and appropriately. You need to give some order to consumers, don't give complete control to them (WOMM-wise), have the conversation but again don't dominate it.
Two questions came at the end of the keynote. One was from the PR person from the Dove Campaign who explained the situation with the pictures. Joe applauded them for addressing it, and talking about it openly. Second question was from me, I asked him what he thought about Comcast's new Twitter efforts with @comcastcares (shout out to Frank!). He thought that was great, even said he's thinking of changing his "delta twitter slide" to Comcast, but still its a shame that its an employee doing this and not the company.
Overall this was just an awesome keynote. Joe put things into a great perspective when it comes to Word of Mouth Marketing and how its now being used.
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