A couple weeks ago I spoke on a Word of Mouth panel at Forrester's annual Consumer Forum in Chicago. Attendees were senior marketers, online/ecommerce executives, and CMOs.
The theme was "Humanizing the Digital Experience". The tracks were:
- Experience-based Differentiation
- Devices Everwhere
- Next Generation Branding
- Social Computing
I don't really like "Social Computing"...but you can pretty much pick the term you like:
- Long Tail
- Folksonomy
- Word of Mouth
- Crowdsourcing
- Prosumerism
- P2P Marketing
- C2C Marketing
- Listenomics
- Social Media
- Social Computing
- Social Networking
- Citizen Marketing
- Open Source Marketing
- User Generated Content
- Customer Created Content
- Consumer Generated Media
To me all these underscore the same theme: Consumers are in more control than ever (their voices are amplified) and they are taking a bigger role in creating the consumer experience and content.
As part of Forrester's follow up they posted all of the presentations here, host a blog here (here's the summary of my panel), and are hosting an open Wiki here.
Here are some of the themes from the conference, a la their wiki:
- YouTube things are going to happen.
- How do you set standards that define your brand as you want?
- The product must speak for itself.
- Listen to what’s out there and understanding the negative and positive. Research cost benefits, insight methods.
- Blogs as a tool for brand analysis. Chance to engage pissed off customers.
- Chevy Tahoe Apprentice—create your own ad. Environmentalists were creating bad ones. The world didn’t end.It blew over.
- Most of the discussion about the brand is actually positive or neutral.
- Perception among CEOs is that blogs are about ranting and complaining.
- Even negative comments are refuted by customers.
- “Illusion that you have control”—we never had control!
- Just do it—dive in, don’t ask for permission
- Loss of control will get even worse—marketers need to be prepared for it.
- Closed groups will be popular.Harder to reach these people.
To me, all this means if you have a great company, great products, great service...this is a great time to be in business!