Travel

WOMMA Summit: Adventures in Live Blogging

WOMMA Summit

So tomorrow I leave for Las Vegas and the WOMMA Word of Mouth Marketing Summit 2007. I’m not quite sure of the logistics of everything but I will do my best to report throughout the day on the sessions that I attend. The ones that I’m looking forward to the most include:

Wednesday

Who Owns Word of Mouth? (And Who Should?)

4:15 p.m. — 5:00 p.m.

  • Rick Murray, President, me2revolution, Edelman
  • Paul Rand, President & CEO, Zocalo Group

Since day one, WOMMA has attracted a diverse medley of potential word of mouth owners: Ad agencies, PR firms, specialty WOM shops, media firms, and more. All of these folks arel vying for a leadership position.

  • Who is best suited to word of mouth marketing?
  • Who really owns WOM — or is that the wrong question?

Sparks will fly in this session because the answer has huge implications for future winners and losers in the agency services and brand management arena.

and

Thursday

WOM Measurement: Knowing When WOM Works

2:15 p.m. — 3:00 p.m.

  • Sam Decker, VP of Marketing and Products, Bazaarvoice
  • John Lazarchic, Vice President, E-Commerce, PetCo
  • How can we measure ongoing programs and know they are actually working?
  • What does it mean to make word of mouth work?

Explore how we are measuring WOM-based programs today to optimize and manage programs now.

There’s lot’s of other great sessions as well. I should get plenty of material.

TripIt: Why Did This Take So Long?

TripItIt always surprises me when I find a new business that is so helpful that I can’t imagine why someone hasn’t thought of it before.  After going through the TechCrunch 40 recently, I found such a company.  TripIt, a social traveling site of sorts that has made the consolidating of travel itineraries easier than ever before.

I decide to put TripIt to the test on a recent trip to Amsterdam.  The process was remarkably simple.  You register on the site and give them every address that you might receive travel confirmations at.  Then once you receive your confirmation emails from your various travel services (air, car, hotel…even OpenTable restaurant reservations) you only need to forward them to a specified address.  The service recognizes the dates and the formats of the emails and automatically formats them into a consolidated itinerary complete with confirmation numbers, maps and even the weather for where you’re going to be that day.

Another great feature is that you can invite others to either view or edit your itinerary.  This is one of those things that is so new that you just assume it’s not helpful but that’s not the case.  Once I created my itinerary I invited two friends that I would be traveling with to edit it.  They inserted places to meet up and other areas of interest for specific days and the service automatically created maps of these locations and offered directions from my hotel.

I think TripIt is really the killer app of online travel and the first of the major travel sites to do something like this – it seems like it would be up Orbitz’s alley – will finally have a reason for me to pay them $8 more for a ticket that I could get somewhere else.

Also, for you traditional media folks, if you’re sending clients on elaborate media tours or to trade shows for a series of briefings all over an unfamiliar city, I can’t imagine too many things more helpful than an itinerary this detailed and intuitive.

 Scroll to top