Last week I had the chance to run my second workshop on "word of mouth measurement and beyond" at the Esomar annual congress in Montreux (Switzerland). The first one was in Sweden earlier this year. The overall feedback seems to be really positive. With my old friend Pete Blackshaw from Nielsen Online that I invited to lead the workshop with me, we really had fun together sharing insights, views about the challenges and opportunities of measuring word of mouth.
We had a full room of nearly 20 people, all very engaged, the majority of them coming from the advertiser side, with a clear mandate: "understand word of mouth and its measurement to implement things in their companies". I really have the impression that things are coming together slowly but surely when it comes to setting up measurement systems for word of mouth in Europe. We are certainly far away from a market of $200M in the US growing 15% a year as recently reported by PQ Media, but the question becomes important enough for marketers to consider wom hot enough to start dedicating specific investment measurements. Let's see how things progress in the coming months...
Beyond word of mouth measurement, one of the key outcomes obviously is really to relate to LISTENING to consumers' conversations, this is the reason I personally started to be interested in the wom topic more than 5 years ago, a time I coined the expression "customer listening" thus the name of this blog... Things usually take more time than initially expected but It seems that things are coming slowly together. Let's see what the trend will be in Asia in 2010 where I should be running the same workshop at Esomar Asia Pacific event in April 2010. Check it out and register!
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