WOM with a seat at the table

I was at the ARF Audience MEasurement 3.0 conference this past week. There were a couple developments in particular worth commenting on.

The final keynote session of the conference, titled "Global Views and Rapid Fire Measurement Updates", featured short updates from the measurement of seven media: word of mouth, radio, gaming, print, internet, outdoor and mobile. (Not sure why TV wasn't mentioned here, perhaps because TV was already represented well in the rest of the conference). But the important point is to see WOM included as media to be measured.

Jim Kite from MediaVest was presenting the update on WOM and mentioned some industry leaders in the online and offline WOM measurement space.

One of his main points was how WOM measurement needs to go beyond "just" measuring the volume of WOM and its sentiment, but also making clear linkages to ROI and measuring what the value is of a WOM conversation.

This is clearly an imperative and something that we are working on with our Conversation Value Model (per earlier posts). It's also an initiative that the Word of Mouth Marketing Association is taking up as part of the agenda for the Research and Metrics Council.

Finally, at the end of the conference the ARF announced it is making one of its imperatives to better understand the impact of listening to consumer conversations.

These are both interesting developments to watch as WOM takes it seat at the table.

PS - This is my first post using TypePad's mobile app for Palm OS 5. I haven't figured out how to add links yet using this app.