The WOMMA Agenda Bully

A good conference has its own personality. The preparation that goes into registration, choices made on staging and signage, the attendee density, volume of expo din, prevailing audience attitudes all contribute to a show's uniqueness. To most people who attend, trying to detail what causes, say, OMMA to feel like OMMA is like trying to describe a person's features to the police sketch artist. I don't know how far apart his eyes were. But he had on a RedSox cap. But conference producers are attuned to these details - in part because we create them, but also because the choices we make in creating them are driven by an expectation of the impact they'll have on an audience.

The WOMMA conference in Orlando last week was a loud-mouthed bully. It told you where to go, how long to be there, what you were doing next, and warned you that you damn well not better be late. At the end of Day 2, when most events serve up (let's call it) lighter fare, WOMMA was at its most intense and flavorful, packing 20 sessions across 4 tracks into 4 hours. No leisurely stroll through plush lounges and networking breaks was this show. It was Track, Track, Track, Track - like staccato bursts of machine gun fire.

The audience of 440 loved it. Every minute, in fact. Rooms were packed - not comfortably full, but packed - through the end. (Don't look at me - I didn't have anything to do with it. I was called in by WOMMA about 5 weeks prior to manage the operations. The agenda strategy, programming and marketing was pure WOMMA.) WOMMA didn't even bother to organize their concurrent sessions into any sort of traceable track. Most shows need to do that in order to create hooks for marketing. (A track dedicated to, say, Mobile Marketing tips off the planner at the Agency whose clients are interested in Mobile that this show may be worth attending.) WOMMA didn't need to.

Here's why:

Word-of-Mouth is a nascent marketing function. While there certainly are agencies vendors who have begun to specialize in various aspects, most marketers are still coming into the discipline broadly. So right now, a case study by Whirlpool on podcasting is interesting to everyone from a Marketing Manager at a pharma firm to a PR Account Rep working for a b-to-b client in satellite telecommunications.

Over time, WOMMA will have to choose its content deliberately based on target audience composition, and recognize that function, vertical industry, company culture and other factors will play a larger role in how prospective attendees determine show must-attendedness. But for now they can - and should - throw as much content up as quickly as they can.

Scott Ginsburg, that guy who has worn a nametag for 6 years straight and (subsequently) written books on Approachability, was a lunchtime keynote at WOMMA. Perhaps his most salient piece of advice was to find a word to own. Scott owns "approachability." Well, WOMMA owns "word-of-mouth." They have an attentive voracious audience, and WOMMA has the w-o-m market cornered.

It's an enviable position, really. And they're taking full advantage of it.