The following is cross-posted from the WOMMA Research blog:

The second afternoon breakout session was led by Steve Hershberger, Principal, ComBlu. Steve's session looked at evangelists and how to measure their impact. Steve says he's often asked the same thing by companies looking at WOM. They say, we're interested in WOM, but it has to show up on the P&L, it has to help me reduce my ad spend and we want to be able to increase the lifetime value of every profitable customer.

All customers are not created equal. Some customers are worth more than others. There are evangelists, they are customers that help you market your products/services to other customers. It's important to be able to identify these evangelists and measure their impact on your customer base.

Steve is a loyal Dell customer, but direct mail doesn't influence him. For three months he tracked the number of direct mail items he received from Dell. In three months he received 173 pieces. At what point does he get turned off because he gets saturated with mail? Things like this need to be tracked.

The life blood of evangelists are social networks. These can be online, but many times it's offline.

Customers always have a pattern of patronage. How do they want to engage with you/the brand? As marketers we must research this. When you do this, your evangelists will rise to the top. The more you work with your evangelists, the more you'll give them experiences and stories to pass along.

Focus on outreach, what are the communal elements that you can build discussions around the product that are relevant? Be sure to build your measurement tools into your outreach efforts though.