Mark Jarvis,Dell’s CMO, spoke to the group of Inc. 500 and Inc. 5000 award attendees on day 1. He referenced a survey of Inc. 5000 companies that showed 73% of us felt word of mouth marketing was the most important marketing tactic. His presentation talked about how to turn ‘word of mouth’ marketing to ‘word of mouse’ marketing. To help build a case as to why this is necessary, he gave us these very interesting stats:

• Every second: 2 blogs are created, 7 PCs are purchased, 4 babies are born, 3 new DSL subscribers signup, 25 cellphones are sold, 2 million emails are sent, 1,157 videos are watched on YouTube, 23 domains are registered, 257 search queries are executed, 13,547 instant messages are sent, 7 people logon for the first time.
• There will be more devices connected to networks in the next 5 years than were connected in the previous 15
• By 2010, there will be 988 Exabytes of digital information. At then end of 2006, there was 161 Exabytes.
• If you took the digital data equivalent of every book ever written and multiplied that by 3 million, that’s the amount of new data that will be created in 2007.

Because of the network effect of the people and devices that are now interconnected via networks AND because of this massive creation of data, consumers today have an incredibly short attention spans, they’re feeling media overload, they take part in pro-active advertising avoidance, and they have an aversion to intrusion. They are also increasingly seeing themselves as unique and individual. They want things personalized, portable, interconnected, and collaborative. Mark talked about the marketing challenge that faces every company today is to become part of this new world of networking and data and to create a network of advocates for your business. He recommended to companies where to do 3 things: 1. Give people a way of talking about you; 2. Make it easier for conversations to take place; 3. Be part of the conversation too.

As I listened to Mark, I realized that outside of this blog, Doba doesn’t do much of these 3 things. Probably a good thing I took some good notes. I was very impressed by his marketing insights. After re-reading the notes I took, I’d actually combine #1 and #3 into the same point: Give people a way of talking WITH you. When he talked about how you can give people a way to talk ABOUT you, he went over forums, online community, chat, tagging, reviews and evaluations, user generated content, etc. Each and every one of these things could be extremely powerful if implemented in a way that the organization is talking WITH customers in all of these ways. Pretty easy to put up a forum (although Doba still hasn’t done it), but more difficult to put up that forum and make sure Doba employees are engaged with it from day 1 and our processes are aligned with that forum being robust. My $0.02 on what he talked about, and gain, I was impressed with his ideas. Hopefully we’ll get to some (and eventually all) of them with Doba soon.

More to come from the Inc. 500 conference…