Throughout the past couple of months, CIC has been hosting its 2nd Annual IWOM summit series. The IWOM summit is part of our IWOM roundtable series of PR and marketing events that CIC holds several times each year, which include IWOM gathering, IWOM roundtable and IWOM classroom. For the IWOM summit, we have been meeting with high level executives from CIC’s key clients and agency partners to discuss recent developments in the IWOM industry and our strategic thoughts for CIC and the industry in 2009. While we are still in the process of meeting with clients, we’d like to share some preliminary highlights from the IWOM summit conversations we have had so far.

Last year’s IWOM summit focused on the importance of IWOM and its role in marketing communications. According to our client feedback, in 2007, IWOM was moving from a “nice to have” to a “must have”. For further findings, check out our review post here.

This year’s discussion focused more on recent developments in the IWOM industry and the sharing of best practices on how to integrate IWOM findings across the marketing organization. In particular we looked at ways to work together to expand the use of IWOM beyond PR, and integrate it into marketing insight, campaign strategy, research and development, among other areas.

We found our clients were interested in learning how to organize client internal resources to take action on IWOM findings. For example, some clients wanted advice on how many people to hire and which department should take lead on IWOM strategy.

Another key area of interest was the difference between having tactics and having a strategy behind the tactics. The purpose of the IWOM summit is to exchange ideas at a strategic level to ensure we are implementing a strategy over the long term and not simply “putting out fires” or utilizing quick-fix solutions.

It’s quite exciting to see IWOM becoming more and more strategic and to see more emphasis being put onto IWOM. I will wriite a follow up next month with more IWOM Summit findings and client feedback.

For more on our events see here.