In my younger days I had a bit of a crush on Tina Weymouth and when I was putting together the soundtrack to the ultimate conference on word of mouth communications, Tom Tom Club's Wordy Rappinghood was an essential choice. Sadly the CD never got played but more of that later...

The ultimate conference on winning the battle for word of mouth was the brainchild of Andy Green of GREEN Communications who pulled together a dream line up of speakers from the worlds of marketing, PR and advertising for a get together at London's Dental Institute last Friday. Andy kicked things off with his meme judo session on personal 'brandcasting' which had very little to do with martial arts but set the tone beautifully for the day.

Self confessed Lemsip junkie Mark Borkowski didn't allow a dose of the man flu to interfere with his theatrical take on the history and role of publicists in the art of word of mouth. Everyone who's criticised the pure genius of the recent Borkowski Movey is just jealous!

Later in the morning William Ostrom of The Number gave us an insight into the 118 118 story who's Seventies runners have legged it into advertising folklore. Ivan Palmer of Wildfire Word of Mouth Marketing looked at how you can make your wom experiential and Fergus Hampton of Millward Brown Precis led us into lunch with an overview of research into the power of wom as a marketing tool.

The afternoon featured presentations from conference chair Steve Barton of Keevil Barton Kershaw who looked at the phenomenon of the 'broadcasters' and 'followers' amongst consumers, Robert East of Kingston Business School on academic wom research and Graham Goodkind of Frank PR on the whole issue of talkability.

Graham certainly stood out as one of the highlights of the day and his presentation featured the Frank PR case studies of Wimbledon pigeons ethically branded to advertise a tennis computer game, advertising opportunities on tombstones and the HP Sauce branded snooker ball and sponsored Jimmy White name change to James Brown.

The other highly entertaining campaign was for a condom company and allowed women to unscientifically measure up the size of their prospective date online by selecting various signifiers such as hand, foot and nose sizes. Andy Green was our guinea pig and seemed disappointed with the accuracy of the answer!

Simon Collister of GREEN Communications gave a social media perspective on wom and looked at how blogs can be used to spread messages. Thresher's recent 40% off promotion is a case in point and the national news stories it's generating on how a million people have downloaded the voucher looks less like a bad backfiring and more like a very clever PR stunt. Interestingly about the same percentage of our marketing and PR audience raised their hands when asked who was blogging.

The conference took place in the Henriette Raphael room of the Dental Institute at King's College in London Bridge. It's actually quite a nice space but sadly our experience on the day means we wont be using it again.

On arrival the room doors were locked, the AV equipment wasn't wired for sound until lunch time and we had to contend with sporadic banging throughout the morning. On top of that the CD player we'd requested never arrived and the venue's conference organiser didn't even return our phone calls let alone show her face to resolve the issues we'd raised.

Thankfully it didn't detract from the strength of the conference but it's poor service like this which can ruin a venue's reputation. Having read our delegates feedback the venue received an overall thumbs down for being hard to find, noisy and having the most uncomfortable wooden seats in London. The only saving grace was the quality of the buffet.

Despite all that and the lack of sleep due to a four hour drive through the night, we really enjoyed the day. Events are rarely as much fun as this and audience participation included Chinese whispers, Mexican waves and a rendition of Agadoo!

Lots of people have already blogged about the event and you can read their posts from a PR perspective by clicking these links - Simon Wakeman, Ian Delaney, Heather Yaxley, Simon Collister and Mark Borkowski. There was also talk about taking a version of this event on the road next year so watch this space and we'll keep you informed.

Finally, many of our delegates asked if they could get hold of the presentations so out of courtesy we'll seek the speakers approval and then add as much as we can to this post soon...

UPDATE - The following speakers have agreed for their presentations to be made available as PDF's - Simon Collister, Robert East, Andy Green, Fergus Hampton, William Ostrom and Ivan Palmer. Please click the links to access the documents.