This past week, I went behind the scenes at Satmetrix’s Net Promoter conference in Miami.I nabbed interviews (scroll down) with a few key people from the Net Promoter team: Fred Reichheld, Richard Owen, Deborah Eastman, Laura Brooks, Vince Nowinski and John Abraham. Feel free to listen in from your treadmill.Top-Level Take Aways Based on Geoffrey Moore’s “Core vs. Context,” the conference highlighted that a successful company needs to have operational efficiency, product leadership and customer intimacy. It is this last point that Net Promoter and their Net Promoter Score (NPS) helps brands to drill down on. From Laura Brooks’ presentation: It’s not enough to have good products anymore, you need to have a high degree of customer intimacy. There are different personas for interacting with your brand: detractor (not good), passive (this is where the opportunity lies), promoter (good) and super promoter or NetWorked Promoter. She introduced a new key term: NetWorked Promoter. This term describes people who are expressive, charismatic and extremely influential, either locally or at large. They usually have a large following of people who respect their opinion. LISTEN to: trends and what’s top-of-mind for your market ENGAGE for: innovation and to test the market ACTIVATE to: boost 1:1 marketing and amplify word of mouth (WOM) 80 percent of customers trust WOM more than advertising — Forrester WOM is 9 times as effective (9!) as advertising — Day A NPS increase of 5 to 7 percent is doing well, while a 10 percent gain is not unheard of, but few and far between. Almost all Net Promoter conferences are linked to certification courses. The cert classes usually happen before the conferences and this year in Miami was the first cert class and it was sold out with 47 people — they had only planned for 40. Net Promoter has been able to link NPS’s to actual money generated … something they’re calling “WOM economics” (look for more information on this at another time b/c I’m really interested in this topic). A new white paper from Satmetrix will be released soon that’s all about the WOM economics topic. Big brands that gave awesomepresentations: Enrique Salem, COO, Symantec, was the quintessential case study sharing the imperative at Symantec to use Net Promoter across their organization. If you thought Net Promoter was just for customers, think again. (I have to say that everyone whom I’ve met at Symantec lately has been authentic, up-front with their shortcomings and ready to make improvements. It’s amazing.) Kip Knight, VP of marketing, eBay, discussed the ins and outs of creating and nurturing community through promoters and detractors at eBay Lee Boykoff, director of digital media at A&E Television Networks, got into the nitty gritty about A&E’s digital success cocktail of microsites, community, NPS and A&E Insider to make sure their viewership watches more A&E! Ricardo Acevedo, general manager of the Four Seasons Hotel, Miami, hammered home the importance of The Golden Rule at work within The Four Seasons operations and how that one principle creates promoters. Interviews Interview with Fred Reichheld, Author of the Ultimate Question, and Bain and Company Fellow: 3:25 minutes Interview with Richard Owen, president and CEO: 7:44 minutes Interview with John Abraham, general manager, Net Promoter Programs: 8:19 minutes Complete interview with Laura Brooks, vice president of Research and Business Consulting; Deborah Eastman, chief marketing officer and Vince Nowinski, principal methodologist: 30:00 minutes Interview with two attendees, Russ Cosentino and Tony Lopresti of Clarabridge: 3:59 minutes Next Net Promoter Conferences April/May 2008 in the U.K. January 2009 in San Francisco Technology Industry