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What did you say the last time someone asked you how an event was?
Probably not much. Two or three sentences, maybe a detail that stayed with you, maybe a complaint, maybe the name of someone you met. You did not describe the stage design or the brand messaging. You gave a short verdict to a colleague in the office, to your family over dinner or, quite likely, to a WhatsApp group, and then the conversation moved on. Multiply that by a few hundred guests and you have what the event becomes for everyone who was not there. That is word of mouth marketing in its real form: not the posts tagged during the event, but the conversations that happen after it, in places the organizing team never hears, built from what guests went through far more than from anything the brand put on a screen.
While an event is running, everyone involved watches the room. The agency checks the run of show, the client watches the faces in the front rows, the production crew watches the screens. Then the guests leave, and the verdict that really travels starts somewhere else.
Is a hashtag the same as a recommendation?
In marketing reports, word of mouth is usually measured through social media: how many posts mentioned the event, how often the hashtag was used, how many stories were shared. These numbers are easy to collect and they do say something, but they mostly capture what happened during the event, often in front of the photo corner or the stage, and they are shaped by what people want to be seen doing.
Real word of mouth is quieter and less flattering. It is what people say when they are not performing for anyone. A guest who posted a smiling photo from the branded backdrop might tell a colleague the next morning that the program was too long, the food was cold and they left before the end. Both are true, and only the second one reaches the colleague’s decision about next year. Our business has become very good at producing the first kind of activity, and plenty of what is sold as experiential marketing arrives with backdrops, hashtags on every screen and photo points at every entrance, while paying far less attention to the second.
Who is talking matters as well. A guest who tells a friend the congress was worth the trip, a creator paid to post from the venue and a customer who gets a discount for a review are three different relationships, and agency reports love to fold all of them into one “organic reach” figure. They are not the same to the listener, and in several markets not legally either: the FTC’s endorsement guidance in the United States, for example, expects material connections between a brand and the person praising it to be disclosed. I would keep paid and rewarded content in its own column and never let a team on site hand out small favours in exchange for nice posts, because a recommendation is only worth something while the person giving it is free to say otherwise.
What do guests retell the next morning?
People talk after an event about what happened to them, not about what was shown to them, so word of mouth has to be designed into what guests do rather than added afterwards with a hashtag.
Listen to how people actually describe an event to someone who missed it. They rarely praise the lighting. They say they met someone working on exactly the same problem, that there was a session where the room actually built something together, that a speaker answered their question and then came to find them in the break. On the other side, they say they waited a long time for the shuttle and there was nowhere to sit. What these accounts share is that they are personal: the guest is a character in them, not a spectator. Someone who watched a beautiful show has an impression, and impressions are hard to retell, whereas someone who did something, met someone or had a problem solved has a story, and stories move from person to person almost on their own.
That is why I like to ask, early in planning, what each guest will be able to say about their own day, whether the project is a congress or a shopping mall activation. Not what we hope they will say about the brand, but what will have happened to them that is worth telling to someone else.
The answers tend to be modest and practical. A coffee break long enough for a real conversation instead of a queue at the urn, a moderator who introduces people at the same table to each other, a session small enough that everyone speaks at least once, a speaker who stays for lunch rather than leaving for the airport straight after the talk. None of these looks impressive in a proposal, and in most congresses the breaks are usually the first thing squeezed when the program runs late, yet they are where most of the stories guests carry home are actually made.
Why does the shuttle story travel further than the keynote?
Negative details travel faster than positive ones, and small ones travel faster than big ones. I find that uncomfortable, but it matches what I keep seeing. A long queue at registration, a cold dinner, a missing shuttle, toilets far from the hall, a room kept too cold because the air conditioning was set for the stage lights: from the organizer’s side these are minor problems, often caused by one supplier or one oversight. For a guest asked “how was it?”, they are perfect material, concrete and easy to picture, and they make the teller sound like a shrewd observer.
Big positives are harder to pass on, which is also why guerrilla marketing bets everything on one odd, specific moment that people can describe in a sentence. “The content was really good” sounds generic and “it was well organized” sounds polite, so unless there is one specific moment to point to, a good experience fades into a general “it was nice.” The practical lesson is that the operational details rarely shown in the creative presentation (transport, food, temperature, toilets, waiting) have an outsized effect on what is said afterwards. A strong program does not protect an event from a bad shuttle story, and the operations side deserves more attention for exactly that reason.
How far does one message in a WhatsApp group go?
In Türkiye, where I work, and in many other markets, a great deal of the post-event conversation happens in messaging groups: sector groups, alumni groups, company groups, family groups, and groups of people who attended the same congress years ago and simply stayed in touch. One message in one of them can reach dozens or hundreds of people within the hour. Word of mouth in such groups is therefore less a chain of one to one conversations and more a series of small broadcasts. One guest writing that the dinner hall was so loud nobody could talk is enough for the whole group to know.
This also means a few voices carry a lot of weight. In most sector groups some people are trusted, because of their experience, their position or simply the way they write, and if they had a good time the event benefits for years, while a bad experience on their part is hard to recover from. This weighs most at a product launch, where the first opinions shared in a sector group tend to colour how the product is discussed for months. Organizers should not try to manage these groups, which would be impossible and rather inappropriate. It does help to know they exist, to understand who the trusted voices in a sector are and to make sure those people get an experience that works, without special treatment that everyone else would notice.
Many organizers open their own participant group for the event, and it is useful while the event is running: shuttle times, a room change, the lunch location all reach people in seconds. The question is what happens to that group afterwards. Some go silent the day after, and the group turns into a place where guests answer each other’s questions about invoices and certificates without anyone from the organization replying. I think the honest option is to keep it for a short, clear period, answer what is asked there, share the promised slides and photos, and then say goodbye and close it.
What should reach guests the day after?
Most organizers stop communicating when the event ends, a little like a pop-up store that closes without telling anyone where the brand went, or send a generic thank you a week later with a link to a photo gallery, by which point the conversation has already happened. The day after is when guests are most likely to talk, and a short, personal message on that day can shape what they say. It gives them something concrete to forward and reminds them of the best parts while the memory is fresh.
The content of that message matters more than its design. Not a sales pitch and not a long survey, but something useful: the slides from the session they attended, contact details of people they met, a few photos in which they actually appear, a short summary of the main ideas. Whatever goes out should make sense to someone who was not in the room, because that is exactly who it will be forwarded to; a deck of stage photos and one-word headlines keeps the speaker’s style and loses the content, while a few lines of context and the name of the person behind the idea turn it into something a guest can pass on at work. (Ask speakers what they are happy to share before the event, not after, and never turn a frank closed-door discussion into a public case study without asking.) If something went wrong, a delayed shuttle or a technical failure, a brief acknowledgment helps too. Guests are surprisingly forgiving when an organizer names a problem before they have had to complain about it.
Do crews and suppliers talk as well?
The people who worked at the event have their own word of mouth, and it is rarely considered. Hostesses, ushers, technical crews, catering staff, security teams, freelancers and the students called in from a university see everything, and in a sector as small and connected as ours their stories travel fast: which agencies pay on time and which keep people waiting for weeks, which clients treat crews with respect and which leave them without food until midnight, which events are calm backstage and which are chaos behind a polished front. A brand or agency with a poor name among crews often finds that the best people are suddenly busy when it calls, and over time that shows in every event it produces. The remedies are the familiar ones, clear briefings, decent conditions, payment when promised and a word of thanks at the end, and they cost very little.
Measuring all this is harder than counting posts, and I think it should be. The evaluation framework published by AMEC, the international body for communication measurement, separates outputs (what was published and how far it reached) from outcomes (what people understood, recommended or did next), and word of mouth sits almost entirely in the second group. None of it produces a neat number for a report, and a brand that decides to sponsor an event for the conversations it starts has to accept that. A few short conversations with guests once the dust has settled, asking simply what they told others, reveal more than most survey scores, and asking new registrants for the next edition how they heard about it gives a rough sense of how many came through someone they trust. The two or three sentences a guest says when asked how it was will never appear in the final presentation, yet they are the version of the event that most people will ever hear, and they decide who comes next year.