My panel was on Brand Monitoring: What Works and What Doesn’t — moderated by Peter Kim, joined by Karl Long from N-Gage at Nokia, and Suzanne Fanning, Senior PR Manager at Fiskars.
Peter threw some obligatory questions about monitoring, hoping one of us would trash at least one vendor, but as granny told me, unless you have something nice to say, say nothing at all …
So we talked about the SMM programs within our companies, and Fanning won, hands down, by talking about her success in activating the “Fiskarteers” — a group of four-mega fan bloggers who have done a lot to spread the Fiskar brand to the craft niche. Good stuff — sort of grassroots community activation we saw in the early days of Reel-Time — but I felt downright dour talking about my world of detecting unhappy customers and trying to make them feel good.
Lesson learned, SMM should embrace the positive and not dwell on the negative. There are good, positive things out there to promote, the community just needs the tools and a good reason to do the promotion.
Drank beer with Karl and David Armano from Critical Mass, who was livecasting the beer drinking through a mash up page, but being too busy to drink a second, I returned to the room to get a project out the door and catch up on mail.
Here through tomorrow. Good conference, but what do I know, I am not a conference goer.
