Simon’s presentation described how this kind of event gains an increasingly important online presence and how the Attentio Brand Dashboard can capture and analyse this buzz.

“Basically social media is a place where people go to get the most current information, discuss their frustrations and find new influentials. Eurocontrol and some airlines made a “good name” for themselves by updating fresh and relevant information”, said Simon McDermott.

Other panelists were Aurelie Valvat, from Eurocontrol, with an excellent presentation about their ad-hoc social media strategy applied during the “volcano crisis”, Philip Weiss, from ZN, who gave an input on how people can organise themselves using social media and access the information that they need without waiting for the following day’s newspaper, and Gilles Gantelet, from the European Commission, who offered the public a pan-European vision of the crisis and gave details about the passenger rights and the obligations of airlines.

The conference was organised by ZN and the Web2EU group of IABC and moderated by Teresa Küchler, journalist for the national daily Svenska Dagbladet.

Check out Simon’s presentation here:

Poland is a still a fast growing economy even with the recession and has emerged strongly after years of stagnation under communist rule. It has also taken social media to its heart. There are a high percentage of young educated people who spend much of their time in internet. The most known phenomenon of the Polish social media is the social network called Nasza Klasa that has 14 Million users (35% of the Polish population) and was chosen medium of the year 2009.

Karol Szumowicz from DMC prepared a case study around the brand image of mobile phones in Polish social media. The most discussed phone – surprise, surprise – is the iPhone. In discussion forums however most of the buzz around iPhone is negative due to internet connection problems and issues with software update and bugs.

It has been great to be able to present in Polish (though it’s been difficult, too – not using this language on daily basis any more) and I hope there are more chances like that to come!

Blogs range from introspective to soapboxing–blogs are just more personal and thus more political. People blog to tell you something.

People participate in forums to discover something. They exchange experiences, advice and information. People on forums share.

I’m researching more and more to the differenences in these online cultures. It’s noticable more and more that online, expertise is not enough. People want experience to validate that expertise. Consumers today are suspicious of a news culture that vibrates between journalism and “churnalism“, that is, journalists that spend hours reading public relations releases and “churning” the information presented into news stories. People turn to blogs and forums to find out which news to credit and which news to ignore.

On that note, I’m glad to say that Attentio is once again teaming up with Emakina Academy, experts at mixing social media and PR with an impact, for another conference in Gent this Thursday. With Attentio’s measurement and monitoring tools and Emakina’s expertise, we’re exploring the capacity for social media to create long-lasting and valuable relationships between consumers, brands, and products.

Social Media in Marketing: what is the added value for companies?

The event will be held the 21st of March, Place Flagey in Brussels with a second session scheduled for April 17th in Ghent.

Academies aim to share knowledge with the agency’s clients through a panel of broad competences and hot topics. Attentio, as the Europe’s leader in monitoring and measuring social media, has been invented to demonstrate how the active- and pro-active- ‘listening’ activity can add value to businesses and how it impacts marketing strategy.

During this one half-day event (followed by a lunch) you’ll also learn through concrete business cases the basics of Social Media, the best practices to efficiently monitor and measure real-time buzz and identify threats, opportunities, influencers and detractors along with concrete business applications.

We’d be happy to meet you there. The event is free. All you need to do is pre-register here. (http://www.emakina.com/academy/registration.cfm).

Contact Attentio if you need more info. We’re here to listen;)