Live At The Blog World Expo: Tracking Reputation In The Blogosphere

Franki and I are here, blogging at the courtesy of free WiFi in the Las Vegas Convention Center. After a great breakfast at the Grand Lux Cafe, and a restful night at the Paris hotel, and a pretty decent sushi meal late at night (Shibayu at the MGM Grand), we're here at the conference and in a session with filtrbox, umbria, collective intellect.

These three companies are talking about the need to perform constant monitoring of the blogosphere if you are concerned about your brand online.

The general speech is simple. More information is out there, and the cycle of time that you have to respond is now measured in days, maybe hours, instead of several weeks.. Howard Kaushansky, Robin Seidner, and Ari Newman are speaking.

Robin is saying now that the time to perform online monitoring is before you have a crisis. You need to understand a baseline of what the current chatter is so you can identify a crisis (or an opportunity!).

Also, understand who the influencers are. Now this is the tough part. The definition of influence is much harder. Robin does a good job of explaining that influence has to be eyeballed, one-on-one. Her presentation also makes the point that companies should be proactive, instead of reactive, and corrective, while remaining authentic.

Conference Note: Arianna Huffington is on the cover of a free issue of Blogger and Podcaster magazine, which is funny, because Arianna blew the conference off to speak at another, fancier venue.

Update: An interesting use for Twitter. Rather than spamming people when you write a new post or want to push an idea, put it on Twitter, and it's not considered spam. Interesting.

(More of this panel is listed over at StlRecruiting.com)