Things have been busy here at Attentio, limiting my time to blog. I’ve been reading blogs and forums, however, and I’m fascinated by the evolving cultures.

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.

Now this seems like a cool event, asked by big bunch of people will we be going, snazzy speaker line up, great city… They have great stuff on the web, including a robust dislike of panels :)

Attentio is co-hosting an event with Emakina, the well-know Belgian web 2.0 agency. The subject of the event is (Mais Oui!)

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;)

Walter Carl from WOMMA is chairing a panel discussion on NPS on the 13th of November. I can imagine it will spark a lively debate. Tim Keiningham from IPSOS-MORI (there is no scientific research to back up NPS claims) will be there as well as Deborah Eastman from Satmetrix (Net Promoter is a disruptive approach to traditional research). Its a shame but I won’t be there but the discussion will be published after the event so at least I can get the results…

While doing research for Financial institutions and social media I came back to the Fortis site for European entrepreneurs. There is an excellent, open interview with co-founder of French outdoors advertising company Athem, Christophe Bourgois. He explains aspects of entrepreneurship and his personal experience. My favourite line from him was “An ass walking goes further than ten intellectuals sitting down…”. His experience building a snow park, the ups and downs, and a fortuitous storm is also a key learning…