Just got back from the Social Media Club LA meeting at the Sheraton Universal, where the crowd got a little raucous after one of the panelists seemed to be “all about the buck” then proceeded (seemingly) to diss on the Motrin Moms. That was Rob Frankel. Also on the panel were Anne Plese from Cisco — an excellent speaker by the way — and Babette Pepaj of BakeSpace.com, all of whom made some interesting points on how to approach social media conversations on the web when representing a brand.

Most interesting to me was the dichotomy of approaches between Cisco, the bohemoth with $millions being spent on branding and BakeSpace with a mom-and-pop style founder branding “team”. Cisco is all about watching the conversation, then jumping in and supporting the positive or encircling the negative ones in side conversations (kind of vulture-like) and having their advocates naturally choke off the oxygen for those who speak ill. BakeSpace, lacking all of those marketing dollars, instead immediately jumps in when something negative pops up and strikes at that negativity head on. Both approaches seemed prudent given the market position of the players, but I’m left wondering where a known but not super-well known brand like my company should land in that conversation. I wish sometimes I had a colleague that could attend these things with me.

Sigh.

The whole Twitter-stream can be found here.

Enlightened but perplexed, Eric Small