James Robertson, Product Manager, Cincom Systems - Make sure you know what people are saying about you and your product. It's a new, unfamiliar world for marketing and PR people. Until fairly recently, marketing communications were tightly controlled, and mostly one-way. Where there was a need/desirefor two-way communication, it was done on terms set by marketing and PR - focus groups, market surveys, analyst briefings (etc.). The emergenceof the blog-o-sphere has changed all of that, in ways that are every bit as profound as the sea change wrought hundreds of years ago by Gutenberg's printing press.

He'll be talking about the need to keep track ofthe ongoing commentary that's taking place, outside of the control of PR professionals. It'sno longer enough to have aconsistent message;you now need to be aware of what's being saidabout you, your products, or your client'sproducts at all times. I'll give afew examplesof companies not paying attention fast enough,and how that's impacted their public image. I'll also explain how I, in my role as a product manager, track references to the products I work with.

You'll learn how I track ongoingcommentary about our product, and how you can dothe same thing to keep track of yours.

Speaker Bio:
James Robertson got started in Smalltalk quite by accident in 1993. He was in between consulting assignments at Booz Allen, his employer at the time. Booz Allen had a training contract with Parc Place, but had lost both of their instructors. He got picked because I had some teaching experience. They put a junior guy with no training experience, but some Smalltalk experience, figuring that they would figure it out.

He spent 9 months teaching for Booz Allen, but got lured over to Parc Place - and decided that he would rather be where Smalltalk was being created and spent almost two years teaching the intro class before he moved into sales - as a sales engineer.

When Cincom took over VisualWorks in 1999, he came along, retaining his role as a sales engineer. After about a year, he moved up to Product Management, which is where he still is.