If you take on controversial clients, you’d better be sure that the people in your company are onside. If you fail to do this, disaster lies ahead.

That’s where Eric Portelance, Sean Howard and I come down in this week’s Social Mediators. We revisit the question of how consulting organizations should decide whether to take on a potentially controversial client.

Sean believes that the decision about a controversial client can be a defining moment for a company. Indeed, the decision will affect both the external perception and the internal self-image of the company.

Eric argues that companies need to first determine whether their employees will want to work for the potentially controversial client. People should not be compelled to work on issues that conflict with their personal beliefs.

I suggest that this is one of those issues on which senior executives should be mindful that their own preferences must be balanced by staff preferences. Eric asks, Will the new client be consistent with the image of the company that employees themselves have.

How will existing clients view the new relationship? Every company must be sensitive to how existing clients react. Do clients hire us to accomplish a specific mandate or do they have a claim on other parts of our professional lives?

Our bottom line: In the era of the social web, when we all need to be authentic, it’s just not viable to say, let’s take all clients. It won’t pass the social sniff test. People will see you as a gun for hire, open to the highest bidder. And that’s not the way any of us would want to be seen.

As Sean Howard says: “Your decision shouldn’t be made out of fear. It should be made out of conviction.”

In this week’s episode of Social Mediators, Dave Fleet and Joseph Thornley talk with Terry Fallis about how he and his publisher, McClelland & Stewart, are using social media to find and cultivate a fan base for Terry’s novels.

Also up for discussion this week: Social media adoption still isn’t universal among communicators.

This week, Terry Fallis, Dave Fleet and Joseph Thornley talk about what makes a good conference experience – and what makes for a bad conference.

Dave Fleet looks for knowledgeable, expert speakers who will speak from experience. He wants lots of opportunity to meet speakers and other participants from whom he can learn. And finally, he wants the conference to reflect the new mobile working environment – lots of WiFi and charging stations for his electronic devices.

Beyond that, Dave finds much of the value in attending a conference in finding a handful of interesting attendees with whom he can hang out, get to know better and learn from. These encounters lead to lasting relationships for him.

Terry Fallis looks for speakers with a fresh perspective on their subject matter and who also are good presenters. Substance plus performance.

Joe wants at least one new good idea from each speaker. If he gets that, the conference is worthwhile. If not, he’ll exercise the law of two feet and head out to do some work.

Conference No-No’s: Faulty WiFi; Slides that don’t work and, worst of all, speakers who turn to face their slides and read the words directly off them. (We can read. We don’t need speakers to read their slides to us. Surely, there must be something more to what they want to say than they could fit on a PowerPoint slide.)

The biggest annoyance of all: Product pitches from sponsors who become speakers. When I speak, I rarely mention my company name. I’m there to educate, not to do a product pitch from the stage. And I don’t expect others to abuse their time on the stage. For Dave Fleet, those are the sessions he walks out of.

Eqentia is a social media startup headquartered in Toronto Canada. Eqentia’s CEO and Founder, William Mougayar, joins Joseph Thornley and Dave Fleet to talk about Eqentia, what it does, who its aimed at and future plans for it.

Eqentia is positioning itself as a team-based knowledge dashboard that can be managed by one or two users, freeing others from the need to set up and refine searches. William hopes that managers will turn to it each day to answer the question, “What’s new that I need to know about?”

Eqentia’s text mining engine promises to deliver content to users in near realtime, providing them with an up to the minute picture of conversations and references to their brands and issues of interest.

William sees Eqentia becoming a productivity tool for medium and large enterprises. Initially, power users can curate the content to ensure that the highest relevance and most valuable content is featured, saving time and effort for the rest of the team. Once the principal user has set up the tool and refined the settings so that it focuses on the company’s specific interests, other team members will have access to the data without the need to manage the sources, relevancies and advanced filters and settings that make all of this possible.

Eqentia will be most attractive to teams that have both power users and executives who don’t care about how to use the tool, but just want to see its output. The power users can publish the information in user-friendly form for the end users – via email, Twitter, RSS feeds, or by giving end users access to individual topics.

Unlike many other social media tools that focus on providing users with the ability to build folksonomies by applying multiple tags, Eqentia incorporates predefined taxonomies to standardize searches and make it easy for end users to find the same data set with a simple search.

Still to come in Eqentia’s development – a comprehensive approach to social media metrics.

The company has some potential client deals in the works and hopes to be able to begin to announce these in the near future.

Eqentia has been seed funded by Extreme Venture Partners, who also funded Bump Top, which was recently acquired by Google. William says that he had the funding to carry on with the development of the product and to explore its marketing potential.

Have you tried Eqentia? What are your thoughts about it?

In this week’s episode of Social Mediators, Terry Fallis, Dave Fleet and Joseph Thornley talk about some of the limitations of the iPad and changes to two of the longest running PR podcasts – Inside PR and For Immediate Release.

Joseph thinks that Steve Jobs has made a mistake with the product by limiting its usefulness for content creation. Dave Fleet thinks that “Steve Jobs has always done  – what Steve Jobs wants to do.” Terry doesn’t see it as a mistake and expects that Apple will sell a “whack of them.”

Also, after four years and 200 episodes of Inside PR, Terry Fallis and David Jones have given up podcasting. Martin Waxman will carry on with new co-hosts. Why did Terry quit? Partly fatigue. But also a sense that the show needs to be refreshed, that it will benefit from an infusion of new ideas.

We also talk about the changes to the longest running PR podcast – For Immediate Release – as Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson announced that they’ve cut back from two shows a week to a weekly podcast. FIR is a must listen for us and we’re glad that Shel and Neville are carrying on.

In Social Mediators 5, Terry Fallis is joined by Jeremy Wright Both Dave Fleet and Joseph Thornley were MIA.

Jeremy talks with Terry about the South by SouthWest Interactive conference (SxSW) in Austin and what has drawn Jeremy to attend 7 times in the past 10 years. And for Jeremy, it’s the open culture of the conference – the friendliness of people and the fact that the meetings and encounters in the hallways can be much better than what takes place in the formal sessions.

A big thank you to Mike Edgell for recording and editing this week’s episode. Although he’s on the road the entire week for a video shoot, Mike found the extra time to produce Social Mediators. Thanks Mike for service above and beyond.

In this week’s episode of Social Mediators, Terry Fallis, Dave Fleet and Joseph Thornley talk about government and social media as well as the measurement of sentiment in social media.

Terry suggests that government departments seem to be lagging government agencies, with their narrower focus and specific mandates. Government has found it difficult to leave shed the command and control approach to management. And this holds them back from engaging in the give and take of social media. Dave offers, “Social media is really built on trust and that’s something that is lacking in government.” Terry adds, “Government often moves in geological time and it’s hard to move into social media in that environment.”

We also talk about machine measurement of sentiment in social media. Dave feels that the tools aren’t up to scratch. He offers props to the approach taken by Radian6, who offer automated sentiment measurement, but counsel that it’s just a starting point and that most organizations will want to add a layer of human review to any critical analyses.

We conclude the episode with the idea of running a comparative test of the automated sentiment solutions offered by Radian6 and Sysomos.

Organizations and people mentioned in this episode:

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner

The Ombudsman of Ontario

Parks Canada

Genome Alberta and Mike Spears

Nick Charney

Ralph Mercer

Advanced Learning Institute’s Conference on Social Media in Government

Radian6

Sysomos

The calendar in Toronto has been packed with social media events. In this week’sSocial Mediators, Terry Fallis, Dave Fleet and I talk about our takeaways fromPodCamp Toronto 2010 and Personal Brand Camp 2.

Over 900 people attended PodCamp Toronto. It has become a huge event on the annual calendar. Dave Fleet talks about how Brad Buset, Miranda McCurlie andDave Bradfield highlighted privacy and the impact of what we share online. We talk about learning from personal experience and the importance of using common sense. Of course, no discussion of this would be complete without reference to Please Rob Me.  Dave bottom lines the discussion, “Be careful, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t be out there.”

Terry, David Jones and Martin Waxman also recorded two episodes of theInsidePR podcast at PodCamp. These should be posted this week and next.

All three of us participated as Mentors in Personal Brand Camp. We all were struck by how the students were struggling with the concept. We advised them to think of their online brand as an expression of who they really are. Not some artificial contrivance. I argue that people should try to find their passion and then to share their views. Everyone has something unique and special to say about the things they are passionate about. Picking up a can of Pepsi, Terry suggested that ” This is a brand. You are a person.” and urged that their personal brand “needs to revealed, not manufactured.”

In this episode Social Mediators, Terry Fallis, Dave Fleet and Joseph Thornley talk about corporate online communications polices and then delve into the case of the Toronto Transit Commission’s handling of their social media crisis.

The new Thornley Fallis Online Communications Policy was the subject of a pretty heated discussion on MetaFilter. Terry and Dave weigh in with their own views. Dave suggests that guidelines and policies need to be closely tied to the prevailing company culture. He likens social media guidelines to a “safety net.” Terry suggest that it goes both ways. If you do something that reflects negatively upon your employer, it most likely also reflects negatively on you as an individual. “Once something bad happens”, adds Dave, “it’s like the toothpaste is already out of the tube.”

The TTC found itself facing a series of citizen criticism that started with a picture of a subway ticket taker asleep on the job and a bud driver who stopped his bus mid-trip for a coffee break. Management sent an email to employees suggesting that “you and you alone are responsible for your actions” and the employees fired back at the public. The damage has been done. We discuss whether it’s too late for the TTC to recover.

Sites referred to in this episode:

Marketers Miss the Mark with Twitter, Mitch Joel

TTC Staffer caught apparently sleeping on job, National Post

Alleged TTC napper under investigation, National Post

TTC union shocked at uncaring response of riders to “sleeping” staffer, National Post

Second photo emerges of another alleged TTC napper, National Post