When people want to know who you really are, they look you up online. When they want to know whether your business is reputable, your service is good, your products reliable, they look you up online. When they are deciding whether or not to work with you as an employee or strategic partner, they look you up online. You must monitor the information about you on the Internet and ensure you are being well presented to your customers, strategic partners, and community.
You have wide variety of tools to listen for information about yourself, your business and your competitors online including:
- Use search.twitter.com to scan all of twitter for a specific keyword or twitterer. You’ll see all traffic for the term over a period of several days. Using this tool you may see negative traffic you can respond to via Twitter or another interface. You may see opportunities to tell people about your product or service or about another product or service that is related to it. You may identify new strategic partners who can help your online marketing efforts.
- Go to blogsearch.google.com to search for blogs about any given topic, term, company name or person. Most blogs allow you to respond to negative posts, and many will also accept new blogs about topics of interest to readers. You often just have to send an email to the editor about the blog you want to post.
- Blogpulse is another site that lets you monitor what blogs across the Internet are saying about you and your business.
- Use Socialmention to search across multiple social media sites for mentions of any keyword. This site can take a minute or more to run a query, but the results are quite comprehensive and very useful.
- Hootsuite is a great way to create a single user interface that tracks your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and hundreds of other social media accounts. It also provides a convenient way to monitor and track social media mentions across the Internet, and to see analysis of Internet traffic about you and your business. Many businesses use Hootsuite as a social media command centre because it supports multiple team members who can view, create, measure and respond to social media mentions across several sites through a single user interface.
- Tweetdeck and Cotweet also provide a single user interface for multiple social media sites.
- Twellow is an index of Twitterers for given topics. You can look here to find someone who tweets about stereo systems and someone else who tweets about motorcycles. By communicating with these people, you may be able to reach through them to their audiences who have a specific interest in what you sell as a product or service.
- Boardtracker searches online forums for specific keywords, names and companies. This is a great way to scan bulletin boards where topic-centric communities suggest products and services to one another.
Using these tools you can monitor what people are saying about you and your business online, and you can track competitors, strategic partners and industry leaders. Leveraging this information effectively will let you reduce the impact of negative events and take advantage of market opportunities as they arise.
Always be friendly and professional when responding to people online.
If you see negative traffic about your business, respond carefully, courteously, accurately and with information about how you are working to remedy and resolve any problem. Respond to negative comments only on the site in which they appear. Do not respond to a negative comment in a blog via Twitter or Facebook. That simply propagates the negative comment to new populations.
When a complaint was posted to a public forum that the popular Kryptonite lock could be picked with any Bic pen, the manufacturer was slow to respond, and then responded inaccurately. Within a matter of days, mainstream media had picked up the story and the resulting firestorm forced the company to announced a free product exchange worth an estimated $10 million dollars.
Handling tough social media problems quickly and correctly can save your business a great deal of time, effort and money.
Finding New Opportunities Through Monitoring Social Networks
In addition to monitoring how your business appears to others online, you can use the tools outlined above to find new opportunities. For example, when one car repair company goes out of business, the remaining repair businesses in the area can pick up the orphaned customers if they can figure out where to find them online. This may be as simple as buying a Google Ad that says “Leeds Repair is Gone, but Caliper Repair is here to stay.”
Q & A
Question: I’m such a small company, how useful is it to monitor the social media for information about my products and services?
Answer: Very useful. You can find customers online. If you run a bookkeeping service in Leeds, and you monitor terms like “Leeds” “new business” you can target new business owners in your area. If your company sells products nationally or internationally, the opportunity to find new customers is even broader. Someone looking for a cashmere sweater might want to hear from you if you run “Cashmere Sweaters R Us”. Someone who writes a blog on “Can’t find a good restaurant in Sidcup to hold a wedding reception” might well like to hear from you if you run a good restaurant in Sidcup.
Question: I don’t know what to post on these sites. I feel uncomfortable posting about my own business, product or services.
Answer: In most cases where someone has made a specific request for information or complaint about something and you have a solution, it is completely appropriate to post a reply. Just make your reply friendly and professional, but not overly familiar. If you really hate doing that, and you don’t have time, you can hire people and train them to do it for you. Elance and Guru both have cost effective labour you can assign to this task. Note that this is not hiring people to post positive reviews about your products and services which is a dodgy technique for marketing at best. This is just hiring someone to contribute to the continuous dialogue about everything under the sun that is always going on online.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?