With more and more conversations happening online these days it pays to be aware of what is being said about your brand or company. As well as providing helpful feedback on how people perceive your company it also gives you the opportunity to participate in the conversation and encourage people to share how they think your services could be improved. This participation also enables you to constructively mitigate any bad press that may be spread by an unsatisfied customer.
The first thing to be aware of is where these conversations are taking place and you will find most of these happening on:
- A personal website or blog
- A forum or message board
- Social Networks (such as Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter)
- Social Sharing & Bookmarking Sites (such as Digg, StumpleUpon, Delicious)
It is good practice to monitor all of these channels daily as that will enable you to act quickly should there be a need to respond to a complaint or negative feedback. If you are responding to negative comments, remember to take your time, take a deep breath and read over what you are going to post a couple of times before pushing the submit button as it is nearly impossible to retract comments once they are out. While you may totally disagree with the comments being made or know that the person making them is not providing the full story, take your time to dissect their story positively and show where they have omitted important details. Do not be afraid to admit fault or apologise as consumers these days are warming to companies that are honest and upfront about mistakes. Make sure you are able to show how you did or will improve this product or service moving forward and the lessons that have been learnt by your company.
Tips for monitoring the web.
Google Alerts
While not yet ‘real time’, Google is getting better at indexing parts of the web that it knows changes quickly such as blogs and social networks. However it can still be slow to pick up changes and comments that are made on websites and forums. That being said, Google provides a great service called Google Alerts and the best way to use it is to sign up for a Google Account (free) and then you can set up multiple alerts. These alerts could be for your company name, web address, competitors name and anything else that you want Google to email you about whenever it indexes a page and the content of that page triggers one of your keywords. Remember to put keywords inside “ “ so that the exact phrase you are after is what triggers the alert. Google alerts are a good way to monitor, websites, forums, message boards, news channels and to an extent blogs as well.
Google has become quite good at showing real time results from Twitter in their normal search results for phrases or keywords that have a significant amount of coverage. This is fine if you are Tiger Woods but for most companies a handful of mentions will not be enough to trigger this.
You can search for a keyword or phrase direct from the homepage at twitter.com or via Twitter Search but there are also other services that act in a similar way to Google Alerts and will send you updates of when your keyword is mentioned such as TweetBeep, TweetAlarm and Twilert.
In the past Facebook was a very closed network with information only being shared between friends and contacts. These days more people are setting up public Facebook pages and now have the ability to make something they say or post publicly available or restricted to their friends.
While Facebook is not a main source of public comment that you will be able to monitor, it looks as though it will start to become more so in the future so it is worth keeping an eye on it.
Blogs
Blogs are online areas of personal thought and these days anyone can start their own blog and say what they want to everyone else. Blogs can be updated easily and tend to be very dynamic and interactive areas where followers of a particular blog can comment and discuss. For this reason even if the blog post about your company is positive then a comment from someone about the post may not be so favourable. To an extent Google Alerts and keeping an eye on Google dedicated Blog Search will help you monitor the ‘Blogosphere’ but as mentioned earlier there can be long delays between when a post goes online and when Google becomes aware that it exists. Another option for monitoring blogs is blog search engines such as Technorati.
So make it good practice to set aside some time each day to monitor what is being said about you online. If you are a small company then it might not be a lot but the damage that one negative comment can cause you if left to grow and be shared out there on the web could be costly.
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Posted in Blog | May 31st, 2010. Author: Phil
