Subscribe in a reader
Subscribe via email
Remember when you were a kid and other kids said you were slow, had “four eyes” or buck teeth? How did your mom tell you to handle that situation? “Just ignore them!” she’d say. Well mom is wrong, at least with respect to what others are saying about your company online.
Everyone in your company should be following what people are saying about you. It’s your brand. It’s your service. It’s your identity. What good does it do to monitor what others are saying?
- It lets you know what you’re doing right and wrong. People are more inclined to talk about you when they are either very happy or very disappointed. As a company you need fix the problems that make people unhappy and amplify doing the things that make people happy.
- It lets you participate in conversations that are happening about you whether you’re there or not. This is a great way to offer ad hoc support and to collect ad hoc user feedback.
- It connects the people within your organization with the people using your service outside your organization. I find this to be incredibly helpful for programmers who usually aren’t talking to customers on a regular basis.
- It helps you identify who your most passionate users are.
Monitoring what people are saying is easy once you have the basic tools in place. I thought I’d share with you what I use.
- Set up a Google Alert using your company name as the search term. The easiest way to think of a Google Alert is that whenever their crawler encounters a new page containing the term you specify, Google will alert you via email or an RSS feed. I find it most useful to have alerts delivered as they happen but if you get too many alerts, you can change the frequency to daily.
- Monitor twitter. There are a few ways you can do this but I use two approaches. I created an RSS feed by performing an ad hoc search using twitter’s built in search (formerly Summize). Once you run an ad hoc query there is an option to save the query as an RSS feed, which means that you’ll get updates in Google Reader (or whatever you use to read feeds). The second approach I use is TweetDeck’s built in search. It’s dynamic and practically real-time. As new tweets containing your term are tweeted, they show up in the search pane.
- Google doesn’t index the comments on most blog posts. Fortunately backtype does. It works very much like Google Alerts does for web pages and blogs. You enter a term and tell it how often you want to be notified and whether you want to be notified by email or by RSS feed.
Monitoring what people are saying about your company is important, easy and pretty fun. All you need to do is spend 15 or 20 mintues setting things up and from there it’s up to you to participate.