Find out what people are saying about you online…

February 11th, 2008 | by Peter Cullen |

How do you keep tabs on what people are saying about your brand? How do you know if people are even talking about you or your business?

1: Know when people are talking about you

Google Alerts lets you monitor search terms. If these search terms happen to be your company name or people names so be it. When Google picks up a blog post or news feed or web page or video/audio (tagged) file with your chosen search term mentioned you get an email. Clever!

2: Write a blog and make it easy for people to comment

Too many companies have a phobia when it comes to blogs or think they’re only for individuals who have a particularly technical or attention seeking bent. This is simply not true anymore. Lots of people are writing blogs and turning it into a business. What they also get of course when they write a successful blog is lots of feedback – good, bad indifferent – either way you get feedback.

3: Use the search engines

Regularly use different search engines to do a keyword search on your company or your company’ s product. You should be using at least 4 search engines:

You will get different results from each of the search engines and in some cases different media, i.e. not just text from websites but audio, video, newsfeeds, images, blogs. Do your competitors talk about you? Are they using your company name when using paid search?

4: Use an news/feed aggregator to stay in touch

Most people these days have a collection of websites and blogs that they like to keep in touch with. As this collection grows, so will the time it takes to physically go to each website to see if there has been new information uploaded recently. You can use a news aggregator that will manage this for you. So when you log in you can see at a glance what websites/blogs have new content and you can quickly tab through the new entries to see if one if important for you to read further.

Some popular news/feed aggregators are:

5: Setup Social Media Profiles

Get your employees to start writing articles about what you do. You can use social media to start a conversation directly with your customers. You can write about a niche area, or about the products and services you provide. As long as you are adding real value to the conversation most people should respond positively. Its only when you go into selling or marketing overdrive that people lose interest and will start talking about you and your company in a more negative tone.

Some of the best social networking websites are:

Its true that businesses are still trying to figure how best to utilise these channels. The only real way to understand them is to dive in and start playing around with them. Post a few articles and see what response you get.

What about your experience? How do you keep your finger on the pulse online? Have I missed any obvious techniques?