Are Your Customers Talking About You? Five Ways to Find Out

In our last post, we talked about how Twitter helped start a revolution in Moldova, and how the ruling Communist party was caught unaware that any protest was going to begin until it actually began.

People are talking about your organization, whether you know it or not. The Communists were not following any discussion on Twitter or social media, and were completely caught off-guard by the protests. The best way to find out if someone is talking about your company on social media? Use social media.

So how can you find out whether people are talking about your company or not? Can you even measure it? There are a few basic ways that any social media practitioner uses:

Plain ol’ Google – We’ll start with the most obvious one. Just type in your company name, product name, or even your name, and see what comes up. If you’ve done nothing else online, hopefully your website and a Google map came up. If it didn’t, learn search engine optimization and start blogging super quick and fix this.

Google News Alert – If you like what you see in your Google search (i.e. not “nothing”), you can set up a Google Alert to let you know whenever your name, your company, your product or industry have appeared in a news article, website, and even blog. We use Google Alerts to monitor issues in our industry, see what our clients are up to, and to even see where our own names are appearing (we’re very needy that way).

Twitter searches – We use Twitterment.com, TwitterFall.com, and of course, Twitter’s own search feature. Twitterment does a keyword search, especially in a Twitter bio, so you can find people based on their background or interests. TwitterFall lets you search for keywords and then drops them on a website page for you to see (TweetDeck’s search feature will do the same thing, but without the clunky web interface.), and Twitter search will look at every tweet for your search term.

Radian6 – A social media measurement service that actually seeks out and tabulates social media conversations people are having on Twitter, blogs, and other social networking sites. It’s a subscription-based service. We use it for some of our clients here, and have been able to not only find conversations about their topic, but find out who started it, how much of a social reach they had, and determine what the potential impact a positive or negative message could have on them.

Bloglines – Search blogs and get the results emailed to you. It works a lot like Google Alerts, but delivers the results to your home page and RSS feeds, rather than your email (Google Alerts can only send results to your email).

So what did you find? Are people talking about you? Are they saying mean and nasty things about your horrid lack of customer service, or are they singing your praises because you deliver more than you promise, you’re on time, and provide a great value?

Or did you find nothing? If you’re a glass-half-empty kind of person, that’s great, because no one is saying anything bad about you.

On the other hand, if you’re a marketer, this is awful news, because no one is talking about you! You are NOT the subject of anyone’s conversations. You have barely made a dent in the mindshare of your market. And you’re probably destined for more of the same until your company shuts down, which may be any time now.

If you want to jumpstart a conversation about your company, now is the time to start blogging and participating in social media. Read this blog, read Kyle Lacy’s blog, read Doug Karr’s blog. Or you can even give us a call.

Just start doing something right away.

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