Who’s Online Talking About You?

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Your customers, employees, and competitors are among millions talking online everyday.  With the rise in popularity of social networking sites like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook people have more online avenues than ever to express themselves.  In today’s Friday Flashback, we look at a post from November 22, 2009, where I asked, “Are they talking about your small business?”

Once your comments are on the internet they’re pretty much there forever.  They can quickly be picked up by RSS feeds that redeposit them all around the internet.  Even if the original comment is deleted, chances are high that it has already started to make it’s way through the internet.

It’s like ripping open a pillow filled with down feathers on a windy day.  Good luck getting all those feathers back into the pillow!  Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a simple way for you to find out if your small business is being talked about online?

If they are talking about you, don’t you want to know what people are saying?

You Got Your Ears On?  Set Up a Listening Post

The online world is a big place.  There are many places that people could be talking about your small business.  You could even be active on the same social networking site where these comments are flying all around you and not know they exist.

Let’s take Twitter for example.  You can’t follow everyone so tweets about your small business may never make it to your feed, or if you follow too many people these tweets can get lost amongst all the others in your feed.

You could do periodic searches to find these tweets, but wouldn’t it be nice if you were notified anytime someone tweeted about your small business?  This is exactly what a listening post does for you.

A listening post is a query that you set up once that automatically updates itself and notifies you whenever it finds anything that matches your query.  You can set these giant electronic ears up on almost every social networking site or search engine.

What Should You be Listening to with Your Listening Post?

Okay, that sounds great.  What should we be listening for though?  Well, pretty much anything your heart desires.  Here are some possible ways you may want to consider using your listening post.

• Customer Feedback The first query for your listening post should be your company’s name.  Hopefully, your own company name is unique enough that you won’t pick up interference in the form of hits on other company’s with the same name.
• Employee Activity A disgruntled employee, either current or former, can be very damaging to the reputation of your small business.  Setting up a listening post to gather this information can help you effectively stop and counteract the damage done.
• Competitor Analysis If your competitor is getting rave reviews then you can look at what they’re doing well and incorporate it into your small business.  If they’re receiving complaints, you can make sure you’re not making the same mistakes, or perhaps it’s an area where you excel and can market yourself to these potential customers.

Where Should You Set Up Your Listening Posts?

You want to set up your listening posts anywhere your customers hang out online.  Social media networks are becoming more specialized, so do a little research to find out which ones your customers would be most likely to use.

In the next post, I’ll show you how to set up an online listening post.

Are you listening to your employees, customers, or competitors online?  How are you capturing their conversations?

Related posts:

1. How to Set Up a Listening Post on Twitter

Tagged as: Friday Flashback