Thursday, 14 October 2010

What does your brand say about you?

What does your brand say about you? Are you sure?

Now, more than ever before, it is oh so important to keep a finger on your online pulse. You need to know what people are saying about you and with the use of the internet it is easier than ever.

The internet gives customers a barrier to hide behind; it allows them to speak their feelings more freely than if they had to do so in a shop, for example. The down side of that is that their feelings could be positive or negative, and you have no control over what they are saying.

Luckily, there are tools that allow you to monitor what is being said about your brand online; Google Alerts and SocialMention being two of the better ones.

Once you have established what people are saying about your brand, the glory of the internet is that you can reply in real time, taking the time to address concerns, thank people for positive comments, and in general interact with your customers and increase the power of your brand.

The internet allows you to speak back to your customers, address the issues that they may be tweeting or blogging about. Reply to their tweets/blog/facebook, ask what the problem had been and how you can help. This interaction will bring the brand a personal touch and hopefully, restore (or increase!) customer faith in your company.

It may be that consumers are responding online to changes that have been made to your products or services; listen and take note. You may have made some brand changes they don't like – but at least you will know! Or they may be talking about how great your brand is – if you're not monitoring then you won't know!

It is a lot easier to collect customer feedback online than anywhere else – after all, who really fills out customer feedback forms?

Monitoring your brand online is free, cheap and easy – are you doing it?

You can set up Google Alerts to email you every time your company or associated key phrases are mentioned online – so you needn’t waste valuable hours searching the web for them.

Similarly SocialMenton does all the searching for you, even creating a positive to negative ratio for all the mentions; searching blogs, twitter, facebook as well as online newspapers and news sites.

http://www.socialmention.com/

http://www.google.com/alerts

Of course there are more complex, expensive online media monitoring tools but if you are a small company and intend to keep your monitoring in house then between Social Mention and Google Alerts, you will have most ground covered.

Do YOU know what's being said about YOUR brand online?

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