Day to day web chatter is what I call “the buzz”. The daily buzz could be both positive or negative. Either way you should know what people are saying about you, your company and most importantly your brand.
Most of this buzz will come from blog posts and blog comments, forums and social sites like Twitter and Facebook. This data is invaluable to your company, because you will get a snapshot of what the general public is saying and it will allow you respond to that buzz to build a better brand.
Negative Buzz:
If you know the daily buzz then you will be able to respond in a timely manner with a blog comment or a forum response and you may be able to resolve the customers issue or problem fast. This will show others that read this that you are a trusted company that will stand behind your products and your service. You might be able to turn the negative buzz into positive buzz. But you have to know about the buzz in a timely manner and then act fast.
Positive Buzz:
You may be lucky enough to find out that everyone just loves your products and your services. In that case you could show the human side of your company, by adding a forum response or a comment to thank them for the kind words and possibly use that opportunity to spread the latest coupon or promotion around.
The Internet provides many services to track what people are saying about your company or brand. Here are a few that I use and I recommend that you at least setup these to track your buzz.
- Google Alerts provides free email alerts when it finds relevant results based on your custom search terms. You can monitor any search query, domain name or basically anything you could search for. You can even keep track the competition and capitalize on your competitors buzz if you want.
- Tweet Beep is a service that allows you to setup keyword and domain alerts. It’s basically like Google Alerts for Twitter.com. The domain alerts are particularly nice because they even find the URL’s that use url shortening services like tinyurl.com etc.. Now you can get a see every tweet with your keywords or your domain name it in. You can setup how often you want to receive these. I have mine setup for once per day.
- Good old web reporting will show you where traffic is coming from and this data will lead you directly to some buzz on your company. Review your web reports often to look for traffic coming in from referring sites.
As you can see this can be a ton of data to sort through and if your company is large enough you will want to consider outsourcing this to a competent PR Company or find a Buzz Monitoring Agency. But most start ups and small to mid-sized eCommerce companies will be fine with some internal monitoring.
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