If you are using social media it is important to monitor what people are saying about you and or your brand. The thing to remember is that the conversation is going on without you whether you want to join in or not. As well as people wanting to find you, they’re actually talking about you or your brand on-line and they might be saying bad things. They might be saying good things, but you need to be at least listening. If they’re saying bad things, you want to head them off. There are a growing number of cases where people have not been monitoring their brand on the social media channels with negative consequences.
Vodafone in Europe have a team monitoring the conversation in social media about Vodafone. This is smart because retention of customers is perhaps more important than getting new ones, so they’re trying to keep their customers happy by monitoring the conversation and jumping if they see unhappy customers sharing their dissatisfaction.
Here are three ways I recommend for people to monitor their reputation on the web. There are many others like http://www.socialoomph.com/ but we’ll cover these three today.
Google Alerts: Set up Google Alerts to monitor any keyword that Google Indexes. For example you can set up an alert on you, or your company name, or product/service name and any time Google indexes this search term it will show up in the alert. You can set the alerts to to be emailed to you but I receive them as an RSS feed in GoogleReader which is my favourite RSS feed reader. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts to use Google Alerts.
TweetDeck: This is a free desktop application that you can download to manage your Twitter experience. One of the things I do is set up a column to monitor when I get @ mentions or direct messages on Twitter. This allows me to review my Twitter feeds periodically during the day and respond. I also have a variety of searches set up in TweetDeck for keywords, hashtags andother things I want to monitor in Twitter. Tweetdeck is also extending it’s reach into Facebook and MySpace. Go to http://tweetdeck.com/to download.
TweetBeep: TweetBeep is very like Google Alerts but for Twitter. It allows you to keep track of Twitter conversations that mention you, your products, your company, anything, and send you hourly updates via email! You can even keep track of who’s tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL (like bit.ly or tinyurl.com). This great for online reputation management, catching all your @replies and @mentions, finding job/networking opportunities, keeping up on your favorite hobby, and more! Go to http://tweetbeep.com/ to use it.