Monitoring Your Brand Online

Before launching any marketing campaign, online or otherwise, it is vital that you gather as much information as possible about both your customers and your competition.  As a business owner, you already have an understanding of how your customers interact with your company and your products.  But if you aren’t monitoring online conversations about your brand, chances are you’re missing out on opportunities to understand how your brand is perceived by current and prospective customers.

Social listening tools allow you to track brand mentions across a broad swath of the social media universe.  The more sophisticated tools will cost you, but there are plenty of free resources at your disposal.  Use these tools to investigate how consumers interact with your business and your content online:

• Social Mention is a real-time social media search and analysis engine.  It allows you to search for mentions of any term (i.e. your brand) across scores of media sources.  In addition to aggregating brand mentions, it also provides some useful metrics in the left column about your search results, such as sentiment data, keywords associated with your brand, and top sources.  More importantly, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of your search that will send you new data about brand mentions as that data becomes available (more on this later).
• Addict-o-matic allows you to create a custom search page on any topic (i.e. your brand).  It aggregates fewer sources than Social Mention, but it presents each source as a widget on your custom page.  You can arrange your widgets however you wish and delete widgets you don’t want.  Addict-o-matic does not provide additional metrics for your search results.  You also don’t have the option to subscribe via RSS.
• Twitter Search is a search utility on the Twitter homepage that displays mentions of your search term in real-time.  Sure, it only searches Twitter, but Twitter deserves your attention.  Twitter Search is easy to use, and if you have a Twitter account you can save searches and return to them later.
• Google Alerts are customized web searches that alert you when new documents related to your search are published online.  Google Alerts searches websites, blogs, articles, and some social media sites.  It is an easy tool to use and runs automatically after setup.  The presentation below demonstrates how to use Google Alerts to monitor your brand online.

You should consider setting up some Google Alerts to monitor how consumers interact online with your competition as well.  You might discover some ways to be more competitive.  This does not mean you should blindly copy the strategies of your competitors.  Look for deficiencies in your competition and implement strategies to make your business strong in those areas.

Your marketing strategy should be tailored specifically to meet your goals and objectives.  There is no one-size-fits-all online marketing solution.  Besides, why would you want to wear sweatpants when your competition is decked out in custom threads?  Don’t steal their pants; make some better pants for yourself.