Web Monitoring: The Importance of Listening to Brand Conversations Online

Monitoring what people are saying about your business online is one of the most important things you can do as a company. The good news is that there are multiple tools online, most of them free, that can help you carefully follow Web conversations about your company. In the following post, I’ll go over how to use some of these simple tools to help you keep tabs on these conversations.

What to Look For

When I develop my web monitoring strategies, I like to break down my efforts into categories. Three main categories that all business should consider are: 1. Conversions about their business and their products and services, 2. Conversations about their competition, 3. Conversations about trends in the industry.

Inside each of those categories, I brainstorm terms that people would use in conversations about those subjects.

For conversations concerning your company, some keywords to consider would be:

• Your company name
• The names of any products or services you offer
• The names of company employees

For conversations concerning your competition, some keywords to consider would be:

• Your competitors’ names
• The names of their products and services
• The names of their key employees

For conversations concerning industry trends, some keywords to consider would be:

• Terms associated with your industry
• The names of thought-leaders and key influencers in your industry
• Any associations that cover your industry

After you complete this initial analysis, you’ll begin to notice some places that are consistently producing conversations you want to follow, and you’ll easily be able to follow them directly. The question is: How do you go about finding all this information?

Take Advantage of Feeds

When you’re monitoring brand conversations online, feeds are your best friends. Most all news sites, blogs and even many search engines offer the ability for you to subscribe to a feed.  When monitoring your brand, you won’t have time to check multiple websites a day. You need the information to automatically flow to one place.

Google Alerts

If you haven’t heard, Google offers a very cool service called Google Alerts. Basically, Google Alerts lets you monitor key terms and phrases as they appear on Google. Anytime something new appears on Google, you’ll be notified – either by e-mail (you can choose the frequency) or via a feed. For example, let’s say you’re monitoring the phrase “vacation rentals.” Anytime something new pops up on the Internet relating to vacation rentals, whether it's a news article or just some new content on the Web, you’ll be notified. For important terms, I like to have Google e-mail me immediately. But for most alerts, I like to send it to a feed.

Getting alerts through feeds is easy with Google Alerts. You can specify this under the “Deliver to” option either when creating the alerts or editing the alerts. Once you switch the “Deliver to” option to feed, you’ll want to click on the orange RSS box. When you click on that box, it will bring up a new Web page with a bunch of code. But, you can just ignore all that programming language.  All you need to do is copy the URL (you know, the thing that starts with “www” in bar above). You’ll want to paste that URL into a feed reader. To learn how to do that, keep reading below.

Netvibes

There are a lot of feed readers out there (Google Reader, Feed Demon, Yahoo Pipes), but the one I use predominately is Netvibes. It’s free and it allows you to set up multiple dashboards for organizing your monitoring efforts. While it can set up dashboards for you automatically by entering search terms, I like to set up mine manually.

Adding content, such as a feed, to a Netvibes dashboard is pretty straightforward. You click on the green “Add Content” button in the top, left-hand corner and then click on “Add a Feed.” Simply copy and paste in the URL of the feed (told you I’d get to this). And finally, click on add content.

In the widget view, the feed will show up as a box below, and the feed items will show up as bulleted lists in those boxes. In the reader view, you can sort through and combine all the feeds in that dashboard. You can switch between the widget view and reader view with a button at the top of the page.

Monitor Daily

Once you have your feeds set up, you’ll want to log into your feed reader at least once a day and scan through all of items it brings up. If you find that some, or even most, of the items aren’t relevant, you might want to go back and refine your Google Alert parameters. But, you don’t want to monitor so narrowly that you’re missing key news. Sometimes, sorting through results can be like searching for hidden treasure. It takes a little longer, but finding a relevant bit of useable intelligence (especially before your competition) is well worth the effort.

Put Out Fires Early

If you are good at Web monitoring, you’ll quickly be able to identify problems and opportunities online and deal with them promptly. Maybe it’s a guest complaining about their stay with you or simply a prospective guest searching for more information. Web monitoring allows you to identify these problems and opportunities early, before they get out of hand. Remember, things can go viral on the Internet extremely quickly, so make sure you’re keeping a watchful eye and dealing with problems and opportunities proactively.

Monitoring Twitter

If you really want to get crazy with monitoring, you can watch conversations on Twitter. This used to be way easier before Twitter did away with RSS feeds. Now, you have to go back and modify the old RSS feed URLs. You’ll want to start with this base: “http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=”  If you wanted to search vacations, you’d add the word “vacations” to the end of the URL (“http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=vacations”). If you wanted to search vacation rental software, you’d need to add “vacation+rental+software” to the end of the URLs (“http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q= vacation+rental+software” ). For more complicated searches, Sociable has a great article explaining the ins and outs.

Happy Web Monitoring!