One of the main objectives for all social media marketing initiatives for a brand is to “navigate the narrative”. In other words, to ensure that your competitors or disgruntled customers don’t steer conversations in a way that put you on the defensive.
In order to cultivate the conversations taking place in the social media arena, you need to know that they’re happening! Social media monitoring is the somewhat new but indispensable tool that all serious marketers should use in order to keep track of what people are saying about their brand, their products and their competitors.
The first step to monitoring your brand reputation is listening. Whoever said “eavesdroppers are never happy” could not have been more wrong. You might not be always be happy with what you hear about your brand but I guarantee that you will be a lot unhappier if you don’t listen in!
Social media is the speakeasy for all those incessant public conversations that you must listen in on and eventually join.
One simple way to discover what people are saying about your brand is to simply create a Google Alert so that you’ll get an email anytime your brand name is mentioned.
However, Google Alerts are limited – and aren’t designed to be a comprehensive online brand management tool. That’s why you need to use a variety of online tools to find out what people are saying.
Here are the steps you need to take in order to deploy an ongoing online brand monitoring campaign.
Choose the Keywords You Need to Monitor:
Anything associated with your brand and company needs to be monitored.
For example:
- Your brand name
- Products
- Trademarks
- Competitors
- Clients
- CEO
Channels You Need To Monitor:
The key to managing your online reputation is a comprehensive daily monitoring of various platforms like:
- Social Media Platforms (Facebook, MySpace)
- Blogs (WordPress, Blogger, Twitter etc)
- Video Sites (Youtube)
- Image Sites (Flikr)
- Articles (ezine, articlebase etc)
- Tags (keywords on social bookmarking sites and Twitter Hashtags)
- Wikipedia
- Press releases
- Comments
- Forums
- Complaint Sites (Ripoffreport, Complaintsboard etc)
Next…how to monitor all these platforms? For a comprehensive list of tools that will help you monitor your online reputation and keep you posted on all the conversations taking place in the social media universe stay tuned for part two of this blog post that will publish next week. In the mean time go ahead, set the radar in the right direction; start with creating a Google Alert.
