subject: Keep Your Ear To The Ground To Keep Your Reputation Shining [print this page] The Internet has given you the enormous opportunity to sell to a worldwide audience 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That same Internet gives your customers the opportunity to not only buy from you but also to talk about you in any of thousands of forums, blogs and social media sites. As you know, once information gets out onto the Internet, it is very difficult to get rid of it. Even if a piece of information is taken down from a site, it may have been picked up and forwarded to many, many other places.
Have you thought about how to keep tabs on what people are saying about your business?
Digital Ears
Fortunately the Internet has solutions for the problems it creates. You can and should create digital ears for yourself. These ears are often referred to as listening posts a term that comes from World War II posts set up to listen for enemy chatter.
In the digital age a listening post is an electronic query that, once established, automatically updates itself and notifies you whenever it finds anything that matches your query.
What to listen for
You need to be listening for a variety of possible scenarios such as customer feedback and competitor news.
Query types to establish
There are several types of queries to establish.
Company name You should set up a query on your company name so that any time your name is used, you will be notified.
Your name You can also set up a query on your own name.
Employee names It is useful to be sure you know that employees are not out selling your products from the backroom or that your disgruntled employee is not badmouthing you in any available forum.
Competitors This is a great way to track competitor moves in the marketplace.
Products you sell This query may bring too large an avalanche of information unless you can make the keywords very specific
Industry terms If you sell cell phone chargers, you may want to know anytime sometime discusses mobile battery power, for example.
Google Queries
It is simple to set up a system using Google Alerts. Just go to Google Alerts, provide the keyword information, check off what you want to have reviewed and how frequently you want to hear about new uses. Google will deliver Alerts to your email.
Twitter Queries
Go to the advanced function, search twitter and enter your search term. Then choose the RSS feed option. You will get a message every time your keyword is used on Twitter. Your keywords will be your company name, your name and so on.
Facebook
At this point, Facebook does not offer an easy way to keep tabs on what is being said. You can search but the searches really just supply names of people on Facebook. Concentrate on Google and Twitter for now.
