Comments on: What to Do When Everybody’s a Reviewer: Trader Joe’s and Yelp

By: joelogon

joelogon — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:33:14 +0000

Mike — I agree that small business owners should offer support and engagement on their own sites, but they also need to be where the customers, reviewers, and prospects are. It's a package deal. Thanks — Joe

By: joelogon

joelogon — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:23:58 +0000

Hi AJ — thanks for the suggestions on monitoring. I was planning on doing separate entries (heck, maybe an entire series) on monitoring and competitive intelligence, so I'll be sure to mention those tools. — Joe

By: Mike Cichon

Mike Cichon — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:46:39 +0000

For many small businesses, great customer service is a key differentiator so there's no better place to engage customers in a conversation. I gather your point here is that there is no reason to tacitly participate in social media as simply a cost of doing business. Instead, embrace it, and why not do this at your location on the Internet — your website. Web-based community customer service solutions offer an ideal alternative to 3rd party forums, and they provide customers a direct link to other customers and agents who can help them.

By providing customers a place on your own website to ask questions, share opinions, and get problems solved any company can actively engage customers at their greatest point of need 7×24/365.

My company, Helpstream, offers Community Customer Service via an on-demand delivery model and at a price point that takes cost and difficulty almost completely out of the equation. Please check us out and tweet me @helpstream to let me know what you think.

By: AJ Gerritson

AJ Gerritson — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 05:07:50 +0000

Hey Joe,

All great points. I think the more companies embrace engagement and information sharing with their customers as opposed to selling the better off they will be. Also, the more they gather feedback from their customers in a timely manner the more likely they will be able to proactively address business problems.

I think it might be helpful to point out some of those monitoring tools for companies as well...
For monitoring websites, blogs and most online indexable content Google Alerts is a great tool. Visit www.google.com/alerts to set alerts for your company, products, industry news, competitors and more. Next, I would say check out TweetBeeps to help you monitor Twitter conversations. This tool send email alerts when any phrase/term you set is mentioned on Twitter. (TweetGrid if you have even more time for monitoring in real time)
Best,
AJ Gerritson, Partner at 451 Marketing
Twitter: @AJGerritson