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SXSW Part 3 – Keeping an ear to the ground about your company’s brand terms

Many of the people working around you are smart people and even though they may doing a variety of jobs they have their ear to the ground. When Google alerts first started, I setup alerts for the Network Solutions brand names. Everytime an alert came in I would send it to folks in support or operations so they could help the poster. If it pertained to products I would send it to colleagues. As I was a product manager myself some of the products mentions I uncovered helped me validate the product roadmap. I soon realized that these alerts were a useful to to get feedback straight from the customers even if they were not communicating with the company directly. Feedback that came in the form of alerts would be part of my water cooler conversations, corridor conversations and the like. In many cases I had a smug sense of satisfaction almost like I was privy to information that was so public yet. As I sent these alerts to the PR and communications in many cases they already had seen the alert themselves or had got it from other employees within the company. The PR folks soon turned into a competition where we should compete to see who got the alert first. I am saying this to illustrate that using tools like Google alerts may not be uncommon among other colleagues in the company but you may be the first to socialize this and let people be aware of the importance of the feedback. There are several tools you can use to monitor your company’s brand:

Monitor your company’s brand

• Google alerts
  • Trial software – Radian 6, Techigry, Buzzgain
  • Backtype ( Gives you an alert when someone mentions the keyword in a blog comment)
  • Boardtracker ( tracks the mention of the keyword on forums and bulletin boards)
  • Google blog search (Blogs mentioning your keyword)

• Socialize your results
  • Send them as FYI to key decision makers
  • Walk across the aisle and ask for time to talk about your findings
• Search on Twitter
  • http://search.Twitter.com
• Competition
  • Look for the chatter on what people are saying about the competition
  • Are there any lessons learned about products and feedback

On Saturday March 14th at 3:30pm Raj Malik and I are presenting a Core Conversation “A Hard Sell? Social Media & Your Boss” at SXSW in Austin. Raj is one of our resident legal Gurus at Network Solutions for Social Media and I do not tire from telling people that I am the Social Media Swami at Network Solutions. Steve Fisher and Jill Foster will also be at SXSW. Looking forward to meeting you folks there.  Please swing by for the panel session.  It should be fun!

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