Do you find yourself overwhelmed by the enormous volume of information on the Web and the daunting task of organizing it all?
If you answered "yes," don't worry! There are a slew of free tools to help monitor your brand on the Web , and learning how to use them will save you time and alleviate stress.
Check out this video for a comprehensive introduction to some of the most widely used and effective brand-monitoring tools, and start monitoring your brand today !
So when did online brand monitoring become important?
If your answer has something to do with when you started browsing your name on the Web (what we call egosurfing), then you are on the right track.
The importance of brand monitoring increases with the rise of new media. Just as you pay close attention to the things people say about your personal brand online , you should also pay close attention to conversations about your business. This will give you a better idea of the merits and weaknesses of your brand and how to address them.
Still not convinced ? Here are three good reasons online brand monitoring matters:
1. The speed by which online comments travel multiplies their impact.
The sheer speed of the Internet -- one of the main reasons people use it for communication -- means comments can travel far and wide in no time. Just as a mere tweet may turn into a blog post and then make national news, a negative comment, genuine or not, may turn away hundreds of people who may have been willing to try your products. You can preempt such situations by monitoring your brand in social media, the blogosphere and on major discussion forums to catch sight of and fend off malicious brand attacks before others do.
2. The collection of individual comments gives you a more objective overview of prospects' and customers' perception of your products, and may help you improve them.
Different people prefer different sites, so gathering commentary from various online destinations enhances the likelihood of obtaining a representative sample of customers/prospects. Setting up tools such as Google Alerts allows you to aggregate relevant comments, making it easy to organize information. As a result, you'll have a better overall sense of how customers perceive your products. This will give you a better idea of the aspects of your products that need improvement and help you facilitate changes that will satisfy potential customers and strengthen your brand.
3. These tools also help you stay up-to-date with new trends that you can integrate into your product design or marketing strategies for your existing products.
Another advantage of online monitoring tools is they help you track news and changes in your industry. By tracking these industry trends, you can learn about the new needs of your customer base and base product design changes or marketing strategies on addressing these needs. By monitoring keywords relevant to your business, you can obtain a bigger picture of industry development to determine where your business stands in its context, helping you stay cognizant of the pace and direction of business development.
The rise of new media bridges the communication gap between sellers and buyers but also presents new challenges such as staying focused in the midst of information overflow. However, with the help of free online tools , businesses can become better equipped to interact with potential customers and, in turn, build stronger brands.
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Frank Reed 3:50 PM on February 04, 2010
Any automated sentiment analysis should not be trusted wither it's with Social Mention or any other paid service. It is simply unreliable AND as you suggested you need to check the results manually anyway so why pay for it? There are many low cost tools that take you beyond Google alerts (which become very cumbersome very quickly when trying to track multiple keywords / key phrases.
One good inexpensive solution is Trackur. Robust results without dinging the budget.
Thanks for the post.
Lily Zhu 3:53 PM on February 04, 2010
@Frank, thank you for sharing another site! I wasn't aware of the fact that businesses need to pay to use Social Mention since I navigated the site without paying a cent. Perhaps you are right.
Best,
Lily Zhu
Mark Aaron Murnahan 6:09 PM on February 04, 2010
It is funny that I was just looking at my Google Reader for what people are saying about me when I saw this post.
These are not hard things to implement, but it is shocking to find so many people not using them. There are too many companies flying blind but still wonder why things are not going their way.
Michaleen 10:06 PM on February 04, 2010
This is huge! We all google ourselves ... our potential employers google us ...
Imagine trying to manage the google alerts for Toyota right now!
Sebastian Roman 8:10 AM on February 05, 2010
It's clear that analytics is going to be a career path of its own, porbably just as great as the "Social Media Manager"
Ed 10:09 AM on February 05, 2010
Excellent post in many ways, Lily; need to monitor is greater than ever - and harder.
People and businesses that are new to new media and now 'get' that monitoring is crucial, often try similar first steps;
Google alerts and maybe search.twitter.com. They see something about themselves and think "Great, I'm covered".
But it's not that simple.
-A lot is missed
-There's too much noise.
-It's chaotic
If folks and especially businesses think they're too busy to take the time to really learn the process, then ignoring that feedback will be brand suicide.
Even if a company (whether 1 person or 1000) does well, they can do far better by listening.
After watching the dynamics of new communication (intensely for the past 3 years on Twitter),
I now tell everyone to sign up for @AndyBeal's Trackur.
It's been engineered, built refined, for exactly this purpose.
It comes down to 'What's your time worth? + What's your reputation worth?'
(If a corp outgrows Trackur's powerful Enterprise/Custom service level, I send them to consult with Amber Naslund (@AmberCadabra) at Radian6.
Hope this is helpful,
Keep up the good work at HubSpot! -Ed :)
Lily Zhu 10:14 AM on February 05, 2010
@Ed: great suggestions, Ed. I totally agree that there are many better (though slightly more expensive) tools out there that perform more personalized, relevant, and in-depth search. There is always a tradeoff between quality and cost, and different tools apply to users at different brand monitoring stages.
Best,
Lily Zhu
Lily Zhu 11:40 AM on February 05, 2010
@Jeremy: absolutely. Gauging brand image in the context of industry development is a good strategy and definitely keeps business owners/managers aware of the possible trends that can be incorporated into building their brands.
Thanks for your thoughtful feedback!
Lily Zhu
Amber Naslund 3:50 PM on February 05, 2010
Hey Lily - Great stuff here, and some solid ideas. And like many in the space, we're ALL for companies getting started with listening practices, even if free tools are the most sensible way to do that. The important thing is the act of paying attention and doing something with that information once you find it. It's a big, busy social web out there.
But unsurprisingly, I'm going to respectfully disagree with Paul up there that there's "little need" to pay for social media monitoring or analysis. There are tons of advantages to paid solutions - from coverage and aggregation to reporting, workflow, and more robust analysis or measurement than is reasonable to tackle manually. Whether it's Radian6 or not, it's most important to find a platform that helps you spend your time on the human side of social media - engagement and content strategies - and not on crunching spreadsheets. :)
And thanks to Ed for the shoutout! Always appreciated.
Thanks for sharing some great resources for folks, Lily. Well done.
Best,
Amber Naslund
Director of Community, Radian6
@Ambercadabra
Lily Zhu 8:04 AM on February 06, 2010
@ed hardy uk: if you are planning to expand your business in the future, then it's important to start build your brand. Even if you intend to confine your customer targets to your relatives and friends, they will still have some perception of your products/services. Brand is broadly defined and often associated with the quality, characteristics, or uniqueness of your products/services. If you are starting a small business, perhaps you can focus on developing your products first; just keep in mind that brand building will be a necessary step somewhere along the way.
Hope this helps,
Lily Zhu
Ryan 9:46 AM on February 17, 2010
What is the best way to monitor Facebook? Is there a way to monitor what people are saying about my brand even if I'm not friends with them and/or can't view their profile?
Lily Zhu 2:26 PM on February 17, 2010
@Ryan: good question. It seems that Social Mention has the capability of searching everything relevant to a keyword (i.e. your company name) on all major social media sites including Facebook. The search algorithm might be crude, however, so be wary of judging your brand image too quickly without first reading specific comments.
Hope this helps,
Lily Zhu
Paul Pruneau 2:52 PM on February 25, 2010
The velocity of change and content/message distribution makes brand monitoring more important than ever.
Great insights and thanks for sharing!