With the ease at which social media and other sites make it to post comments and reviews of a company and their products and services, there is a greater need to be proactively monitoring the internet for mentions of you. Most large companies like AT&T, Dr Pepper/Snapple and Dell Computers all have teams of people that monitor the internet for any and all mentions of their products or services.
As a small business, it is a little cost prohibitive to hire a new head count to do this for you. So I am going to share with you one of my tools that I use to provide this service to my clients.
That tool is Google Alerts, a free product that they offer with an account. The basics of the product is that it is doing a Google Search that is constantly searching for the keyword that you are monitoring. Then each day, it sends you the results in the form of an e-mail with links and summaries of the findings.
I will mention that you are able to define as many of these alerts as you want. As of the time I am writing this blog, I have 22 alerts defined on a wide range of topics.
With my active clients I generally define 2 to 3 alerts associated to their business. First and foremost, I search for the companies name. Second the product or service that they offer. If you are an individual, I would setup an alert for your name, user names or other common id’s that you use online.
Another option that you may define as an alert is the name of your competition. After all, it would be great to see that they are making a new offer and would allow you to counter it with your own great offer. Or even better that they recently file chapter 11.
Once you have an alert defined, start proactively reviewing the e-mail results for any customer comments. When you find these comments actively engage them. Thank them if it is a positive comment. Offer to resolve a problem if there was a bad experience.
I had a positive experience with this last week as an AT&T customer. I was having issues with my DSL service at the house. I made a comment on Twitter about this and within about an hour I had an AT&T rep contacting me to see how they could help. My experience is that AT&T truly cares about the customer experience.
Another aspect of these alerts is to monitor the industry you are in. One of my clients is involved with LEGOs, yes the building block toys we all grew up playing with. I run a alert for simply the word LEGO. I get great information that I can share with him and his audience via Social Media and his website, ultimately adding more value to his potential customers.
We all know that a bad customer experience can kill a business. By using Google Alerts, we can actively monitor the internet for mentions of our businesses name, product or service. Then proactively engage these customers and provide them with a great customer experience.
If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to post a comment or contact us at NosalCentral.