Listening on the web for business 101

It happened again this week. I was discussing online strategies with a business, only to discover that they do not have even a basic listening program in place for electronic chatter about themselves.

I realise that before online media came along it was extremely easy to stick your head in the sand. As long as sales were going okay and profits were good you weren’t too concerned about what people thought of you. Unless they went to the trouble to tell you directly. The old adage of a happy customer tells one to two people, an unhappy one tells ten was often touted but generally ignored because either way you did not often hear about it.

The reality for many small to medium operations was also that marketing, satisfaction measurement and improvement didn’t often fit into the time schedule. They should have, but it is more often than not just left to chance.

Things have changed for businesses (yes even small ones), and it didn’t just happen this year.

So for those that aren’t already (and this might seem rudimentary to the very web friendly out there) here is a simple, and I do mean simple, beginners guide to listening online. Hence the title: Listening on the web for business 101.

Use Google. Why? Well if you are in Australia the lion’s share of search traffic at present is being managed by them. No not all, and there are plenty of other places you can go looking, but to keep it simple, accessible and hopefully likely you will start listening – stick to the very easiest to get access to, and the one that offers the biggest return for your small time investment. Remember this is not the be all and end all however for those who do nothing now this is your dummies guide.

You will need:

• A Google account
• An email address
• 30 minutes absolutely maximum.

Go to www.google.com

Click on [ sign in ] in the top right hand corner.

Locate the sign in link top right

• If you have an account, login here. You can use your Gmail login or other Google account login. If you don’t then at the bottom of the sign in panel is a box marked “Don’t have a Google Account?”
  Click the link to [ Create an account now ].
  I won’t walk you through signing up for this service.
• So now login.

In the top right hand corner click on [ Settings ] and then in the drop down [ Google Account Settings ].

You need to find the link to Alerts

Having located Alerts, click through to a screen that looks like this.

The main alert screen

Fill in the following:

Search Terms
This is what you want to be found by Google Alerts. You may need to adjust this over time. For each query you need an individual alert. e.g. “ireckon” and “i reckon” are different. I turned off the second because the amount of unrelated noise in it was unusable.
You can search for your company name (a very good start), products or services you offer, people’s names and competitors. You are only limited by how much information you can process. Start simple and small and grow into it.

Type
In this drop down choose where you want these alerts to come from. I use “comprehensive” usually as it covers all of the selections and gives a good coverage.

How often
This depends on how often you will pay attention to it. I get daily updates. It will depend on how much your search terms are being used. I.e. if you get mentioned 400 times a day but have weekly limited to 20 on screen you will miss much of the content.

Email length
How many items in the email alerts? Google sends you the alerts via email, which also means you can monitor while mobile.

Deliver to
Your external email address, or if you use Gmail you could choose that address.

Then all you need to do is [ Create Alert ].

You will then get shown the Manage Your Alerts screen.

As you add more you can see them all here, and click to edit them as required.

That is it.

Well this is how it starts. Once you are starting to see how powerful listening can be from an information gathering process, you will then want to know how to do it even better, and also what to do about it. Those are completely different conversations.

This is free, easy to do, and only requires that you care enough about your business to want to do something to improve it.

I wrote earlier in the year about how Dymocks had a website fail. This was picked up by one of their staff who took it on their own initiative to create an alert and she helped solve my problem.

This really is just a simple beginning, but it is probably one of the most important first steps you can take to begin paying attention to the dialogue that might be happening about your business online.

Well that’s what ireckon anyway.

Leave a Reply