People Are Talking…Are You Listening?

Today a friend reached out to me.  She works for a very big, well know company. She asked me a simple question.

“How do we monitor our brand online?”

My response was “You guys get it!”. She responded with a very puzzled tone (as my wife does to me a lot) : “We do?”

“Yes, you do” Your company is taking the first step of looking into what people are saying about your brand online and learning how to deal with brand monitoring”

Okay, so enough of my little cut scene from a conversation. Let me give you some links to tools and resources that help companies monitor what people are saying online about them. We will do it in list form, as people like lists:

–Twitter Search which use to be called Summize before Twitter bought it. You simply type in keywords and you can see people who have used that word in a tweet.

–Social Mention searchs Google blog search, Delicious, FriendFeed, Digg, Twitter, Youtube and such and puts it into a nice package for you.

–Google Alerts An amazing tool by the folks at well, Google. Put in keywords and it will send you alerts when people use those words. This searches Google so we are talking about anywhere on the web that Google indexes, which is well, almost everywhere.

–Backtype allows you to search blog comments.  Users need to register and it will monitor the url you put in the chat. Then pulls all the comments back to one place for you to search.

–Yacktrack monitors lots of different social networking sites and allows you to see which sites your brand is being mentioned on vs another.

These are just some of the several tools that are out there. If there are some I have missed, please post them in the comments so I can add them to an updated list.

I used the term brand and keyword when writing this post. What is it you should be monitoring when following your brand? I think you should look at:

-Company Name

-Your Product

– Competition

-Your Company Executives (and your competitions)

– Clients

All right now, get out there and see what people are saying about you!