How To Eavesdrop On Conversations Online And Have People Love You For It
on Mar 13, 2009 - 9:52 PM PSTWhat if there was a tool that let you hear when people were so upset at your competition that they wanted your startup to rescue them? Well there are, but are you using them?
Listen to conversations about:
Your name & company’s name – It’s about more than vanity. It’s about protecting your brand and recognizing issues before they flare up.
Your competition – Try it and see how many of their customers are upset and looking for a replacement. (I have a great example in the video.)
Old friends – If it’s only about searching for business, the process can get boring. Why not have fun with it.
Mixergy – Okay, so I gave myself a gratuitous plug. But if you set alerts for this Mixergy, you can see how I respond when people mention this site.
Use these tools:
Twitter’s Advanced Search – Use this tool to hear what people say on Twitter. It works really well on a mobile phone, so you can stay on top of conversations from anywhere.
Backtype – This service will let you keep up with what’s being said in blog comments. In the demo video I included with this post, you can see how it might save your company’s reputation.
Google Alerts – When Sean Percival revealed information about his past boss in this Mixergy program, his boss found out about it instantly because the boss set up alerts for himself.
Did I miss any tools? Add them to the comments.
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March 13th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
Hi Andrew,
Great overview and thanks for including BackType :) There's one more tool I'd add to the list — we also use Friendfeed search to keep up with what's being said over there.
March 14th, 2009 at 3:20 am
After tweeting about this post, SuggestionBox http://www.suggestionbox.com tuned in, followed me, and connected me to its excellent website that is absolutely relevant to my interests.
SuggestionBox gives users a platform to make suggestions to companies. Easy design, except for still a little underpopulated. It is another website to track what customers what changed from either your company, your competitors, or a whole market that is not being giving exactly what they want.
March 14th, 2009 at 4:22 am
For a totally different type of search, but I've been using tineye.com since the early beta and have found it a very valuable tool. In a nutshell you can either give it a URL of an image or upload an image and it shows you every site it knows that has used that image, even if the image you are looking at is cropped or sized.
March 14th, 2009 at 6:03 am
Hi Andrew.
That was absolutely awesome. Thank you so much!
March 14th, 2009 at 11:00 am
Wow Mike. Great example of a company listening in.
I love your service.
March 14th, 2009 at 11:00 am
Thanks.
March 14th, 2009 at 11:03 am
Thanks. I never heard of it, but I tried it after reading your comment.
I uploaded the picture that I use for all my online profiles. Out of all the
sites I use it on, it found 1. Not great, but it's a start.
Thanks for telling me.
March 14th, 2009 at 11:04 am
I love when companies do that. But it's so rare that I'm still surprised
when it happens.
Thanks for sharing this example!
March 14th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
great post, very good information here. I tried your suggestions by searching for the products we sell on twitter search, now I'm joining the conversations. In fact, I found a couple people actively shopping for the products we sell! lets see if I can turn this strategy into revenue…
March 14th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Thanks Deep. I'm watching the search results for GoGreenSolar on Twitter
right now. Interesting conversations.
March 14th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
no problem. for those people who don't want to continuously search for key terms on twitter search, check out tweetbeep.com, its like google alerts for twitter. I think twitter alerts will come in handy to jump into the conversation.
March 14th, 2009 at 11:46 pm
some good tools to play around with
March 15th, 2009 at 10:42 am
Thanks Andrew for this video it is by far the most useful you have given. I have now put alerts on all my competitors and have even been able to beat them to some deals.
Cheerz mate.
March 15th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Deep of GoGreenSolar.com suggested this for keeping track of twitter: http://tweetbeep.com
March 15th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Thanks Michelle.
March 15th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Thanks.
I'll have to do more of these. It was quicker to do than an interview too.
April 23rd, 2009 at 4:31 am
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July 27th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Holy cow… this Backtype tool is frakkin' awesome.
July 27th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
I know. People are amazed when I respond to something they say in comments.
July 27th, 2009 at 11:50 pm
Holy cow… this Backtype tool is frakkin' awesome.
July 28th, 2009 at 12:19 am
I know. People are amazed when I respond to something they say in comments.
February 19th, 2010 at 1:52 pm
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