There is a good article at the Wall Street Journal about real life examples of companies making use of social media to monitor negative PR and move quickly to rectify it. Even if you are a small business and can’t afford to dedicate significant resources to monitor comments and reviews made about your company, you can make use of free and paid tools to monitor comments about your business.
For Alaska tour operators, it’s very easy to monitor travel review sites like TripAdvisor with the tools they provide to business owners (you can be notified via email and/or a RSS feed when you have new review). I set up email or RSS feeds for my Internet marketing clients and can quickly react to positive and negative reviews. Sometimes a quick post to clarify a policy is all it takes to respond to a question or a negative review. There are many free and paid tools out there to monitor reviews, article mentions, and social media. Here are just a few of the possibilities to consider:
- Google Alerts: Set up the term(s) to trigger an email or RSS feed. A very useful way to monitor news, blogs and other websites that mention your business.
- Twitter Search: Enter your search term to see how many tweets include it. RSS feed available, or make use of TweetBeep and have the results emailed to you.
- Social Mention: Real time search of social media sites.
Ideally, your company or organization should take the time to craft a strategy for monitoring social media and engagement. Perhaps I’ll tackle that one in my next post.
