The Conversation About Your Brand
If you had a live customer in front of you right now, what would you say? What would you talk about? How would you answer though questions? The fact is, you have customers in the virtual world wanting to talk with you right now, wanting to form a relationship, wanting answers to tough questions and if you’re not engaging them with 1to1 marketing or as many have deemed it ‘social media’, you’re missing a huge opportunity. In fact, it may be more than missing an opportunity. If you aren’t engaging this online community you could be in for a serious hit on your brand or sales that you don’t expect.
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Gone are the days when marketers could tightly control their marketing messages and branding. In today’s totally connected 24/7 online world, customers trust each other far more than they do the messaging from any company.
Customers are having conversations about your brand and your products or services online every day. In order to protect your brand and to dial-in your message, you need to become part of that conversation. Putting your head in the sand and trying to ignore Social Media just won’t cut it anymore.
If you think about it; your customer’s family, friends and colleagues have always played a significant role in shaping opinions about your product or your service. But now, add the additional elements of an online community that also shares its thoughts and feelings about your brand, product or service it’s like that small family circle of influence on steroids.
In the old days, your customer may have told a few friends about their experience with your business. If it was either really good or bad, they may have even called a few people to relate their experience. Today with the emergence of all the social media tools, your customer can instantly relate their experience to their 200 friends on FaceBook and then those 200 can instantly relate that experience to each of their 200 friends. So the reality is, this person’s experience reaches 40,000 people almost instantly. So, in today’s interconnected world, we’ve gone from word-of-mouth to world-of-mouth.
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So where to you start to get in on this conversation?  The first thing you need to know is what the online community is saying about you. The easiest way to find this out is to use social monitoring tools. There are a number of very good free tools as well as fee-based applications.
The key is to start listening right now. I’ve listed a number of monitoring tools below for you.
Social Monitoring Tools
TweetDeck – http://www.tweetdeck.com (free)
Addictomatic – http://addictomatic.com/ (free)
Radian 6 – http://www.radian6.com (paid)
You can also use Google to monitor specific keywords related to your brands. Just go to http://www.google.com/alerts and set up an alert.
