You should be tracking the word of mouth about your company. You should know what is being said about you in blogs, reviews, and social media.
If you’re a big company, you should hire one of the great monitoring firms out there. If you’re a small company, you can do it yourself.
Either way, it’s important to get a personal feel for what people are saying.
Debbie Curtis-Magley of UPS has come up with the best solution ever: Receptionists and admins in her department help follow the online word of mouth. Each one is assigned a topic, and keeps a sharp eye and human perspective on what is being said. I love how Debbie has taken the participatory nature of social media and extended it to the research side.
P.S. Favorite factoid: UPS started doing this because it’s really hard to use automation when your brand is a common word. They were flooded with information on push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, and screw-ups.
Hey Andy – video is set to private so we can’t view it.
Hi Andy – the video is no longer available. Is there another link? Would love to hear more about their strategy.
Great video, Andy. It’s refreshing to see companies that understand the value of monitoring what’s being said about them themselves as opposed to farming it out. Instead of a few marketing people reading the reports from an outside PR company, the company’s own employees are listening to the conversation first hand. The internal word of mouth conversations these employees are invariably having about the external conversations they’re monitoring have got to be bringing the company more in touch with their customers.
These are good tips and it looks like a new position “social media monitor” or “social media monitoring assistant” could be a new job in this recession.
So who’s going to develop the product on how to train this position?
Thanks for your comments on my discussion with Andy. Monitoring the UPS brand has been a fascinating learning experience for our team.
Interesting approach to brand monitoring. Does UPS then use this info to engage in conversations?