Do You Monitor Your Brand Online?

As I've discussed in earlier posts, I like to know where my traffic is coming from.  This helps me analyze whether or not I've properly optimized the site, if I'm targeting the right audience and if I've extended my reach beyond friends and family (thanks for reading this blog, Mom!).  In the same vein, it's important to know who your posts are reaching, and that's where brand monitoring comes in handy.

Does your company monitor your brand online?  It's a simple process, which allows you to put out fires should they pop up, correct perceived mistakes or miscommunication, and monitor what your audience is saying about you.  With the internet as vast as it is, a couple of simple steps can help you not only keep tabs on brand engagement online, but use that engagement to create additions to products or services you provide.  How should you monitor this?

Free tools are the easiest answer.  Tag your site for Google Analytics and watch as useful information starts to roll in.  The network location report is particularly insightful, which can provide you with some visibility on the pool of users who access your site - even some competitors or in the case of a personal website, "interested parties".  For example, when I did a post on Paddy Power's ill-planned e-shot, I got a spike of traffic from servers associated with the company.  Six Apart, who own TypePad (what this site runs on), have visited, along with a couple of big names in the online world. Curiously, whoever set up the Jewish Chronicle's server has misspelled the name of the paper. It's not worth trying to figure out singular visits, like what brought Mayo Foundation, the Michigan Legislative Council or Toys R Us to the site (although I suspect if any of them monitor their brands online I'll get another visit from their servers by mentioning them).  Instead, take the list of servers or referrers you recognize, and try to engage them in conversation. This is especially true for blogs which have referred traffic to your site - does their site content fit with what your brand or company is trying to project?  Have they mentioned a negative customer service experience with your brand?  Can you correct it?  Have they blogged about a positive customer experience with your company?  Thank them!  

Another couple of easy tricks which are available regardless of whether or not you've installed analytics software on your site:

link: www.site.com - see the pages that link to your site - are there any you don't recognize? 

related: www.site.com - see which sites Google thinks are related to your site

Those two commands in Google are pretty simple, but pretty revealing as well.  Can you learn anything about how your competitors do business?  Who links to your competitors?  Do they have more inbound links than you?  What are people saying about your competitors?

The last bit of really simple information is track.  Track what people are saying about you or your brand online.  What pops up when you search for your own name in Google?  Do you have alerts set up on your brand?  Easy as literally typing in your company name and e-mail, and you start getting alerts as soon as you're mentioned online.  Great for "rapid response" in the face of a negative review or comment.

If the blogosphere is aware that you're "listening", customers are far more likely to engage with your brand online, turning that engagement into advocacy and maybe even a sale or two.