Who is Talking Behind Your Business' Back?

Do you know what people are saying about you on the Internet?

Even if you don’t have a Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter page, as a small business owner, you should monitor everything that is said about you.

Why?

If someone makes a positive or negative comment about your business, don’t you want to know? Companies that don’t monitor their exposure are liable to loose their market share. Take a look at companies like Domino’s Pizza when staff members posted a YouTube video that negatively reflected the company. It took the company’s CEO nearly three days to respond.  If someone says something about your company, you need to react immediately to alleviate any negatively.

There are lots of ways to monitor your presence, both free and through paid services. These services track social media sites, shows you what people are saying about your product or service, offers real-time metrics for buzz volume, and even tracks what your competitors are doing too. Most of them track more than 100 million blogs, social networking sites, microblogs, and forums.

To help you weed through the clutter, here are some of the popular paid and free services available:

Radian 6: Starts at $600 a month
Cision Social Media Monitoring: Starts at $375 a month
CustomScoop: Cost is based on keywords needed and how many users: $299-Standard 1 user,15 key words, 30 day archive $499 unlimited key words 3 users, $999 unlimited.
Scout Labs: Cost is dependent on months and users: $249-5 searches, 5 users, 6 months historical data $449-10 searches, 5 users, 6 months historical data $749- 25 searches, 5 users, 6 months historical data
Vocus: The small business edition is $3,000
Rowfeeder: Cost $250 a month to start

These websites are free and still give you an array of information/alert about monitoring your business online:

• Google alerts

• Addict-O-Matic
• Backtype.com
• IceRocket.com
• Social Mention

Obviously, you will get more out of the paid services because they provide more metrics for you to evaluate your social media presence and monitoring of what your customers are saying. Charts and graphs are also offered with many of the paid services. With the free services, you will get email alerts or RSS feeds. They don’t offer as many blogs and web sites to monitor as the paid services and you have to do all the work in terms of pulling the information together.

In addition to addressing negatively, by seeing what people are saying gives you the heads up on your competition. You will be a frontrunner on engaging your customers and adding value to the service you offer. Now, don’t you think it’s worth doing?