Tod Maffin shows how to monitor what people say about your company online before it becomes a crisis. Use Bloglines to track custom searches like your company name plus "broken widgets," set up alerts for high-risk keywords, and watch Flickr for brand photos that could spread across social media in seconds.
Chapters
There's a couple of things you could be doing to, um, to fix this problem. Two things in particular. First, you cannot fix what you do not know. Cannot fix what you do not know. If you do not realize that your company— what people are talking about you, you're lost. It won't happen. I do a lot of workshops, more in-depth seminar stuff for groups on specifically, so I'm only— only have time to cover off the bare necessities of here. But at the least, at the least, do these bare necessities. This is— this will serve you much more than monitoring news services. I mean, keep your clipping services, of course, for God's sake, that's important. But this stuff will alert you as well. This is sort of the new clipping services. I use a service called Bloglines. Free. bloglines.com. It's free to use. Uh, it's great. All you do is you punch in your company name. Do a search. ABC Corporation. Search anywhere. If you're— if you're a computer geek like I am and you get off on Boolean searches and regular expressions, you can go nuts. There's a big search screen, and, you know, we all get excited by this, so— What happens is you type in ABC Corporation and it returns a list. Now, if your company name is ABC Corporation, good luck to you. Hopefully your company is a brand name that isn't owned by Wile E. Coyote or something. Acme. You've got all of these returns. The key here is if you look in the upper right, it says subscribe. Subscribe to this search in blog lines. That's what you want to do. What that means is every time— so basically it creates a little thing there for you. And over time you'll add a bunch of different things. So here I've said anytime the word ABC and broken widgets. So if you sell widgets, you want to be alerted. Excuse me. If someone comes up and says broken widgets in reference to your company name or the name of your CEO. And this can happen immediately or you can choose to not. Now this is not like email. 'Cause we all get, what, 43,000 emails a day, right? So it's not like this is gonna come into your mailbox and all of a sudden flood you. This is a website that you go and check whenever you have spare time. I would recommend first thing every morning. Just make it— Bookmark it. Doop. Check it. See what's happening. Ruin your day. It's a great way to start. What I do actually is I put mine into folders. So news stuff that I'm interested in, photos. You can subscribe to all sorts of different feeds and folders, which are important to track as well, which I'll show you in just a moment. I do this on my computer. If you look down in the bottom right there, that's my Bloglines Notifier. So as soon as there— I can actually track on certain ones. If you see here where it says down at the very second to the bottom, I've added a search and I say, "Monitored by Bloglines Notifier." So I can say, "Well, you know, certain searches aren't that important." But if ABC Corporation and the phrase bankrupt appears, I want that to alert me through the notifier. So either on a Mac or Windows, something will actually pop up and say, "Something just happened on the blog that you need to be alerted to immediately." You click on it, it pops up. Hey, how much is your clipping service charging you, by the way? Can you even get that kind of service? I mean, it's pretty powerful. Let's talk about photos really quick as well. Did you know that when I typed in McDonald's, there were 8,400 photographs that people were uploading? I subscribe to the tag McDonald's just 'cause it's interesting. These are people who are uploading it to this great website called Flickr.com. I'll bet you McDonald's isn't checking this to see what's out there, you know. I'll bet you they don't know that yesterday someone uploaded this. That yesterday someone uploaded that. That yesterday someone uploaded this. Well, I don't know. Are these actionable? Probably not. It would probably be really stupid for you to do it. But it's probably a good idea to keep aware of it, you know? And more importantly, take a look at the upper left up there, because people going on the website who think that it's a really cool photo, all they have to do is click that button in the middle, "Blog this," and boom, it's on their blog. And if they have those social networking things, boom, it's on Digg.com, and it's on the front page of your website, and about 30 seconds later, you have a PR crisis. Here's a couple of other companies I looked at last night. More importantly than anything, you've gotta become human. Thank you.
