Are your clients doing a good job of monitoring and managing the online conversation about their company? Maybe this is an area where your agency can help them with a service they know they need but just can't afford to add the time and resources to properly manage.In previous posts, I have discussed the need for agencies to broaden their service offering to clients and re-position themselves as more than just a vendor of ads. I have gotten responses to these posts that say they would love to help their clients in more ways, but too often it becomes an add-on cost without incremental income.
Managing their online reputation has become a critical need for many companies that simply can't afford to do it well. So here's an opportunity to approach your clients to add a new service (and build your relationship) for a small incremental fee -- monitoring the online conversation and managing their company reputation.
As we all know, the Internet and social media have shifted a significant amount of marketing power from the company to the general public. For many businesses, this is a terrifying prospect. As an example, a restaurant owner could be doing everything right, have one bad customer experience and end up with a negative review on Yelp or another review site. Just because their 19-year old server broke up with his girlfriend and is having a bad day.
On the Internet, peer reviews are increasingly important. According to a survey by the Opinion Research Corporation, eighty-four percent (84%) of Americans say online reviews influence their purchasing decisions. A negative review or disparaging comment can now be seen by hundreds, or even thousands of potential customers, and it can hang an albatross around your neck that never goes away.
On the bright side, positive reviews and happy clients are traditionally the best source of new business. That’s why it has become increasingly important for companies to monitor what’s being said about them online.
This is an opportunity for you to build a stronger relationship with your clients. By helping them with a problem that many know they have but just can't afford to hire additional staff to support, your agency can become a hero.
Popular sites like Facebook and Twitter have become essential components of many companies’ online marketing strategy, but there are hundreds of other sites where customers rant and rave about companies, products and services. The question you should ask your client is this: Do you know what they are saying about you?
There are a host of free and low cost social media monitoring services to help you monitor and manage the online conversation for your client. Google Alerts and Yahoo Alerts are free services that allow you to select keywords and topics to track and receive email updates whenever they appear on the Web. They aren’t new tools and have some limitations on where they monitor, but they can still be useful for keeping an eye on search engine and blog activity and other mentions of relevant content.
More specialized monitoring services like Social Mention, HootSuite and Addictomatic track a broader range of social sites like Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, etc. Their function is to give you a more complete picture of online conversations and help you to organize this information better by aggregating all of this user-generated content into a single stream of information or dashboard.
Is your client aware of some of the newer monitoring and aggregation tools that focus on small local businesses, like Yext Rep? This company offers a real-time feed of what people are saying about them on Yelp, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc. as well as local sites like Google Places and Superpages - all on one dashboard as it happens.
Companies like Trackur, Radian6 and Viralheat offer a feature-rich monitoring package with more sophisticated services for a fee. These more robust service companies can offer greater appeal to a company with multiple brands and numerous keywords to follow. They can provide detailed analytics with comprehensive dashboards that show precise details (date published, source, title) as well as a summary of each item discovered. Their analysis can also allow the user to evaluate the potential influence of each blog or news site discussing your brand or company by measuring and reporting statistics like coverage, Twitter followers, friends, etc.
In addition to helping companies defend themselves and their reputation, keeping track of online mentions can create new marketing opportunities. For example, Radian6 users can drill down into several layers of detailed information on their profile results to segment comments by media type and geographic region. This data can help your client as a business-building tool by allowing them to tie this dashboard into their SalesForce.com database to create contacts and sales leads for the sales department.
There are many other tools and services out there that you should consider. These are just a few that I am familiar with. The important thing for you to understand is that you can help your clients, and make more money, by helping them monitor what customers, prospects, and peers are saying about their brand, their company, their industry, and their competitors.
Who’s talking about your client right now? Are their ears burning?
And for that matter, who's talking about your agency right now? Are your ears burning?
