I've started to read Naked Conversations
The "get it" factor is the fact that business can't continue as usual. Either engage your customers, both the skeptics and evangelists, or be left in the dust. Now, just because the book is about blogs, that shouldn't matter. Having a company blog, or employees that blog will not make the difference. Rather, engaging your customers in any two-way communications in a public forum is the key. It could be through discussion boards, e-mail discussion lists, or other online-communities. The point is the companies who are putting a human face to their brand is winning customers over left and right.
Want to know what is being said about your company? Head to Technorati or Feedster and conduct some searches on your company, or even yourself if you are a CEO. You might be amazed at the conversations happening without you even knowing about.
If you aren't monitoring the Blogosphere yet, you should start today. And don't be affraid to enter the conversation about your company, products, and services. You might learn that the new feature you put on the latest version of Product X doesn't work like the customer thought it would. Or you might gain valuable feedback on how to improve the product even more. This is market research you can't buy.
So how do you monitor the Blogosphere? Here are some tips.
- Get a Gmail account (If you need an invite, let me know
- Set up some Alerts in Google for your company, products, services, Senior managers, etc.
- Create a free account on Bloglines or any other news aggregator service
- Set up free accounts at Technorati, Feedster, PubSub
- Create "Watchlists" for the same terms you used for your Google Alerts and add the RSS/XML feeds to your news aggregator
- Start watching
It seems pretty simple once you look at it. But by doing this you can get a quick lay of the land on what is being said about your company by bloggers and other citizen journalists.