Monitor the content that others are generating about you and your business

Who in your organization is responsible for monitoring the content that's being generated about it and its products and services?

We've all heard the buzz around UGC and UCM - User-generated content and Consumer-Generated Media - but this is far from just a passing fad.  As the lines have blurred between consumers and producers, so-called prosumers (a term coined as long ago as 1980 by Alvin Toffler) have emerged to become critically influential players in the conversations taking place in your market.  Mainstream media reviews and articles still remain vitally important to influencing opinion but focusing on these alone is the marketing equivalent of listening in to one end of a telephone call and hoping to understand the detail of everything that's being said.

Your challenge is to market-watch efficiently. But like consumers, the attention of marketers is scarce and because we're all so oversubscribed with information, it's hard to cut through the white noise and follow what our customers are saying about us.

What's the best way to monitor the conversations in the blogosphere? Google offers a solution with its Reader, which styles itself as an 'inbox for the web': enabling you to source, consolidate and manage what's being said about you on the internet. 

Not a unique idea but the most consistently impressive solution available says Steve Rubel who evangelizes about Google Reader in his blog at Micropersuasion.com 'Become a knowledge management ninja with Google Reader':

'In this era of data smog, the knowledge worker who can act like an agile ninja by consuming vast quantities of information, synthesizing it and getting it in the hands of the right people at the right time is invaluable'.

Reader enables you to organize, file, tag and share feeds and web content easily and efficiently.  If you're having a problem keeping up with all the conversations in your area of specialism, then it's a fantastic solution because when you log in, the homepage consolidates all the content updates for you. Cancel your email subscriptions and replace them with RSS feeds that you can subscribe to within Reader, with unread posts clearly visible. You can also organize the feeds into folders to ensure that you are able to differentiate quickly between multiple conversations that you are following: for example, you may be a marketer who needs to keep the different info streams apart because you are responsible for several products or product groups in your portfolio.

But is simply monitoring the content enough?  How about re-using it in your own marketing messages or joining the conversation yourself?  This is a core topic of Meerman Scott's The New Rules of Marketing and PR,  a full review of which will appear in the next Relevant and Valued.

Be relevant, be valued and get your customers to act.

www.relevantandvalued.com

Comments

[David Meerman Scott]

Looking forward to reading it!

Best, David

[Phil Darby]

I had this conversation (again) today. I guess we are still trying to get organisations to focus on seeking customers views and its a bridge far too far for most of them to dedicate resource to sniffing out unsolicited comment. Although, as we know, that's usually the kind that gives you real insight.

Last week I started a thread on a consumer web site about a retailer that I think has lost the plot. Within less than thirty minutes I had five pages of comment, examples and valid critcism of the organisation and a week later there hasn't been a comment from anybody at the organisation itself.

Next, I'm going to mail them a link and see what happens.