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The following article is reprinted from the February 2009 Plugged In column of Society of American Florists' (SAF) Floral Management Magazine. SAF's Floral Management is distributed to more than 11,000 SAF members and is the floral industry's premier floral business practices publication.
Before the Internet spawned hundreds of "everyone is a critic" sites, when customers loved (or hated) your business, they may have told a friend (or seven) and, if you were lucky, given you feed- back directly. Now, they can voice their discontent or satisfaction to the masses using blogs, Web sites, social media networks and discussion boards where their opinions live for an Internet eternity. Speaking of an eternity - that's
how long it would take to manually track what's being written about you online. Thankfully, a few monitoring tools let you keep an eye out and help you address negative content.
Get Google Goggles
Your first stop is www.google.com/reader. Google Reader will be your reputation control panel, as many of the tools mentioned deliver information in a Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feed format to this site.
At www.google.com/alerts, you'll see a box to enter search terms. You'll be creating several separate alerts containing the following: your shop name, your name, other key employees' names and the keywords used to find your shop (florist, flowers, delivery, wedding, city, state, etc.).
Create your first alert and select "Comprehensive," "as-it-happens" and "Feed" in the drop-down menus. You should now be taken to a list of your alerts. You'll see under the "Deliver to" column "View in Google Reader." Click the link. It now takes you to the Reader where you should see the alert as a sub- scription to the left and results on the right. You can also opt to create the same set of alerts but switch the "Deliver to" to an e-mail address, to get e-mail notification until you're familiar with Reader.
You've just automated the process of Googling your business 24/7. Since Google constantly crawls the Internet for changes, you'll know immediately of new references to your business (as long as you check your Reader page daily). And since your business isn't the only one in town you care about, create a set of alerts to watch local competitors.
Bug the Blogs, Boards
You'll need more in your arsenal to target blogs and discussion boards. Create an account at www.backtype.com to zoom in on blogs. Like Google, this service al- lows you to create alerts based on search terms, but goes beyond the search scope to scan blog postings. Create several alerts just as you did with Google. Select "As they arrive" in the "How often" menu and enter your e-mail.
Now that those alerts have you tuned into conversations online about your business, you're going to want to chime in and keep track of what you're saying and where. Backtype also can do this. Click on "Claim Comments, " and in "My Websites," enter your shop's URL since you'll be using it when you post comments to other posts and discussions.
Monitor discussion boards with an account at www.boardreader.com. Again, enter your first set of search terms. Scroll down to the drop-down menus. The default settings should be "post," "last three months" and "freshness" for the latest results. Then hit "RSS" in the top right corner of the screen. This prompts you to select your RSS reader. Select Google Reader. Hit "Subscribe" for e-mail notification.
Care to Comment
By now, you should have several subscriptions in your Google Reader and a list of hits. Visit each one and review all the posts. Some are good; others will test your patience and thick skin. But don't shy away from dissatisfied customers - engage them. Don't worry if posts are months, if not years, old. This is your chance to provide some balance and show that you're listening (or at least reading) and ready to resolve the issue.
Be courteous and professional in your response, and remember your audience is infinite. What you say, how you spell, your overuse of emoticons (one is one too many, if you want to appear professional) will live on after you've settled down and/ or thought twice. Provide all your contact information, especially a link to your shop. You'll know when people reply to your comment because the Backtype.com feature that you signed up for will alert you to any activity on your comments.
You are now in a position to not just monitor your reputation, but improve it. By responding to a post, you've shown that particular customer (and others) that you are attentive and want to turn a negative into a positive. You've created a free online ad with contact information and a link to your site. And, your posts will ultimately add to your shop's positive Internet galaxy that future shoppers will discover.
Social Eyes
You can never cast a wide enough net online. To ensure you ensnare the chatter from social media sites, use socialmention.com and yacktrack.com.
At socialmention.com, click the "All" tab and enter your terms. You may want to consider using quotes to further define your searches, as "All" is truly all encompassing. Then, hit the search button. Now, click the "Subscribe to RSS" to add this to your Reader. At yacktrack.com, click the "Chatter" tab and enter your terms. Then click "Subscribe to this query using RSS" to include in your Reader. -R.S.
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