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What are Your Customers Tweeting About You? – Part 1

We’ve been discussing how to know what your customers are saying about you on the Web. Posting opinions or comments on a company doesn’t even require a blog, as we saw in the post about MicroBlogging with Twitter. So if your customers are tweeting (the verb of to twitter) about your company, how do you know (Part 1) and how do you respond (Part 2)?

One tool I like to use, TweetScan, allows you to search Tweets by keyword, user, and time. Once you have your keyword search, you can then subscribe to that search using RSS to keep track of what people are saying about your company and products. Or you can link to it and come back to see who else is talking about you. I suggest adding the RSS feed of the search of your company name and major products to your RSS reader and checking it with the rest of your feeds every day.

You can also take a look at the Public Timeline on Twitter to see what’s going on.

Here are some links to more tools, etc. about Twitter:

In Part 2, we’ll discuss how to respond to all these tweets about your product or company.

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Consumers using blogs and user-generated content

Interesting information regarding online consumer use of blogs, video and podcasts:

Groundswell: From the chart: In the US, of online consumers, 25% read blogs, 14% comment on blogs, 29% watch user generated video, and 11% listen to podcasts. The US is the clear leader in both creation and viewing of user-generated video, which is at least partly due to the fact that YouTube is mostly in English….Podcasts still haven’t caught on the US after years of availability.”

These numbers will be different for the B2B audience, but are very important for the B2C audience.  B2B often follows directly in the footsteps of the consumer market, so they’re interesting from a trend point-of-view. Looks like video is still pretty important.

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Give your Business Users Voice

One way to know what people are saying about your company or products is to have a place where people can post their opinions and ideas.

Similar to Get Satisfaction (covered in my last post), UserVoice provides a forum for customers to post their ideas, opinions and ideas. Once a company sets up a profile, their customers are asked directly for their input at the top of the page which says “I suggest…”. Each idea can be voted and commented on by the entire community. Companies can leave an official response and mark each idea with a status: planned, started, declined, or completed. Ideas can be searched for or browsed by top, new, accepted and completed. Customers can also add ideas free form from a widget that companies can place on their website or blog.

UserVoice is geared towards customer feedback and ideas, but lacks tagging, related issues, general discussion and a tie-in to a larger community. However, segregating the forum for each company could allow customers to feel more comfortable leaving their feedback. Voting on ideas is another valuable feedback, but without negative votes, you only know how many were for it (everyone else either abstains or doesn’t care). UserVoice is still in beta (free for now) so it will be interesting to see how their features develop over the next few months.

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