The Big Ear: Twitter

Social Media’s Million Voices & the Big Ear | The Big Ear: Review Sites | The Big Ear: Google Alerts

Big Ear – developing a keen awareness of your business by listening to social media and online customer thought streams

Haven’t signed up for a Twitter account? Seriously? Go get one now (signup)!

1. Search to see if your company/brand name is already taken at Namechk. If your first option is already taken at Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter, then pick another!
2. Strongly consider registering this name at the other major social media sites that you might grow into.
3. Keep the name below 10 characters. Twitter only allows 140 in a message, so why take it up with a long Twitter name?

Twitter is a potent tool for driving traffic to your site, market research, complaint management. Using Twitter as a complaint management tool is infinitely easy yet incredibly difficult at the same time. Finding customer complaints is the easy part, whereas resolving and winning the customer’s satisfaction is the difficult part. Being able to quickly resolve a complaint requires that the person or team listening understands the internal people and procedures to draw a happy conclusion in a timely manner.

Recognizing the impact of complaint management via social media upon a brand, Kodak has backed Beth LaPierre as their Chief Listener. Fortunately, companies of all sizes can easily develop their Big Ear for customer feedback on Twitter and other social media.

The Big Ear for Twitter – Newbies

1. Start a Twitter search starting with your company name.
   Tip: Twitter search results can automatically be pushed to you through an RSS feed by clicking on the “Feed for this query” link on the search results page. What is RSS?
2. Create an advanced search using the company name restricted to 100 miles from where you are located.
   Tip: Twitter searches get better when combining “search operators” to pinpoint the information you want.
3. Search and grab RSS feeds for any particular brand names such as Kleenex, Coke Zero, etc., that are relative to your business.
   Tip: Type your company name in the “All of these words” field and then any brand names into the “Any of these words” fields.

4. Make three RSS feeds to monitor with your company name using all of the Attitudes criteria – with positive attitude , with negative attitude , and asking a question.
5. Visit Twubs to find any hashtags that might be currently used in your industry. If there are none, create and define one at Tagalus.
   Tip: Hashtags are Twitter’s answer for organizing user updates around a particular topic or theme using the number key (#) followed by a keyword such as #mcdonalds, #lady-gaga, etc. #Prepress and #printing are a couple used within the printing industry.

Bottom Line: Only listen until you have your customer support and resolution systems in place, then you can start to engage!

Shoutback: How are you monitoring your successes and failures on Twitter?