Like blogging before it, Twitter has pushed us even further into an era of an unprecedented for reputation monitoring. Never had it been so easy for an anonymous writer to either help or harm a brand with comments, well-founded or not.
One tool that I have blogged about before makes reputation monitoring on Twitter extremely easy. TweetDeck is a slick Adobe Air app that sits on your desktop and notfies you of Tweets as they come in. Set up a column that is essentially a search for your company’s (or product’s) name and will give you a little buzz anytime something comes in. This is a tremendous way to find out what people think about your customer service, what companies are evaluating your solutions, etc. If you have not done this before, you will probably find that there is quite a bit more chatter than you may have expected.
TweetDeck
If you do see something about your brand, definitely feel free to join the conversation. If someone says something negative, address it, offer to point them to support, etc. If someone says something positive, thank them for it. It encourages your clients and prospects to continue the conversation, which is definitely something that you want for your brand.
Google Alerts are important for less time sensistive monitoring but so far nothing beats Twitter when it comes to stream of consciousness monitoring.
