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Your Brand and Where it is Discussed

Social media begins with listening. One of the first things to do is to find out what has been said about your brand. But what is your brand?

Your Brand may include anything associated with your business. Some quick examples include your business name (obviously), business nicknames (think “Micky D’s”) your products, the business owners name(s), trademarks and tag lines, and perhaps your employees (those in customer service, especially). Other considerations include your clients, your industry, and your competitors.

Come up with a list of keywords to use for monitoring your brand.

Once we have the keywords, we can begin to find out how your brand is mentioned in conversation. And to find that, we need to go where those conversations are happening!

The internet includes forums, blogs, wikis, minisites, microblogs, search engines, social networks, web directories, websites, online reviews, rating system sites, word of mouth, online communities, and any other online or other collaborative media. Common social media marketing arenas in 2010 include Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. But there are a lot more.

Perhaps the easiest way to find some places where your brand is mentioned on many websites is to create a Google Alert. A free tool, Google Alert can send an email anytime your brand is mentioned on any of the millions of websites they follow. If your email gets to be too much, you may want to use an RSS reader to get the information (Google wouldn’t mind if you used their free Google Reader, either).

The problem is that Google Alerts are limited to only those sites they crawl, and conversations are happening in dozens of other forums all over the internet. Some sites – especially those being used for social media – are not always included in search engine results. Here are a handful of examples that a typical search engine may not always see in a timely manner:

  • Social Networking Platforms (Facebook, Windows Live, MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning, etc.)
  • Blogs (WordPress, Blogger, etc.)
  • Microblogs (Twitter, Tumblr, Plurk, Foursquare, etc.)
  • Comments
  • Microsites
  • Video watching (Youtube, Hulu, Vimeo, Metacafe, etc.)
  • Image browsing (Flikr, imeem, Gather, etc.)
  • Forums (also Bulletin Boards)
  • Complaint websites (Ripoffreport, Complaintsboard, etc.)
  • Wikis (Wikipedia, WikiCity)
  • Press releases
  • Articles (ezine, articlebase, etc.)

Luckily, many of these also have related search tools to help you comb through the web, and find where and what people are saying about your brand.

For now, try using the Google Alert to help you get started. If you need further assistance, get in touch with me soon.