Chapter 7

Setting Up Your Listening Tools

In This Chapter

Creating your Google Alerts

Setting up your Google Analytics

Saying hello to HootSuite

Staying informed via Yahoo! Pipes

This is one of my favorite chapters. The setups I describe in this chapter are useful for the vast majority of brands (everyone except maybe a Fortune 100 company), cost almost nothing to operate on a monthly basis (outside of payroll expenses, that is), and take little time to maintain. It’s an extraordinary amount of value in just a few pages.

In this chapter I, explore several free and almost-free listening tools that you probably should be using every day, if only for 15 minutes, to monitor your online reputation. The larger your name or organization is, the more often you need to check in — and these tools can save you an enormous amount of time.

I start by showing you how to create your Google Alerts. You can set these up to send information right to your mailbox any time your name, company, or industry is mentioned online. I then cover the basics for getting set up on Google Analytics. It’s an involved subject, but even getting a simple setup will give you a lot more information than you ever could have imagined about who is coming to visit your site and what site referred that visitor to you.

You can choose from several different aggregators to track mentions of your brand in real time. My personal aggregator of choice is HootSuite, but if you decide to use TweetDeck, for example, many of the same characteristics and tips apply.

Stay tuned for a quick tutorial on Yahoo! Pipes at the end of this chapter. It’s a powerful way to host live updates on your site about you, your brand, your industry, or just the fact that you’re fascinated with the idea of gophers living on Mars, like me. It’s all available to you.

The moment you set up your listening tools, you will have roughly a 1,000,000 times better handle on how people are talking about you and your brand online, as well as keeping track of the very latest trends in your industry.

Online communication is a two-way street. You need to listen at least as much as you speak.