B2B/B2C online strategy and enterprise eBusiness blog

Social media enthusiasts of the world often unite in the wake of internet riots with the “I told you so” speech and blog postings (present company included) about how a company or brand should have reacted to a social media meltdown. The latest debacle was made possible by Motrin with this :30 spot. 

Problem: You’ve alienated your target demographic

The speed at which a big brand like Motrin reacted was decent. Rumblings started over the weekend and by Monday afternoon, Motrin had this announcement posted on the homepage of its website (although several hours after the entire motrin.com site was not available):

Not sure what’s distasteful about the ad? Read the coverage:

http://blogs.forbes.com/sciencebizblog/2008/11/twitter-moms-si.html

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/11/17/motrin-mothers-groundswell-by-the-numbers/

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/motrin_bows_to_social_media_pr.php

How can this type of situation be prevented in the future?

In short, it can’t be 100% prevented. At the end of the day, even the best processes and procedures can fail and its why we live in a world of product recalls and warranty repairs. Dealing with a negative reaction to an advertising campaign is similar to a massive product recall — it’s all in how you react to the problem.

How should I react to an internet riot?

I jokingly refer to these types of situations as “internet riots” however I realize they are to be taken seriously otherwise they will spiral out of control — much like a riot.

While mommy bloggers certainly rallied and voiced their opinion to Motrin via blogs, twitter, and other outlets, we have to remember that there are other types of visitors to the site — visitors who, like me, had never seen the commercial and had no idea what “everybody was mad about” this morning.

Plastering an announcement on the homepage of the site is probably “good enough,” but not ideal. Here’s why the Motrin execution falls short:

1. The entire homepage announcement is an image and not text. This means Google and other search engines cannot index the contents of the image. This then means the message will not be searchable on search engines. As of this writing, “motrin moms” (the ad campaign’s main message) dominates search results and motrin.com is nowhere to be found.
2. The message on the homepage is not clickable — it doesn’t take me to more information on the product, status on when the rest of the campaign will be disabled, or even a way to contact Motrin.
3. How long will this message stay on their homepage? What if we need to refer to it at a later date after the initial groundswell as died down?

Instead, the following steps would have been much easier and faster to produce and maintain on an on-going basis:

1. Post a blog posting containing detailed information on what the problem is, what you’re doing to fix it, and make sure to have keywords in the article that are found in the referenced blog posts, tweets, and articles (no need to involve IT or web developers to update the site)
2. Link to the post on the homepage of the Motrin site (so it can be later removed without eliminating the content of the article!)
3. Post a tweet on twitter to the channel of the dialogue with a link to the blog posting
4. Openly accept comments (I like the reference to the feedback, although there’s no mechanism to contact Motrin from this message on their homepage)

What can I do to monitor whether or not a riot is brewing?

In late 2006 I outlined some common ways to monitor your brand online via this post. If you find a site that is not RSS-enabled, you can also monitor it with a service such as this.

Help “steer the ship”

Posting content to your own site and managing comments on it can help you “steer the ship.” The last thing you want is a situation like Motrin’s that continues to spiral out of control with blog entries and tweets that carry a negative connotation about the product or brand name. By funneling all attention about the issue (good or bad) through a blog post our your website, you now function as the central source of information.

As the blogosphere ogles at the “success” of the “Elf Yourself” campaign, I find myself wondering if the old cliché “there’s no such thing as bad press” is true. While this particular campaign has been positive for Office Max, will it (ever) contribute to the bottom line? Or does this campaign simply go down in the books as “fun” and win an award?

The “Elf Yourself Campaign
Put together by Officemax, here’s the comparison of the ElfYourself.com demographics and Officemax.com demographics:

The above graph is for ElfYourself.com

The below graph is for Officemax.com:

Demographic & site analysis
Officemax.com hits the internet average for female and male visitors skewing slightly higher in the 55-64 and 65+ demographics. The ElfYourself.com campaign however is highly skewed towards 65+ females. We do see an obvious jump in traffic to OfficeMax.com during the same timeframe that the ElfYourself.com site has been running (presumably due to the coupons offered on ElfYourself.com when you click on the OfficeMax logo).

Will it translate to revenue? Time will tell.

PR firms focusing on “viral” vs. product
Switching gears from OfficeMax to my day job…it’s interesting seeing the campaign ideas we are pitched from marketing firms who aspire to earn our business. There’s an overwhelming amount of focus with online marketing, but in our industry (blinds & shades), is making it up the ranks of digg.com really going to translate to revenue? Many marketers think so and go out of their way to focus on links we receive due to PR, blog mentions, and diggs. Let’s step back for a moment and focus on digg.com’s demographics (courtesy of Quantcast):

Skewing higher than the internet average on the 25-34 Male demographic is not exactly the sweet spot for us when it comes to spending money on press that end up on digg.com.

Common sense in online marketing
Viral campaigns are fine — if they are targeted towards the demographic you are seeking as customers. digg.com is not a “mass consumer” demographic and should not be treated as one by marketers, but for some reason it is. This is nothing against digg. There comes a time when you have to ask yourself the “So, what?” question when a marketing pitches you a concept. With the viral success of the Elf Yourself campaign, be sure to ask yourself the “So, what?” question if a marketer comes to you with a great viral idea that does not pave a clear path to sales revenue.

Marketing campaigns can and should be measured in sales
Some marketing agencies are not held accountable to revenues generated from campaigns. Generating impressions is great, but if the campiagn cannot be tied directly to sales, then you should find a way to measure it. Every campaign we run is measured — sometimes we may not know the potential return (which is often the case testing new ideas/technologies surrounding promotions and marketing), so we measure it to see what the return is after the campaign is over with.

Your sales cycle may be a long sales cycle, so campaign “success” may not be measurable immediately — it could take weeks, months, or even years. If this is the case, plan your campaigns accordingly because the sales cycle should help drive the types of promotions that work for your business. OfficeMax seems to have played their cards right with the coupons/discounts on ElfYourself.com and the traffic spike to Officemax.com.

However, traffic spikes do not always equate to revenue — especially if the campaign is driving unqualified customers to your site. This is the one thing that many agencies fail to grasp in this new age of viral campaigns and del.icio.us, YouTube, and digg.com’s of the world.

Sony is closing the doors on its ImageStation online photo hosting product. This is an interesting move and makes me wonder exactly how much money they were losing on this venture. Quantcast has ImageStation.com ranked at #2,994 with an estimated 790,000 unique visitors per month. With the combination of products (coffee mugs, calendars, etc.), premium memberships, and traffic to the site, it’s amazing that they are completely shutting the service down.

ImageStation has been around for quite some time and was always one of the larger sites funded by deep-pocket companies that we (SuperMotors) had to look at for competition and feature comparisons. I guess when you’re up against the likes of Shutterfly (4M uniques/mo), KodakGallery (7M uniques/mo), and Photobucket (16M uniques/mo), at only 790K uniques/mo, you are in a very distant 4th place. Not to mention the other services out there that offer photo hosting.

David vs. Goliath
This presents an interesting challenge for significantly smaller sites like ours without the deep-pocket funding. Is this a sustainable business model? How do you capture market share against companies offering arguably similar services? For us, being a part-time venture, the biggest challenge is finding the time to add value to the site and continue to improve it. We are sitting on several months of work that has yet to be launched due to the commitments of each of our collective day jobs.

At the end of the day however, we offer a very niche service to automotive enthusiasts. While photo, audio, and video hosting remain the core of the features offered, the added bells and whistles that make us unique will always set us apart from larger sites like the ones mentioned above. They cater to the masses and as a result, have to be generic in nature of their service offering. We continue to add services and features to the site that specifically support the automotive enthusiast.

Still though, it would be nice to have a name like Sony or Kodak bankrolling the operation.

This is surely making the rounds, but I wanted to draw attention to customer service with humor as demonstrated by Google Transit’s Joe Hughes. This is such a great way to give a large company a human touch, particularly with the sense of humor. The PR/buzz surrounding this is also going to be an added bonus.

A few weeks ago while analyzing the results of an internal test on a new web design we’re testing, it was brought up about how manufacturing is guided by Six Sigma standards. It was suggested the website live in a similar realm of excellence.

What is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma is a rigorous and disciplined methodology that uses data and statistical analysis to measure and improve a company’s operational performance by identifying and eliminating “defects” in manufacturing and service-related processes. Commonly defined as 3.4 defects per million opportunities, Six Sigma can be defined and understood at three distinct levels: metric, methodology (DMAIC/DFSSstructured problem solving roadmap and tools) and philosophy (Reduce variation in your business and take customer-focused, data driven decisions).

Can Six Sigma be applied to web development, design, and usability?
This is a very logical question. Yes, it can be applied, but achieving it is another issue altogether.

Pulling from Jakob Nielson’s November 2003 post, Six Sigma engineering relies on a five-step process called DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control). He was really ahead of his time in this article. A google search does not pull up much information on applying six sigma to web development, design, or usability. This tells me the concept has not been discussed too much and it makes sense — the web is still in its infancy, and the more experienced developers within organizations today are now moving into upper management where they are beginning to look at the website from a higher view within the company.

As the web becomes more of a vital tool for most businesses today, upper management (who often times knows little about how exactly a website goes together or how to build a successful site) is seeing the value in applying other business practices and methodologies towards the design, testing, and execution of their websites.

Why Six Sigma is difficult to achieve in web development today.
In manufacturing, the amount of variables encountered in an assembly line is not as vast as a complex website. Manufacturing doesn’t deal directly with consumers, either, and the manufacturing process has very strict processes and tolerances for how things are assembled.A website is dynamic in nature and also navigated and operated by your customers — customers who may not know a thing about your product and have had no training on your website. Manufacturing lines are staffed by duty-specific workers, trained to perform specific tasks accurately and efficiently.

A website on the other hand can be navigated in millions of different ways and combinations by millions of different people. Testing each of these combinations is impossible and will result in you testing your website into eternity without ever releasing it to the market. Add on top of this a team of people who are most likely very diverse in their backgrounds: developers, designers, and marketers — each come with their own education and experiences and often time have no visibility into what their other team members’ job responsibilities really entail (how many developers do you know that can truly do graphic design? how many designers do you know that can write complex database queries?).

Accept the variables in web development, and apply the concepts of Six Sigma
The key is applying the Six Sigma mentality to web development, design, and usability so you can get the best balance of accuracy and conversions. The problem most developers and designers have is that they get “tunnel vision” and focus exclusively on just one piece of the entire web application. This is a problem for any type of site which has multiple conversion funnels (sales, registration forms, contact forms, etc.).

Next Segments:

1. “Define” in the DMAIC process

More on this topic over the next several days as I cover each phase of the DMAIC process in individual blog posts in an effort to keep the posts spread out and on-topic, rather than one long, rambling post. I’ll provide links at the end of this post as each phase of DMAIC is evaluated.

While Friday still remains at SES NY ‘07, it feels like today (Thursday) was the last day. I sat in on several sessions all of which were focused around retail, search, advertising, and social media. The underlying theme of the day was looking at advertising from multiple angles and how it can help build/elevate your brand. My notes from the day are very scattered so I’ll do a recap with my own thoughts as well.

Online SEM Channel Strategy - What to do?
As I evaluate our online channel and the fact that it is like the Wild West right now, I am presented with the following dilemma:

1. As a manufacturer, we want to protect our brand name. In fact, leveraging our brand is a corporate initiative, and it should be a differentiator when people shop for blinds and shades online or offline.
2. Our products are sold in different channels: Big Box, Independent, and Online. Online presents the biggest challenge because our brand name is used to drive traffic to competitor websites. This is an easy problem to fix thanks to our legal department. However, the more interesting and complex issue is how to work with our online retail partners to get a win-win situation: we want to “own” our brand name, yet our retail partners need to advertise our brand name. What’s a consumer to do?

I don’t have all of the answers yet, but have some ideas (which I will not discuss here). The more important point is that we have retail partners who are advertising our brand name, essentially free of charge. In the blind and shade industry, brand names are either very well known, or completely nonexistent. It’s really a hit-or-miss vertical. With that said, once you start rolling in banner advertising, offline advertising, PR, social media marketing, etc. to create that brand awareness, then the online retailer SEM takes a whole different role.

Where does SEM live in the sales/conversion funnel?
There are essentially two types of searchers:

1. Consumer searches for a specific product name (sometimes including a brand name)
2. Consumer searches for generic product name

Consumers who fall into bucket #1 are further along in the sales funnel. They have been pre-disposed to your product and are more or less “in the market” now and ready to spend their money. I would argue that these consumers represent an “easier” conversion to a sale and that your SEM budget should focus heavily in this area.
Is SEM a marketing tool or a sales tool?
Consumers who fall into bucket #2 are the people who blur the lines of SEM. Is SEM a marketing tool or a sales tool? Or is it both? People using generic search terms may not have a brand top-of-mind, but if they see advertisements relating to their search that mention a brand name, they may be more likely to resonate with those ads. This is particularly true if you have other advertising and marketing in place such as banners, offline ads, PR, good social media penetration, etc. Now, combine the power of the “stickiness” of brand advertising with the online retailers who also sell our products and we’ve got an interesting situation.

Generic terms may not immediately convert, but they may be attributed to future conversions
The problem is that it’s hard to tie sales to generic search terms. They may not immediately convert, simply because the consumer falls a little higher in the sales conversion funnel and may not be ready to purchase right then and there. Unfortunately for us, too, the sales cycle is much longer for custom blinds and shades (due to ordering samples online, waiting for them to arrive, and also because of the higher price point of custom products).

Who’s to say, though, that a generic term didn’t ultimately drive the consumer towards purchasing your product at a later date. What if they came back to the search engine, looked for another term or even used your brand name this time in their search phrase, and ended up purchasing on your site (or retail partner site)? It’s certainly doable to keep track of the initial click or keyword/phrase that drove the consumer to your website for the first time. But it’s also very hard to measure the effectiveness of SEM with other “outside’ influencers such as more traditional advertising.

Fortunately, I will be able to run a baseline test of SEM for 1 to 2 quarters without any other external advertising (other than normal monthly promotions, etc. that we would normally run). I anticipate a lift when SEM begins to clicks to our website (and hopefully sales through retail partners), but even more so do I expect this when we start advertising via more traditional means. I will really be interested to see if it drives a higher conversion rate on the same SEM campaigns I had been running.

It’s hard to say, but fortunately I have tools like Omniture SiteCatalyst and WebTrends Dynamic Search to help me manage it all.

Creating the right blend of advertising - avoiding advertising silos
The ultimate goal is to create the right blend of advertising so SEM is converting at its highest possible rate when balanced with the correct amount of banner advertising, offline advertising, PR, social media, etc. I think the main problem with advertisers today is that they are looking at everything in silos. PR is measured in impressions — but how is it correlated with sales? Banner ads are measured in impressions, click-throughs, and conversions — but how do banners influence search? How does leverage social media influence customer satisfaction and repeat business?

There are so many variables that go into the marketing, management, and maintenance of a brand. Pile this responsibility on top of having to actually creating, produce, and maintain new product development and you’ve got your hands full.  Do it well and you’ve got a well-oiled machine with new product development and marketing playing off each other. Do it poorly, and you’ll find yourself in a very disconnected business with poorly performing sales funnels and weak innovation and new product development.

Session #2 of the training courses on Monday of SES NY ‘07 was called “Getting your site found.” This session really had few takeaways for me as it dealt with the concept of getting your site found by using things like Flickr, YouTube, PR services, and optimizing press releases for online services. Here are some of the highlights:

More Products + More Choices = Lower Customer Satisfaction
The point was made that consumers are being bombarded by all forms of media and advertising, the Internet makes it easier for them to find products, but with all of these products and choices, customer satisfaction is arguably at an all-time low. So, how does one address this problem? Read on.

Resolve Buyer’s Remorse Before the Purchase
Truer words have never been spoken and it was the “ah ha” moment for me during the session. When you think in these terms, it just makes sense. This is particularly true for my day job where we have historically (for the past 90 years) been a manufacturing company whose business has 100% relied on big box and independent retail channels selling our products to consumers. Too often companies (manufacturers, retailers, service providers, etc.) focus on the newest features of their products and offerings that they fail to answer the most basic questions a buyer wants to know.

This ultimately leads to buyer’s remorse after the buyer has shelled out their hard-earned dollars only to be completely dissatisfied with their purchase. We’ve all been there, and to add insult to injury, many of us never bother to return the product because of the hassle in dealing with customer service in the process. What a horrible situation to be in for a retailer or manufacturer!

Buyer’s remorse has lead to the success of social media and blogging for consumers
This is why social media and blogging have become such powerful tools for consumers to vent frustrations and to seek out help and assistance from other consumers who feel their pain. Even being a marketer, I still dread dealing with customer service because it is a considerable time investment. It’s much easier for me to hop online, post a question, and deal with the resolution on my own terms and on my own time (companies who monitor blogs will win these consumers back!).

At the risk of poo-pooing any chance at rekindling our relationship with Tribal Fusion, we (SuperMotors) were taken back by an e-mail we received from our (new) account executive on Friday morning, February 16th and 3:23 AM. In what appears to have been a standard form letter used to contact sites that have “fallen below the standards of the Tribal Fusion ad network,” we were notified that adult content was found on SuperMotors.net and that this was in fact a violation of the Tribal Fusion Terms of Service. This as the first such notification in our almost 5-month relationship with Tribal Fusionnnn.

Fair enough. They have every right to be monitoring the quality of their websites and I applaud them for enforcing this. This is what we received:

Hello Eric,

I am contacting you because it is our belief that the quality of the content on SuperMotors has fallen below the standards of the Tribal Fusion ad network. In particular, the content found on these pages:

(page link removed)

Content like this is a violation of our publisher contract; and as a result SuperMotors has been removed from the Tribal Fusion Marketplace and we are currently serving only defaults or PSAs. We value the relationship we have had with you up to this point, and if you would like to speak with us regarding ways to potentially continue working together, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Otherwise, I have to ask you to please remove Tribal Fusion’s ad code from the SuperMotors website and/or from your adserving system by the end of the week. Failure to do so will result in broken images appearing through our ad tags.The clause in our publisher contract for termination (for your reference):

6.2 Termination. Publisher may discontinue participating in the marketplace after the initial term by providing 30 days written notice to Tribal Fusion™. However, Publisher has an obligation to fulfill any advertising campaign configured to run on their site in its entirety prior to termination. Tribal Fusion™ may terminate a Publisher’s participation at any time if Publisher’s website quality falls below the standard set by other websites in the marketplace, fails to deliver the minimum number of impressions, or if Publisher fails to comply with any other provision of these Terms and Conditions.

2.2 Right to Refuse. Tribal Fusion™ reserves the right to refuse to accept any publisher at its sole discretion, as a member of the Tribal Fusion™ Marketplace. Publisher websites shall not contain (or have direct links to) any content deemed inappropriate by Tribal Fusion™ at its sole discretion, which includes but is not limited to the following: content promoting the use of alcohol, tobacco or illegal substances; sex, pornography or adult-oriented content; violence, expletives or inappropriate language; content promoting illegal activity such as copyright infringement, racism, hate, mail fraud, spam, pyramid schemes, investment opportunities or other advice not permitted under applicable law; content that is libelous, defamatory, contrary to public policy or otherwise unlawful.
Should you have any questions regarding this issue, feel free to contact me

Since adult content is also a violation of our own Terms of Service, we immediately removed the material referenced in the link they provided us (which had been available online for less than 24 hours), issued the offending user a “strike 1″ (we utilize a “3 strikes and you’re out” policy for our users) via e-mail, and responded to Tribal Fusion informing them the matter had been resolved. My follow-up e-mail:

Thank you for bringing this issue to my attention. We have removed this photo as well as another photo from this user’s account that were in violation of our terms of service as well as Tribal Fusion’s. We take issues like this very seriously and have sent the user a warning about posting future content like this.

SuperMotors.net is a site with user-generated content. Due to the volume of newly posted photos every day, it is impossible for us to monitor each and every photo, sound, and video for quality. For this reason, we rely on our members to help us police other user-generated content (pictures, sounds, videos, comments, forum posts, blog entries, etc.). We have a clause in our terms of service which specifically states that adult content is not allowed to be posted and if it is, it will be deleted and a warning will be issued to the user. If the user is found to violate this rule a second time, their account is temporarily suspended. A third time results in permanent account deletion, along with all of their posted content.

The image at the URL below was posted on 2/15/07, less than 24 hours ago. I hope that we can be reinstated and continue to be a part of the Tribal Fusion ad network as we have now resolved this issue as soon as we were made aware of it.

To our surprise, there is no leniency. My intent on this follow-up e-mail was more to issue a formal apology and to state that, “Yes, hosting adult photos is not how we do business, nor is it something we permit.” The response from Tribal Fusion:

Unfortunately we cannot have our ads running on unmonitored user-generated content. We have looked at your site more closely and have found numerous pages with this type of content. Because of this, we will be forced to deactivate your account. I have decategorized your site so you should now be showing either PSAs or the defaults you have set up in our system. Later today, I will have to deactivate your account completely. At that time you will serve error messages.

I apologize for the inconvenience.

So, in a span of just 12 hours, this revenue source has completely gone away. While Tribal Fusion isn’t our primary source of income, we are diversified enough among our own sponsorship dollars, subscribers, and Google AdSense, it still is an unplanned loss of revenue especially entering a weekend on a record-setting month for us. Revenue is still revenue, and we really take this seriously. Finding another ad network is not only time-consuming, but really painful when a company like Tribal Fusion is regarded as one of the best in the industry. How and why would we want to switch in the first place?

I did some further digging and looked other sites in the Tribal Fusion Automotive Channel. One of them is YouTube.com. I proceeded to reply to the message above explaining that even YouTube.com, backed by Google, is unable to deal with the overwhelming demand of user-generated content. They do their best by implementing a “report as inappropriate” link on every posted video to allow the community to help report offensive content. We’ve all seen the headlines that YouTube has droves and droves of copyrighted material. There currently isn’t a magic formula to policing user-generated content other than providing the necessary tools for the community to report inappropriate content and to deal with it in a timely manner (if you or your staff don’t discover it on your own).
Another site, which shall remain nameless, has one of the racy Tribal Fusion Ad Network Ads for True.com dating service running on a page where there is a link to view illegal street racing videos as seen in this screen shot:

It just seems that we are being held to unreasonable standards when other sites on the Tribal Fusion Automotive Network are obviously violating the Terms of Service. We fixed the problem on our end in a timely manner and are more than willing to work towards a better solution that will keep Tribal Fusion happy and more importantly, their clients (advertisers) happy.

I’ve asked Tribal Fusion how we can strive to meet their standards for providing sufficient moderation for on a user-generated content site. Unfortunately, our account exec is unreachable for the next two weeks, so I will be attempting to get a hold of another account exec this week to see if we can’t come to an agreement. It really seems like this is a misunderstanding. Maybe my e-mail was interpreted as “we don’t moderate our user-generated content?” Regardless, we can modify our moderating policies and procedures to meet Tribal Fusions needs. I just hope they are open to making this consideration.

As recently posted, monitoring social media is very powerful — particularly when it comes to customer support. Let’s not forget that social a is more than just blogging — it encompasses everything about online communication, including message forums. From simple to complex, message forums are a much larger animal to monitor. Here’s a few recommendatins as well as thoughts on why you should be monitoring social media:

Referring links can sometimes be the crystal ball you’ve been looking for
Setup a daily report so you receive the top 25, 50, 100 (whatever you deem necessary) referring links to your website. We do this for SuperMotors so we can see which sites have generated traffic to SuperMotors.net in the past 24 hours and why. The fact that you get a lot of traffic from referring links is good to know, but you need to evaluate the reason for this traffic. This, by far, is one of the easiest methods at determining whether or not an “internet riot” is brewing regarding your company. I cannot count the number of times this has helped us discover a discussion occuring on another forum regarding a problem with our site.

No matter what, consumers will voice their concerns where it’s convenient for them.
Your customer support phone number and/or e-mail address may be clearly listed on your website, but your customers and consumers in general do not like to wait for answers. This is another reason social media is so powerful when it comes to recommendations and support issues regarding products. What’s more convenient: Calling a customer service center with a question and sitting on hold? E-mailing a customer service center and waiting for feedback? Or searching a website full of consumers who have already encountered the problem or question you have? I’ll search the web first every time before contacting customer service. It’s instantaneous and it’s convenient. Spending 5 minutes researching with Google is often times much more effective than spending 5 minutes navigating through touch-tone phone menus and speaking to a first-tier customer representative.

Find the most popular sites sending traffic to your site and monitor them on a daily basis
My morning routine consists of checking e-mail, reading RSS feeds, and hitting the top 5 discussion forums that drive the most traffic to SuperMotors on a consistent, daily basis. Register accounts on these sites and be available if discussions start up about a problem with your site or business. Use the search feature: search for company name, domain name, mispellings of your company name, abbreviations of your company name — anything to find topics of discussion on your business. This can be extremely effective and will save you from losing customers that otherwise would have gone to a competitive service. Most days, you won’t find anything, and it takes 5-10 minutes of your morning. Other days, you’ll spend quite a bit of time defusing touchy situations regarding poor performance of your service. Suck it up and be honest with your customers, they’ll appreciate it…and they’ll stick with you.

Search blogs, del.icio.us, digg, bloglines, technorati, etc.
Again, doing your due diligence will pay off. You need to know what people are saying about your business. Start with these resources (in no particular order):

• http://blogsearch.google.com/
• http://www.bloglines.com/
• http://www.technorati.com/
• http://www.digg.com/
• http://del.icio.us/

If that’s overwhelming, try monitoring RSS feeds of search results from the above URLs (each of them offers RSS feeds for search queries — except del.icio.us).

Professional social media monitoring & measurement services
I’ll be test-driving BuzzLogic over the next few months as they iron out the kinks in their beta (and will be reporting any interesting findings). You may be interested in a more comprehensive list found here.

Chalk up another well-educated company (PEER 1 Dedicated Hosting) doing their part in monitoring blogs for feedback on their products and service (this makes company #3 to contact me as a result of a blog post in the last few weeks). This morning, I received a call from a sales manager from Peer 1 in response to this post. Again, I must applaud the blogging medium for its power as well as companies who recognize the significance and impact of consumers and customers doing the blogging.

After assuring me that this was not the desired result for my initial experience with them, I also received a call from the rep who I have been working with as we pursue hosting for SuperMotors.net. Since clearing the air, I have received two customer references from PEER 1 (which is really all we’re waiting for to help validate their service — everything else looks great and we anticipate signing a managed hosting contract in the next 2-3 weeks).

I strongly recommend investigating companies that measure social media for your business. I’ll be giving BuzzLogic a shot in the coming months as they perfect their beta. My little blog has found its way to 3 vendors I do business with. Just imagine how many of your consumers and customers could be saying something about your company on their blogs. My whole perception of Omniture, Clickshift, and Peer 1 has drastically improved as a result — and it very easily could have lead me to another vendor without them reaching out to me.