Five Minute Monitoring part 1: How Your Small Business Can Keep Tabs on Buzz

Knowing what people are thinking...and saying...about your store is important. Today, we're getting started with a series of posts of quick and easy ways for you to monitor what people are saying: both in person and on the Internet. We recommend you take five minutes per day to learn about our customers. Our first 5 Minute Monitoring hint is to sign up for Google Alerts. You are probably familiar with Google...you may use it to search the web on a regular basis. Google has a great tool that you can quickly set up to let you know what people on the Internet are saying about your business. This is Google Alerts. To set it up: 1.You'll need to have a google account. All you need is an email address and a password. Sign up for this at the Google homepage: www. google.com . CLick on the 'sign in' in the upper right hand corner to set up your account. 2. Once your account is set up, go to http://www.google.com/alerts?hl=en 3. Fill in the box that says "Create Your Google Alert". The search terms you want to enter can be simply the name of your store. You can set up separate google alerts for names of competitors, or for your industry (such as "Floral Shop" or "Restaurant"...but these are going to generate a lot of information). 4. For "type", the default setting is 'comprehensive', which means that Google will search blogs, news sites, videos (such as on YouTube), and more. This is a good choice to get a lot of information; to get less information, select 'news' or 'blogs' 5. When Google Alerts finds information, it will send it to you via email. In the 'how often' box, you can select whether you want information as soon as Google finds it, or delivered once a day, or delivered once a week. We recommend you start with having it delivered once a day; you can always revise it to get it more quickly or more slowly later on. Remember, you can set up as many Google Alerts as you want. This is probably the simplest way to keep up with buzz!

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"word of mouth spread offline is more positive and more likely to be interpreted as credible than wom spread online, according to a recent research study from womma member company the keller fay group. fifty-nine percent of those surveyed indicted they found wom transmitted face-to-face and on the phone was "highly" credible, versus 49% for online wom. the study also found that 66% of face-to-face wom communication was "mostly positive" versus 57% of the impressions on blogs and chat rooms. offline wom was also found to be 7% more likely to lead to purchase intent, according to the research." marsha t., advertising agency, baton rouge. la.

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