Five Minute Monitoring part 4: How Your Small Business Can Keep Tabs on Buzz

Knowing what people are thinking...and saying...about your store is important. We recommend you take five minutes per day to learn about our customers. The website Topix is a news community that provides you information on the to p news topics of the day. It monitors breaking news from thousands of news sites, and aggregates that information to the most important stories of the moment. It also allows people to comment on the stories, which provides information that may be important to your business. What might be useful to you is the 'local' feature which allows you to access the latest news from your city or zip code. Enter your city name or zip code, and you'll get a list of the top stories and links to comments about the stories. Today, for example, I looked at the top news stories for Eugene, Oregon. I found a review of a small restaurant/bar in my neighborhood along with comments on what people liked (food) and disliked (parking) about the venue. This could help a small business know what to promote (good parking, for example). On the topix site, users also ask questions about where to find various things in the local area. You could give a quick answer (if you know the answer) and mention the name of your store. It's a quick and easy way to promote your store and to build your image as an expert.

Bloglites

Retailer Stories

Action Guides

Book Excerpts

Member Comments

"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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