Monitoring your Online Presence

Right now I am writing an online course on Internet Risk. One of the topics focuses on how to monitor your online reputation. They are lots of tools out there, free and for a fee. Let’s explore some of them.If you did nothing else with social media, monitoring what people are saying about you, your company, your brand, your neighborhood, and your industry is very important.

Sales associates who are in our monthly coaching program constantly speak about wanting to know what people in their community are thinking – they create polls, do interviews, study their website analytics, where all the time there are other simple tools to help them in this task.

Google or Yahoo Alerts are a great place to start. Set up alerts based on your companies name, principals names, community, town, etc. These alerts will send you an email every time one of your search words is found by the search engines.

http://www.google.com/alerts

http://alerts.yahoo.com/

The phenomen of Twitter allows us to search any topic and find out who is chatting about it. Open up a web browser and find Twitter Search at http://search.twitter.com. This is great place to find people to follow as well.

One of the keys to managing your reputation is to know where your name appears and what people are saying about you. Some great sites to help you monitor more of your social media reputation are:

SocialMention.com

Addictomatic.com

Spezify.com

Steprep.com

Also check out the Zoom Info site located at http://www.zoominfo.com. this is site that helps you find specific people in an organization a little easier than using LinkedIn or a Google Search. Search for yourself and make sure you set up a up to date profile.

Customer Focus Calculator

As we all start “getting the power” of our Social Media reputation, it is even more important for us to find tools to help us see how we are doing. I speak alot about analytics, tools that help you measure how your sites are doing in relation to:

• Clicks
• Where people are coming from
• How long they stay
• What key words drive them there.

A student in a recent class in Oklahoma, from the Churchill Brown company told me about the We We Calculator. Put in your website or blog URL and they can rate how much you focus on the consumer and not yourself.

Try it here: The Consumer Influence your Website has on the http://www.futurenowinc.com/ website.

From the Mouths of Babes – The Elevator Speech

Recently eating lunch with Linda Wilson, a REALTOR in Rochester  New York and we were discussing Elevator Speeches and how they can be effective in our real estate business.

An elevator speech is an elevator pitch is an overview of an idea for a product, service, or project. The name reflects the fact that an elevator pitch should be possible to deliver in the time span of an elevator ride, meaning in a maximum of 30 seconds and in 130 words or fewer. For more go to Wikipedia’s Definition of Elevator Speech.

She told me a great story. She is mentoring a eight year old girl, who she has known since she is a little baby. Of course she knows about Linda’s real estate business and actually understands some of the nuances of the business.

According the Linda, this young girl was playing at a friends house and the mom mentioned that they were thinking of moving. Immediately, Linda’s protege told her about her “Aunt Linda” and how she markets homes and she should make sure their home gets sold with a professional REALTOR.

Linda did sign the listing and sold it within four days. Teach your elevator speech to everyone in your life. You never know when they will run into someone who needs your expertise.