In part one of this series, I gave recent examples of when we respond to bloggers when they blog about Vancity. In this part, I want to talk about how to monitor the conversation so you can find those opportunities to respond.

The most basic tool – Google Alerts.
I have just changed the way I monitor the health of the words ‘vancity’ and ‘azaroff’. I have had Google Alerts set up for a couple of years now, so whenever a blog post, news article or web page is published that mentions ‘vancity‘ or ‘azaroff‘ I am alerted by email as it happens.

This helps me keep up with the conversation as it happens about my company or about me personally. Most of what is written is totally ignorable, and most often the post is not even about us. Vancity is a slang term for Vancouver (“Just landed in Vancity, ready for some skiing“), and is also the name of an art-house theatre in town (“Waiting in line to see the sci-fi, chop-socky, Korean anime slasher pic sequel at the Vancity Theatre“). But occasionally I hit a post worthy of a response.

Why should you monitor?
Truth be told, being the first to know puts you in a particularly good position within your company. You are the one with knowledge, and can raise issues. For an organization like an FI where a lot of people don’t get how this works, it almost makes you a magician. Use it! Nothing gets people excited like an extreme blog post, whether positive or negative.

How to monitor.
Monitoring what people say about Vancity is taking more and more time. I have my Google Alerts set, as I described. I also used to monitor Technorati, but stopped at some point because it just wasn’t top of mind. And I have found some good stuff using Twitter Search, but these were manual and I just don’t do it that often.

I was having lunch with my friend Gregory Krysa (“All social media is inherently authentic.“) recently, my equivalent at Aritzia, and he told me what he’s doing to monitor his brand’s online reputation. This is so simple, I almost hesitate posting it in case you are all already doing this and I’m the last one to the party. But here goes…

Using RSS as the aggregator.
So this is the stupid-easy part. I already use Google Reader daily to keep up with all of you guys and your blogs. Well Gregory simply said that all of these services have an RSS feed.

I mean duh!

So if you go to Google Blog Search and look up your company (I’ll use “credit unions” as a proxy) and sort by date, you can see all mentions of your company in the blogosphere starting with the most recent. This page has an RSS feed. You can see it if you use a browser that automatically discovers feeds, or you can see it in the left-hand column of the results page.

Google Alerts also allows you to subscribe via Google Reader instead of email. Google Alerts let you do a comprehensive search so you can get sent news, websites and blog posts. Google Blog Search allows you to do an advanced search, so I can remove words like “theatre” so I skip posts about what’s playing at the Vancity Theatre. Find the one that works best for your needs and add it to your preferred RSS reader (if you don’t yet use an RSS aggregator, I’m not sure I can help you).

Beyond Google.
Technorati also has RSS feeds included in their search. Look up your company in Technorati and then see that there’s a little RSS icon at the top-right of the centre column of the results page. For some reason, Google Reader was finicky with this, and it took a few tries, but it worked.

Now do the same thing in Twitter Search. In the right-hand column, there’s a link to the RSS feed to this result. Voila!

Now check Google Reader.
So then I created a folder within Google Reader called “vancity”, and put all these feeds in there, along with the feeds from our main website and from ChangeEverything.ca.

It isn’t perfect.
I haven’t found a way to check Facebook. Facebook is a closed community, and there aren’t RSS feeds. If your needs become this sophisticated, perhaps it’s time to invest in a blog monitoring service who can add this dimension to your search. If you use one, please leave a comment and let me know which one you use and whether or not you are satisfied. I imagine we at Vancity are ages away from needing that.

I hope this was useful as a practical way to start understanding the word of mouth that is happening online about you or your organization. Let me know if you’re already doing this, or have better methods. I have just set this up, and it’s already been phenomenal.

I look forward to your comments…