Today not a day goes by without another major brand showing up on social media services in an attempt to engage their customer base online. For every company that does this well, there is at least one that blunders in and makes a mess of things. If you are thinking about using social media for your company, you should have an organized plan.
The most important thing you can do before engaging in the conversation is to listen. You don’t want to be like that person at a party who overeagerly attempts to talk to everyone and instead alienates people. You should only join in when you know what people are talking about. There are many free tools to help you listen to the online conversation.
If you don’t yet have a Gmail account, get one. It is free and full of useful tools. Once you have logged in to your account, go to Google Reader. This is a free RSS reader. You will use it to track mentions of your brand.
Open a new tab and go to Google Blogsearch. Here you need to type in the keywords you want to track (for example, your company’s name, your product, your competitors, whatever you should be paying attention to). At the bottom of your search results page you will see subscription links. Copy these links and paste them into the Add Subscription field back in Google Reader. This will make sure that every time Google finds the search term in a blog, it will display this blog post in your reader. Read these carefully.
This should just be the first step. You will want to add Technorati, Twitter Search and others searches to ensure you are hearing everything about your brand or product. Once you understand what is being said, and by whom, you can get your company ready to join the conversation.