radar

You are running your own bed & breakfast? A little hotel? A tour company? You are the communication director of an important hotel chain?

You probably care about customer satisfaction. If so, I’m sure that you read travel magazines and newspapers searching for reviews and comments about your company. Who’s saying what will help you fix what goes wrong and focus on what makes your company what you want it to be.

You already know that Internet is the largest source of information on earth. People already write about your company. Do you know what they are saying? On what sites could they be talking about you? How can you track this information? What should you do with it?

Where do people talk about the company?
- Blogs
- Forums
- Hotel/Tour/etc. reviews sites
- Travel websites (Wikitravel, Road66)
- Travel agencies website

How can I find people talking about the company?
- When people make links to your website, Google knows it (most of the time). You just have to ask Google by searching for

link:http://www.yourwebsite.com

- Technorati. Technorati helps you tracking the content you want in the blogosphere. Search for your company name, you’ll have an idea of who’s talking about you via blogs. Make sure to add the RSS feed of this search to your aggregator.

- Google News. Google news gathers news from 4500 different “official” sources. Just like technorati, you can search for your company and add the RSS feed to your aggregator.

- Website stats. With your own stats you could track who’s refering to your website. You’ll get almost the same results as with “link:” on Google.

With these 4 easy tricks, you will have a good overview of who said what. By subscribing to strategical RSS feeds, it will keep you up to date.

What should you do with this information?
- Understand what people dislike and improve your services/products consequently.
- Add comments on blog posts and answers on forums when people are expressing their disappointment about your services/products or when the info they said is wrong.
- Take the time to thank those who “support” you and give you free publicity.

Simple and effective.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS