Person One: “Hey did you hear that Day Farms Greenhouse is running a sale on hanging baskets this week?”
Person Two: “Yeah, but I heard it was just on begonia baskets.”
Day Farms Greenhouse employee: “Actually this week we are doing 10% off of ALL hanging baskets.”
I know you’re probably thinking that’s not a very good way to open a post, and you’re probably right. However it is the best way to illustrate a problem that we are facing at every level of the industry. There are people out there talking about our businesses, but unlike the above situation, there is often no one listening to the conversations and therefore no one there to give the people the facts about the situation.
Today I want to take a look at some simple strategies that you can use to find these conversations and join them if need be. These strategies will give you a basic understanding of how much content consumers put on the internet. Some of it is probably truthful albeit some of it is probably skewed. I will also note that the strategies I talk about today are much simpler than many of the things I have talked about in this blog thus far.
The first thing to do when you want to find out what people are saying about your business is to find the actual conversations. This is the rather easy part. Have you heard of Google? Yep that’s the big tool for today. However, it’s not as simple as typing in the name of your business and seeing what pops up (although that is undoubtedly the first thing you should do). If you are really trying to gain a sense of what people are saying about your business or the products and services you offer, you have to dig a little deeper. You have to think about possible things people could be saying. When there is a conversation or debate human emotions are always brought into the mix. Therefore if I was looking for conversations about a certain variety of plant “plant x”, I would search for things like “plant x love” or “plant x hate”. These two searches alone can yield you interesting results. This strategy can yield a lot of results depending on the amount of adjectives and verbs you search with your business or product.
Another great way to search the web to find out what people are saying about your business or product is to search for your business or product with the word forum added to the search. People use a wide variety of forums to discuss an even wider variety of topics. Also people generally think forums are a consumer only thing so they feel free to express themselves in any way they see fit.
After performing both of the previous types of searches, I then recommend that you type in your business or product along with review. This will bring up an array of sites that allow for customer ratings and reviews and will give you a general feeling of how people view your company. It is also a good method to compare yourself to your competitors and evaluate what you are doing.
These are just some very simple tips and tricks at finding out what people are saying about your business or product. Google really is a great tool in this sense because without shelling out any money you can find out a lot of basic information for free. You just have to know what to type into that search bar.
I will admit that today’s post is quite basic, but sometimes it’s easy for a business to overlook the little things like this. I will also say that there are plenty of companies out there that for the right price will compile all of this data for you and probably dig even a little bit deeper.
Next time we will continue our discussion about finding these conversations. I will take a look at finding conversations on Social Media sites. I will also touch a little bit on how to enter into these conversations once you have found them. This is often the trickiest part of the situation.
Sometimes the simplest questions can provide the biggest answers.
I can always be reached at mday55@gmail.com for questions, comments, or suggestions. Also please follow me on Twitter if you are interested in this kind of stuff @mday55. You can find me on Linked In too! http://www.linkedin.com/pub/mason-day/20/9aa/233?trk=shareTw .
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