On Mad Men, the ad execs of the 1960s rely on focus groups and psychologists to understand their clients’ customers. Today, we have Twitter, Facebook and blogs.
Instead of employing tricks and misdirection to learn what people really think about a product or a brand, we’re now empowered to share our opinions with anyone who’ll listen, 24 hours a day. But this generational shift from privacy to oversharing has created a whole new problem: we now offer too much input, rather than too little.
Thankfully, the web is loaded with tools to help you understand what your customers (and your competition, and complete strangers) are talking about.
- Wondering what’s on people’s minds? Start with Google Trends, and then dissect Twitter’s Trending Topics.
- Concerned about public sentiment? Try any of these 25 social media tools for tracking online conversations.
- Have questions? Ask your customers directly with these online survey tools.
- Managing multiple campaigns? Keep track of them with rich metrics analysis from Radian6 or Scout Labs.
As you can see, there’s no shortage of ways to listen to your customers. And now you can analyze what they say vs. what they really mean, all from the comfort of your laptop.
Of course, what you actually do with all that information is another story entirely — but at least you’ll never be in the dark again about what your customers really think.
Overwhelmed? We can help! Connect with us on Twitter or Facebook!
Thanks for the Radian6 mention! We do love to share our opinions about stuff, don’t we? It’s been interesting to see how things have evolved to be able to capture all of this data. I’m sure that there will be much more evolution in the future, and I, for one, am the most excited about seeing how companies use all of this information!
Katie
Community Manager | Radian6
@misskatiemo
Another monitoring and analytics tool your clients may want to take a look at is Sysomos. You can check us out for yourself @ http://sysomos.com or feel free to contact me.
Cheers,
Sheldon, community manager for Sysomos
[...] way to find out is by tracking what people are saying about your brand across all social media channels. Do your customers frequently tweet about how good your product [...]
[...] Social media makes it so easy to track and respond to customer complaints — or to solicit customer feedback on everything from their in-store experiences to their wish lists to their discussions about your company’s culture — that you no longer have an excuse for not knowing what your customers really think of you… and of your competition. [...]