Gathering Business Intelligence: Identifying Excatly What Are People Saying About Us and Our Rivals

I believe more than ever before our clients, customers, members, prospects and stakeholders in general have more o say than ever before and importantly, the means to be heard more than they have ever had before.

For this reason it is imperative that each business has a definitive strategy and plans to carry out thorough and ongoing market analysis to consistently be aware of what is being said about our business and brands as well as our key competitors and their products.

As is the case with anything in marketing, a business can spend literally thousands of dollars each month to gain this information. The problem of course is that many businesses don't have this type of money to spend and therefore need to be make sure that they are using the more cost effective options to gain this intelligence.

There are many tools that fit this bill but 3 that I'd like to discuss here today that I believe all businesses should set up are as follows:

1. Google alerts: www.Google.com.au/alerts
This Google product allows you to monitor the web and receive notifications based on any key word that you input into the search field.  It could be your business name, your brand name, the name of key executives or employees.  I'm also pleased to say that like most everything else Google does, it's free to use and highly effective.

2. Hyperalerts: www.hyperalerts.no
This is an alert system that provides email notifications on any terms highlighted within the Twitter and Facebook platforms. It is an equally effective tool and is also free and simple to use like Google Alerts.

3. Mention:  https://en.mention.net
The third option is also a media monitoring application that can be use to used to track conversation around specific names and terms. It has a free option of one user, 250 mentions and 2 alerts, however they also have a $7, $20 and $65 a month packages that basically give you greater numbers of each data type per month.

Using these types of tools you will be well placed to know what is being said about you and others. Clearly this type of insight is no longer a luxury to have but rather a must have that will drive future planning and decision making for any business. So hopefully if you don't already have them you can go out and investigate these and other media monitoring tools for your business.

And until next time, good luck and good marketing.
Regards,
Daniele.