Finding out if people are talking about you is quite difficult in the offline world, but almost effortless online. Rather than having to conduct real-world surveys and interviews, in the digital world you can simply ‘listen’ to the conversation happening about you.
Keywords – the foundation to categorising and indexing the web – make it simple to track conversations taking place online. Customers don’t always use channels designated by a company to talk about that organisation, but the good news is that the Internet makes it easy for a company to identify and use the channels that customers have selected.
Online tools allow a company to track mentions of itself, its staff, its products, its industry and its competitors – or anything else that is relevant. This is called online monitoring or online listening – you are simply using digital tools to find and tap in to existing conversations. The tool then gathers and collates all the mentions it finds, so that you can analyse the data for insights.
Typically, searches include the following main focus areas:
• Company
• Brand name
• Key products
• Key personnel (names, job titles, etc.)
• Key campaigns and activities
• Industry
• Conferences
• Patents
• News
• Competitors
• Brand names
• Product launches
• Website updates
• Job vacancies
• Key people
There are four different types of searches you can perform to track relevant brand keywords. Each modifies the specific type of data collected and aims to improve the quality and depth of the data you gather.
The four operators are:
• Broad match– e.g. Apple Computers. This is when any of or all words must be found in the mention.
• Direct match– e.g. “Apple Computers”. This is denoted by quotation marks and dictates that the tool should find mentions only where the phrase appears complete and in order in the content.
• Inclusive match– e.g. Apple +computers. This is denoted by a plus sign directly before a word or phrase. This will direct the tool to search for any mention that contains both Apple AND computers, although not necessarily in that order.
• Exclusive match– e.g. Apple –fruit. This is denoted by a minus sign directly before a word or phrase. This will instruct the tool to include only mentions that contain the first word or phrase but not when the second word is also in the same mention.
Combinations of these four types of searches (operators) can be used to improve accuracy.
• For example: “Apple Computers” +”steve jobs” –fruit.
Applying this theory to the groupings above, some keywords used for Apple might be:
Company
• “Apple computers”
• “www.apple.com”
• Apple +Macbook, “iPod nano”, “Macbook Air”, “iTunes” +music –radio
• “Steve Jobs”
Industry
• “Consumer Electronics Show” +“Las Vegas”
• “CEBIT”
Competitors
• Microsoft
• www.microsoft.com
It is also important to track common misspellings, all related companies and all related websites.
Tracking the names of people key to a company can highlight potential brand attacks, or can demonstrate new areas of outreach for a company.
Brand names, employee names, product names and even competitor names are not unique. To save yourself from monitoring too much, identify keywords that will indicate that a post has nothing to do with your company, and exclude those in your searches.
For example, “apple” could refer to a consumer electronics company, or it could appear in a post about the health benefits of fruit. Finding keywords that will indicate context can help to save time. So, you could exclusive-match words such as “fruit”, “tasty” and “granny smith”.
