Corporate web reputation: 7 reasons why you can’t help but monitor who is talking about you online

Social listening and web reputation: why listening to the network helps you keep your reputation high?

In the previous articles, you learned what network listening is and how it can help you intercept people’s personal and collective perceptions.

I guess at this point you’re wondering, “But in practice, what do I need it for?”

Good question, which is precisely why we are now going to find out what are the top 7 reasons why listening to the web is essential for all businesses, especially those whose consumers are most influenced by the web-for better or worse.

We’re going to take a nice journey to discover what risks you can avoid with market research based on listening to the Web… And what opportunities you may be able to take advantage of (that right now your competition doesn’t even know are possible).

You will see that these reasons are not just about marketing, as most people think. Listening is not only useful for social media managers or those who have to manage reputation crises-it is a strategic tool for your business on many levels.

You need it to hedge against risk, sure, and to understand your customers’ perceptions so you can deliver the right messages and avoid throwing your marketing dollars away.

But you also need it for choices regarding which products to launch, how to outperform the competition, and how to figure out if you are going in the right direction.

And now stop, gather your ideas and put them down in writing but hand as we go through these 7 points. That way by the end of the reading you will already have a set of guidelines and guidance on what you can start doing from tomorrow.

Here, then, is why you should constantly monitor who is talking about you online.

1. Avoid reputational crises

The first and most important reason for a company to listen to the network is just that: to shelter itself from reputational crises in its industry and company.

Know that a single news story that comes out on a particularly prominent blog can become the spark that leads a large number of consumers to become interested in the topic… And to change their consumption habits in the very short term!

For example, a few years ago a list of potentially carcinogenic products to AVOID, accused of containing heavy metals, began circulating online, including Pavesi Ringo, Motta Pandoro, and Sanson croissant.

Again, I discovered this while, completely unaware, I was eating a packet of Ringo on my coffee break. “But don’t you know they are carcinogenic???” a colleague attacked me.

Stung in pride, I did some research on the Web, actually discovering considerable buzz on the subject and numerous lists of “dangerous” foods in which poor Ringo was always included.

So I looked for the source of it all–and you won’t be surprised to learn that it all began with “a study” conducted by two doctors from Modena, then brought to the fore by one of Italy’s most prominent blogs years later.

In short, the two scientists advanced the hypothesis that products made in factories near the waste-to-energy plants might have traces of heavy metals.

They did sample analyses of commonly used products and discovered nanometer traces of metal particles in some of them (the authors themselves admitted that it might not have been a constant in all products).

Years later, the famous blog, in order to create a “scandal,” took up the research and totally misrepresented the results of the analysis, bringing out an article titled “Walking Hardware.”

This research was not investigated further by anyone else, and indeed companies such as Granarolo commissioned the same doctors to conduct further tests that were found to be negative.

But by then the damage was done: one article was enough to brand as “carcinogenic” a number of Italian food companies that at least in this case had done NOTHING.

Do you understand? Even today if you look up the names of these companies, you find information about why they should be boycotted…even today there are a few scattered consumers who, just in case, at vending machines avoid choosing their products.

In short, regardless of the companies’ actual or alleged guilt, the risk is obvious: at any moment, any scandal or “study” can come out and suddenly target your company.

Predicting it is impossible, but if you don’t notice it right away and do something about it in time, curbing the problem and refuting the news or taking countermeasures before it spreads like wildfire, everything you do afterward won’t do much good .

By now people will have the flea in their ear and your good name will be besmirched forever!

“Those who complain and protest are the canary in the coal mine. It is the early warning system for your business.”

Jay Baer

2. Avoid giving your money away to web giants

Here we come to the second reason why listening to the network is critically important, and this time it concerns your marketing activities.

I imagine that your company has a digital presence and invests thousands-if not millions-each year in marketing activities on social networks, such as Facebook and Instagram, and on search engines such as Google.

Well, you do very well! But if you want every penny spent on the web to turn into concrete results for your business, do you know what the first requirement is?

Know perfectly the target customers you are addressing. Being able to find out who they are, what makes them jump out of their chairs, and what they want is what makes the difference today between a successful campaign and a disastrous one in which the only ones to gain are the social networks.

Market analysis based on listening to the network is exactly what is needed to maximize the ROI of your marketing campaigns, because it is critical to:

• Know your target audience
• Sending the right message to the right people.
• Monitor results and course correct (if necessary)

Speaking of correction: the moment you launch a campaign you also just set up a system to monitor how your visibility changes and to be alerted in case of negative events… and you’ll sleep soundly!

Read also: Web Reputation Analysis: steps to study who is talking about you online and how

3. Sell more (and give super powers to your customer service)

That’s right, sell. Web conversations and messages are not just a risk or a cue to improve your marketing. They are also an invaluable resource for interacting with your customers, building relationships, solving their problems, and ultimately selling more!

On the Web, however, it’s not enough to just respond: if you want to turn an opportunity into a sale, you have to be lightning fast.

Today everything is faster, even interactions with customers, and if you want to seize opportunities you have to be able to intercept them at the exact moment they are making a purchasing decision, or solve a problem for them at the moment they make it manifest.

I’ll tell you more: when a person writes a post online, with a question aimed directly at a brand or to complain/ask something, if you want to turn this opportunity into a sale, you must respond WITHIN 5 MINUTES!

Look at this chart below: as you can see, the chance of turning a contact into a customer depends enormously on how fast you are.

If you respond within 6 minutes it is more difficult, if you let an hour pass by now the opportunity has most likely waned-or if it was a negative message, thousands of people have already seen it and the damage is now done.

So the watchword is responsiveness, even more so than in the case of traditional social customer care (where the only one who knows if you have a hundred customers waiting at the switchboard is you, not the whole world)!

In short, the bottom line is this: invest in listening to the network, have your customer care teams have the data available, and you will win a lot of games.

4. Never make a decision in the dark again.

Listening to the network is the key to gathering an enormous amount of information that can be useful to you at different levels of your company in making business decisions. It saves you from having to throw away millions and helps you seize opportunities you couldn’t see before.

Here, below, are the major opportunities that give you market research informed by social listening:

• Privileged access to the largest database ever: web and social media
• Launch the right product at the right time
• Discover the best-in-class products to focus on (and which ones to divest from)
• You can get a leg up on a new market

As you can see, listening to the network is not only useful for marketers, but also for those who have to make decisions about the future of their companies while keeping a close eye on what is happening in the marketplace.

And speaking of keeping my eyes open, now comes one of my favorite topics….

5. You are always one move ahead of the competition

Here we are, thecompetitive analysis.

It is a topic that affects everyone, companies of all sizes and industries, because no one can say they have no competition. Not even the newest product or the biggest monopolist, because consumers will always have an alternative to meet their needs.

Competitors are all players on the same board.

If something happens to one of them, or if one of them makes an unexpected move, the others are affected positively or negatively.

For this reason, ever new methods have always been devised to spy on competitors.

The earliest evidence of espionage is found as far back as 4,000 B.C., when the Sumerians had concocted methods to keep tabs on the moves of neighboring city states, for fear that they would make trade moves that would jeopardize their interests.

And of course the great strategist Sun Tsu talks about spying on opponents in his very famous “The Art of War.”

“Know the enemy as you know yourself” Sun Tsu

In short, “knowing the enemy” has always been a key point in a strategist’s success.

The reason is obvious: because the only way to be one move ahead of competitors is to know what pawns they are moving and what results they are getting. Not knowing is like playing chess blindfolded

How can you decide what move to make if you don’t know how your opponents are lined up and can’t even guess their strategy?

Seeing what they are doing and what results they are getting is a way to test others’ “butts,” avoiding making the same mistakes yourself if something doesn’t work, and taking cues from the winning ideas to make them even better!

In addition, knowing exactly what others are doing allows you to react in real time by increasing the effectiveness of your actions.

The more information you have about what is going on around you and the more accurate it is, the better you can move.

Yet, I’ll let you in on a secret: very few companies really know what their competition is doing. The vast majority barely know WHO their nearest competitors are, let alone know if they are launching products, have innovative distribution strategies, or are launching successful marketing campaigns.

How come? Not because it is their fault or because they are not good people, on the contrary! The reason is that there is no material time to take care of everything, and keeping an eye on the competition requires commitment.

But here again comes network listening to get us out of trouble! That’s right, because it allows us to discover and collect a great deal of information automatically, that is, without anyone having to waste hours and hours combing through websites and reporting data.

The information we can get from listening to the network first of all makes us understand who are the companies and realities we are competing against, to finally bring into focus who are our opponents around the chessboard.

With the market becoming more and more global, our competitors are no longer the usual known ones you’ve been dealing with forever, but new forces are being born every day all over the world, and we need a method to help us discover them!

After helping us identify who we are competing against, listening to the network guides us in comparing the results of each competitor: who has more visibility? Who is most talked about?

By putting the importance of each actor into perspective, it also helps us bring to light their business and marketing strategies, and focus on their strengths and weaknesses.

Read also: The 4 steps to using network listening software

6. You always know what’s going on in your industry

New innovations and trends emerge every day, some very important that will be world-changing, others more impromptu that will remain mere curiosities.

Some of them will come out in all the newspapers and be on everyone’s lips, while others will remain more hidden, perhaps because they were born in a part of the world too far away from us.

Ask yourself sincerely: do you have a way to track this? Aside from reading the occasional newspaper, can you say that you are always up-to-date on what innovations, startups, and currents of thought are influencing your industry?

If the answer is no or partially no, don’t worry: most other companies are in the same boat as you. As I also told you when I mentioned the competition, it’s not your fault: there simply isn’t the material time to be on top of everything.

Today life is hectic enough as it is, it is not possible to spend even time on things that do not immediately impact your daily actions and that you did not even know about!

They do, however, have an important impact in the long run, and now that you are reading this article you also know that they exist and that it is more than possible to track and monitor them… so from now on you will have no more excuses 🙂

There is a lot of talk about reputation crises, competition and strategies, but there is very little about innovations and trends in the industry, and especially about how you can keep on top of them. Why? Because they are aspects with less sharp boundaries and that are more difficult to study…if you don’t have the right tools and methods!

7. Listening you evaluate the results 360°.

Evaluation of results is a very important point. I put it last, but it might as well be at the beginning of the article.

Because you can make all the marketing campaigns you want, you can make very risky decisions based on very accurate information… but if you don’t evaluate the results, you’re back to square one.

You don’t know if it worked and how, you don’t see where you should improve, and you don’t understand a figment of how you’re doing compared to the past.

If you rely on listening to the network instead, you understand:

• How much visibility are you “gaining”
• You evaluate the results of a campaign (even if you don’t have an analyst)
• If testimonials and influencers are really worth the expense

So here is where listening to the net once again proves to be a very powerful weapon to save you money and make the best decisions!

In conclusion

By now I think you fully understand the benefits that listening to the network can bring you for the growth and security of your business, what do you say?

So let’s cut to the chase!

Feel free to write to us for more information regarding social listening and to book a consultation! We are here to support you in growing your business.