AeronTV for Business Owners:

Episode 3 - Who hates you, who loves
you and why?

There are still a lot of people who think that by not
having an online presence they prevent tricky
situations from arising.

Hi and welcome to AeronTV, a show dedicated to business owners. My name is Martin and I am here to share with you the things I learned the hard way when starting and running my own business. Today I want to show you how to find out:

Who hates you, who loves you and why?

Last week, I had an interesting conversation with one of my friends about competition in the business world and social media. We came to the conclusion that there are still a lot of people who think that by not having an online presence they prevent tricky situations from arising.

When I say tricky situations, I mean hassles such as complaining customers, annoying competitors and loads of spam and hate mail that clogs up your inbox on a daily basis. It is a fact that when you are good and have a big business with lots of customers, you will have enemies. This is normal - people will resent and be jealous of your success and, with so many orders to handle, you will eventually make mistakes.

There is one thing every business owner should bear in mind though: just because you are not part of the conversation, it doesn't mean that people aren't talking about you. Better yet, people are more likely to lie about you if they know you are not listening. Oh, and the best way to show that you are listening is to respond and engage in the conversation about your business and your products.

There really is no reason not to follow the conversation that others are having about you, other than laziness. Online conversations are free, take only a few minutes a day, and are dead easy. There are many tools available: some of them are highly specialized, like BoardReader, which tracks bulletin boards all over the internet, whereas others are more general yet very accurate solutions, like Socialmention or Samepoint.

So, here is a short guide demonstrating how to use these search engines to find conversations about your own business. It goes without saying that you can use this to find what people think about your competition as well.

Let's start with Addict-o-matic. All you have to do here is type your keyword into the big search input field. Now, let's select Careerscoach, which specializes in high quality coaching here in Dublin.

Here we go - in a split second, a pleasant dashboard appears and we can see what is said online about our friend Greg. We can see updates from Twitter, Friendfeed, Google Blog Search, as well as videos on YouTube and more. We can click on the tab 'Available Sources' to select what networks we want to track. It's that simple! To make it easier for yourself, you can bookmark this page, so next time you don't even need to type anything to see all the results.

That's Addict-o-matic - you can get the link from the show notes. Now, let's move on to Samepoint. It certainly isn't as pretty as Addict-o-matic, but it's more functional and accurate. Same story here - just type in the company name, your competitor, or your product into the search field and in a short moment you can see all the conversations.

It covers a lot of networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and more. You can click on the little link called "Search this source" underneath each entry to dig deeper and find more information. Again, it is very simple to use, and it only takes a few seconds to get all the results and see what's happening and who's talking.

The last one for today is Socialmention. This one is my favorite, for several reasons. Firstly, I like it when sites are attractive, indicating that care is put into their construction. Socialmention looks great and is very accurate at the same time. In addition to showing all the conversations, it also shows some interesting metrics like top keywords and top users participating in conversations. It also shows the PostRank for blog posts and provides an RSS feed, an Excel spreadsheet of results and free email alerts! What more can you ask for?

If this is not enough for you, you can have a look at other solutions, such as HowSociable.com and Keotag.com, which are also free. If you have a budget for this, you also have the opportunity of investing in tools like ViralHeat.com, Trackur.com, UberVu.com, or ScoutLabs.com, which are quite expensive but loved and frequented by big brands.

No matter what tools you use, the point is to participate or at least monitor what is being said about your business online. Maybe there are things said that you should not ignore. Maybe your customers want something that you can easily provide, and by monitoring the online conversations you can become aware of and respond to these desires, cashing in on the opportunity. Whatever the reason, have a look and improve your business using the feedback from these free tools.

That's all for today. Thank you for watching and, as always, I appreciate your comments, suggestions and opinions. Don't forget to share this video with your friends, using the links below.