Personal Branding – Listen & monitor

This ninth and last episode of the Personal Branding series will allow you to measure the results of all your efforts, and from there, to Lather, Rinse, Repeat… Because, let’s be honest, that’s what marketing today is all about: strategy, publishing, promoting, measuring… and again: strategy, publishing, promoting, measuring… and again… Don’t be afraid, you’re already getting the hang of it.

News
First things first. You have been creating & promoting your content in your ecosystem and out in the social media world, but people might have been mentioning your brand outside of the content you have produced yourself. That’s the goal isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be valuable to keep an eye on that? There are a few tools out there to help you monitor your brand. My personal 2 favorites:

• Twitter search: The following formula will allow you to find all the people who talks about your brand but isn’t including you directly. Simply search for: YourBrand -to:yourbrand -from:yourbrand -@yourbrand. If you’re using a social media dashboard such as Hootsuite, you can create a specific stream for your formula.
• Google Alerts:  Keep in mind that Google Alerts sends you newly indexed results, not every result available on the Web. Set-up your Google Alert search term as early as possible in the game. You can set as many G.A. as you want, and I know it’s tempting to create searches on all your competitors products and even your exes… but remember that someone will have to monitor those search results for it to be worth something…

Criticism
While there are great benefits to branding interactively over the internet, there are drawbacks: social media is an open door to criticism. Working with restaurants, I often encountered dissatisfied customers bashing the establishment on its Facebook wall… How to deal with negative feedback? First off, unless it’s using offensive vocabulary, resist the temptation of clicking on the “Delete” button. You won’t solve anything and you might make things worse by censoring someone’s ideas. Then, bookmark the 10 Tips for Dealing with Online Criticism by Rachel Held Evans, you might have to read it several times along the life cycle of your Personal Brand, and every time you read it you’ll thank me (well, ok and her…) for it.

Monitoring
By monitoring your Personal Brand activity on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, you will be able to identify the optimum messages, timing and metrics to deliver, track and measure your campaign’s success. You might also want to take your competitors’ activity into account by tracking how active they are they on the social networks and what they are saying to the customers… And because we love you, here’s the Top 10 Free Tools For Monitoring Your Brand’s Reputation (courtesy of Mashable).

And that’s how we will close this Personal Branding series. We hope you enjoyed it. Was it useful? Are there any questions left that we haven’t answered? Now, you’re on your own… don’t forget the magic formula: Lather, Rinse, Repeat!