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to www.google.com/alerts.The Google Alerts page opens, as shown in Figure 2-9.

      2 Enter the search terms for which you want alerts.Try to keep these to one word or a commonly used phrase.

      3 From the Sources drop-down list, choose the sources of content you want Google to search.We generally choose Automatic so that we don’t miss news items.

      4 From the How Often drop-down list, choose the frequency with which you want the alerts delivered to you.We find At Most Once a Day to be the best frequency.

      5 Enter the email address where you want the alerts to be sent.Remember that you can edit these alert settings at any time.

      6 Click the Create Alert button.

      FIGURE 2-9: Google Alerts.

      Setting up Twitter alerts

      Similarly, create Twitter alerts that track those same keywords in the Twitter world. Services such as Twilert (www.twilert.com) let you follow keywords and observe all the microblogging posts in which those words appear.

      

To set up a Twitter alert, follow these simple steps:

      1 Go to www.twilert.com.The Twilert home page opens, as shown in Figure 2-10.To set up a Twitter alert, you have to be signed in to your Twitter account. If you don’t have one, you can sign up at www.twitter.com.

      2 Type the keyword that you want the alert set up for.

      3 Click the Create Twilert button.

      FIGURE 2-10: Twilert.

      Monitoring social networks

      You probably want to observe what your customers are doing on the various social networks. That’s a little harder to do because most social networks are closed gardens, meaning that except for the public profile pages (a very small percentage of all the pages on the network), you can’t search them with external tools, and typically, after you log in, you can’t search the universe of activity on them. However, what you can do is search and follow the pages, profiles, groups, and applications created by your competitors. Keep in mind that some users hide their profiles, so you won’t be able to track them. To search the Facebook public pages, log in to Facebook and type the search query in the search bar in the header.

      Tracking competitor websites

      

Look at the social media efforts that may reside on your competitors’ websites. Often, those efforts are promoted or anchored in the company website or company-sponsored microsite through links. In fact, many of your competitors probably have (as they should) corporate blogs and Twitter accounts. (Start tracking those directly, too.)

Researching Your Competitors’ Campaign Support

      Practically every marketing campaign today has a social media component to it. As you see a competitor launch a major marketing campaign, scan the web and the competitor’s website for that campaign’s digital and social components. The social activity surrounding the campaign (elsewhere on the web) gives you a sense of how successful it is and how much it helps the brand. Also, watch prominent bloggers in that product category: They may be part of an outreach program and could be promoting the campaign.

      Conducting qualitative research

      Using the free tools and observing competitor activity is all well and good. But more often than not, you need to conduct qualitative research that doesn’t just tell you what your consumers are doing, but also the goals, needs, and aspirations that drive their behavior. Here, there’s good news and bad news.

First, the good news. Qualitative research, as you probably know it in the traditional marketing world, hasn’t changed. You can still use interviews, focus groups, shadowing, and other ethnographic research techniques to understand your consumers. There are dozens of authoritative books on the subject — including a few excellent ones from the For Dummies series, such as Marketing For Dummies, by Alexander Hiam (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) — on qualitative research, so we won’t go into those research formats. All the same best practices of recruiting effectively, knowing your objectives, and having good interview guides and moderators apply.

      And now for the bad news: The questions have changed, and you won’t get all your answers from the qualitative research. Unlike qualitative research in the past, which focused on understanding a specific consumer’s goals and needs, you must pay attention to the consumer’s surrounding community and influencers within that community. For example, you need to ask who influences your consumers when they make specific purchasing decisions.

      Running surveys and quantitative research

      Similarly, quantitative research in the form of statistically significant surveys can be most helpful. Keep in mind that you must run surveys at regular intervals to get valuable, statistically significant results. The reason is that influence changes more rapidly in an online environment, and the social media platforms on which people participate change, too. Don’t run extensive surveys irregularly. Run short, quick surveys about your audiences on a frequent basis to glean important insights.

      Pay attention to where you run the surveys, too, because that can affect the results. A good strategy is to run the survey on your corporate website but simultaneously use a third-party survey vendor to run the same survey on the social media platforms. This way, you’re gauging how people participate and socialize in their own contexts. Very often, the quantitative research can give statistically significant results about influence, with the qualitative research being used to explain the hows and whys of the responses. The two kinds of research go hand in hand.

      Some of the survey vendors that you can use include

       SurveyMonkey (www.surveymonkey.com); see Figure 2-11

       Zoomerang (www.zoomerang.com)

       SurveyGizmo (www.surveygizmo.com)

       Key Survey (www.keysurvey.com)

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