Social CRM for Business: Analytics Can Spur Greater Success

Try a little experiment, Pombriant says. Do a GoogleGoogle search of any company name, followed by the word "sucks." Now hit the Enter key and check out the fascinating results. Alles zu Google auf CIO.de

No matter what company name you type in, just look at all that attention those businesses are getting! Of course, this is not the kind of attention you might want your business to be receiving, but there it is, in living color on the Internet for the viewing pleasure of potential customers around the world.

So what can you do

"You can't simply ignore it," he says. "The approach in the past has been to ignore it because it's just too expensive to fight all those brush fires. But if you don't find out, those brush fires are going to turn into forest fires."

At the very least, your company can set up simple "Google Alerts" for instances of your company name when it comes up in Google searches. Customers, both happy and unhappy, are most likely posting things online on blogs, Facebook, TwitterTwitter, Web sites and other destinations about companies and products that they use and buy. "You can find out what your customers think about you, you can discover what is on their minds and about their unmet needs and their biases," Pombriant says. Alles zu Twitter auf CIO.de