MackCollier.com

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Ford CMO Jim Farley: Social media leading to ‘massive cost savings’ for Ford

How cool is this?  My friend Kaitlyn, who works for Ogilvy, wrangled some time with Ford CMO Jim Farley at the Paris Auto Show to answer a few questions about how the automaker uses social media.  So she reached out to me and a few other people to see if we wanted to ask Jim a question.  Of course I did, and Kaitlyn collected all the questions and then got Jim to answer them on video, and here it is:

Isn’t that awesome? My question to Jim was “Are there any areas that Ford can point to where social media has either lowered business costs, or improved existing processes?”

Here is Jim’s answer: “What happens is, by launching the vehicle early, getting people involved in talking about the new global Focus or the new Fiesta is the US before it goes on sale, we can lower the amount of traditional advertising we do after the vehicle goes on sale.  That’s where the massive cost savings have been.  I’ll give you an example; On the Fiesta Movement, we had higher unaided nameplate awareness than Fit or Yaris, and we spent 10 cents on the dollar, than a traditional tv ad campaign.  So by starting earlier and using social media to spread the word about the new product, we’re really reducing the amount of traditional advertising we have to spend.”

This is something that I think often gets overlooked in the whole ‘how do we tell if social media is working?’ debate.  There’s two ways that social media can ultimately help a business:

1 – Generate sales

2 – Lower business costs

As Jim explains above, social media is lowering the amount of money that Ford has to spend on traditional advertising.  That’s money that can then be spent on product development, customer service, and other areas that improves the quality of the product, as well as customer satisfaction.  Which ultimately…increases sales.  So this is another example of social media working indirectly.

And thanks to Kaitlyn for setting this up, and thanks to Mr. Farley for answering our questions.

This is a classic example of a wonderful blogger outreach.  Kaitlyn reached out to a small group of marketing and social media bloggers, with extremely targeted, exclusive and RELEVANT content (Hey marketing/social media blogger, want to ask Ford’s CMO a question about how Ford uses Social Media?  Ummmm…..YES!!!!).  I’ve been getting pitched by publicists and agencies and bloggers, etc, for 5 years now, and Kaitlyn is by far the best at what she does.  She rarely pitches me, but when she does, it’s always a story or content that’s extremely relevant to my readership, and I jump all over it.

And since the outreach is so well-done, I want to promote it here to share it with you.  Not just for the content itself (amazing takeaways from Jim on how Ford is utilizing social media, wasn’t it?), but I can also share what Kaitlyn did as an example of what a successful blogger outreach looks like.  Kaitlyn had established relationships with everyone she pitched, she knew who they were, and what type of content they were interested in.  That’s why she rocks.

Besides being a great example of blogger outreach done right, what else can your company learn from this?  What Kaitlyn did here is she found a way to get Jim involved in creating social content.  While it would be great if the top executives at a major company like Ford could devote time every day to interacting with customers directly via social media, it’s just not realistic.  So Kaitlyn found a way to spend a few minutes with Jim, and get him to answer some questions via video.  That content can then be placed on Ford’s YouTube Channel, or embedded in a blog post on a company blog, or more easily shared via social networks like Facebook and Twitter.  The point is, Ford’s CMO might not have time today to get on Twitter and answer customer questions directly, but Ford and Kaitlyn found a way to get him involved in a capacity that makes sense for him.

Thanks again to Jim for answering our questions, and Kaitlyn for setting this up.  BTW as an aside, if a company is using social media tools to engage with you, doesn’t that improve your perception of the company, at least on some small level?  Granted, this video alone isn’t going to convince me to buy a Focus today, but as a result of Jim taking the time to answer my question, I now have a slightly better impression of the company, versus their competitors.

UPDATE: Scott Monty left a fabulous comment and I wanted to add it here so everyone could see it: “There’s no need for time to tell – we’ve already demonstrated that it worked for the Fiesta. We had a higher level of awareness for the subcompact than for vehicles we had in the market for 2-3 years; we collected over 125,000 hand-raisers who indicated they wanted to learn more when the car became available; and the conversion of reservations to sales was 10X higher than our traditional conversion rate.

All before we began any major media efforts toward the launch of the Fiesta.”

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#Blogchat topic for 8-22, Managing Your Sidebars!

If you are new to #Blogchat and want to know what the deal is, here’s the lowdown.

Tonite’s topic, which was inspired by @JudyHelfand, is managing your blog’s sidebars!  We’ll hit on two main areas:

1 – Before we discuss what content to include on our sidebars, I think we need to first figure out our blogging goals.  That will help decide which information we should be highlighting.  A business blog will likely want to put different information on its sidebars than a personal blog does.  We’ll also talk about the importance of putting the most important information on the sidebars ABOVE THE FOLD.  This topic will cover the first 30 mins or so of #Blogchat.

2 – Then we’ll move to a discussion of how much information should our sidebars have?  Do we REALLY have enough information to justify two sidebars, or will one be enough?  Also, are we not including some sidebar elements that we should be adding, like subscriber buttons, or a list of the most popular posts?  We’ll discuss this area from 8:30 to 9:00.

After 9:00, the discussion will be more open, and we’ll hit on any areas concerning sidebars that you want to discuss!

BTW, as a way to say ‘Thank You’ to you guys for coming out and making #Blogchat so amazing each and every week, I’ll be giving out a few #Optsum passes tonite.  Judy I’ve got one for you for suggesting tonite’s topic.  Thanks guys, see you at 8pm Central tonite!  And if you want to join at 7pm Central, we’ll be having our ‘pregame’ where everyone can say hi and share their blog and get to know each other.

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Having a strategy doesn’t make you social

Let me clear up front: If you are going to use social media, you absetively should have a strategy driving your efforts.  Totally.

But simply creating a social media strategy and executing it doesn’t mean you are using social media correctly.  I can create a blogging strategy for your company and tell you exactly what to do, but that still doesn’t mean you’ll have a successful blog.  You still have to follow-through.

Having a strategy isn’t enough, you still have to BE social.  You still have to WANT to connect with your customers.

So many companies today are resistant to communicating with their customers.  I think in most cases, it’s simply because they never have, and really don’t know how to get started.

But many companies fear blogs and social media because they fear that their customers will say bad things about them.  Or worse, that there will be a social media backlash against their brand.

Folks, social media backlashes don’t just happen, they are created.  Let’s look at a few examples:

Dell Hell – This is the original social media backlash story.  This centered around Jeff Jarvis endlessly blogging his problems with his Dell laptop and the in-home service he paid for, right?  It did, but the spark that lit the fuse of this episode was probably when Dell was contacted about its stance toward bloggers.  The company clarified that it had a ‘look, don’t touch’ policy toward bloggers, and added that if a blogger wanted to get their attention, they needed to contact them directly, cause Dell wouldn’t respond to their blog.  You can imagine that bloggers didn’t cotton to that stance, and that’s when this story started to spread like wildfire throughout the infant blogosphere.  If Dell had been proactive about reaching out to Jarvis via his blog from the get-go, this episode would have likely never happened.

Motrin Moms – Motrin put an ad on its website on a Saturday in late 2008 and some moms found offensive, and they took to Twitter to voice their displeasure.  Throughout the day, the discussion got more heated, and by the end of the day, it was the most popular topic on Twitter.  There was no response whatsoever from Motrin on Twitter, which played a BIG role in the backlash escalating.

The next day, a few bloggers figured out who the agency was that created the ad, and got them on the phone to ask what their response was to the growing backlash on Twitter about the new Motrin ad on their site.  The agency’s response? “What’s Twitter?”.  Apparently, the agency hadn’t been monitoring any of the online feedback to the new ad going up, and neither they nor Motrin had any idea what was happening.  As with Dell Hell, this episode didn’t just happen, it was created by a lack of response from Motrin.

Nestle’s Clash with Greenpeace – This was two-pronged.  First, Greenpeace put up a few videos on YouTube that claimed that the candy company was killing orangutans by harvesting forests for the palm oil that went into their Kit-Kat candy bars.  The videos DID make Nestle look very bad, but really weren’t getting many views on YouTube until…..Nestle stepped in and tried to get them taken down from YouTube.  Now that CONTROVERSY entered into the equation, the videos suddenly became a LOT more popular.

Then Greenpeace and its supporters started going to Nestle’s Facebook page and posting derrogatory comments and images, including those ripping off the company’s logo.  Again, Nestle didn’t handle this as well as it could, first threatening to remove such comments, and then their reps started arguing with commenters on their page!  Of course, these actions simply drew more negative attention to the unfolding episode.

In all three cases, the social media backlash could have very easily been avoided if the company in question had reacted differently.  But this goes to show that companies should understand that their customers aren’t just waiting to use social media to attack them.  These type of episodes don’t happen by accident, they are created by the company not responding correctly to a developing issue.

So how do you avoid a social media backlash and better connect with your customers?

1 – Monitor what is being said online about your company.  I’ve got an entire page set up just for articles on how to get started monitoring what’s being said online about your company.

2 – Start responding to bloggers.  Target ones that are critical of your company, and the ones that are praising your company.  You should leave a comment on their blog, but if you don’t feel completely comfortable doing this, email them directly.  Most bloggers have their contact information on their blog.  Or for extra-credit, do both.

If you can do those two things, you’ll be on your way.  Note that in all three examples at the top, that the company in question waited too long to respond, and when they DID respond, they said the wrong thing.  If you are proactively monitoring your online reputation, and proactively reaching out to customers that have issues, you’ll all but remove any chance of a backlash.

Plus you’ll be on your way to being social, via social media.  Awesome, I was able to tie it back to the post’s title 😉

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This is Why You Don’t Bury Your Blog’s Gold

This morning I checked my blog’s traffic and discovered this:

Now that’s a pretty big spike from 5am – 7am.  So I checked my referrals and couldn’t really tell where the traffic was coming from.  I did see some referrals from a link shared via this FriendFeed user, but I couldn’t tell for sure if that had caused the surge.  So I went back to SiteMeter and checked out the entry pages, or the page that people are first landing on when they visit this site.  For example, if you find this page via a link shared on Twitter, Sitemeter will tell me that you entered my site via this post.

When I checked for entry pages from 5am-7am, I found this:

Almost every visitor during that time was landing on this post.  But that doesn’t make a lot of sense, since that post is a year old.  How are people suddenly finding this year old post?

Look to the far right of my blog, under the section on Search My Site.  See the Popular Posts section?  That’s a plugin that I added over the weekend that takes your 4 more popular posts (based on views, I believe), and links to them.  Notice that the Five Reasons Why No One Likes You On Twitter post is the first one listed.  That’s likely how the Friendfeed user found it, then he shared it on Friendfeed, and I got a nice 100+ extra visitors.

All because of a very simple change in my blog’s layout that took some of my more popular posts, and showcased them.  You could be doing the very same thing on your blog.  Another tip is to link out to 2-3 of your most popular posts every week on Twitter.  What I try to do is write 1-3 new posts a week here.  On the days during the week when I do not have a new post up here, I will pick one of my older posts that was popular with my readers, and I’ll share it on Twitter.  Yesterday I linked to this post on Lady Gaga’s efforts to connect with her fans.  The post is a few weeks old, but linking to it yesterday on Twitter got the post 15 more RTs and 108 more views.  Actually, that suggests to me that I should probably move the Popular Posts section above Search My Site so links to all 4 posts are Above the Fold.  Remember we’ve talked about the importance of that before?

Let’s face it, we all have too much content to sort through, and not enough time to find everything.  So anything you can do to highlight your best posts, is going to create value for your readers.  And this can also help you with your blog workload.  You don’t HAVE to write a new post every day.  Really.  If you can only do one post a week that’s fine, I’d much rather read 1 great post a week from a blogger, than 3 decent ones.  Instead of pressing yourself to write 3 great posts a week (seriously, how many bloggers can do that?), why not strive for one really great one, and then link to a couple of great posts you wrote a couple of weeks/months ago, on Twitter?

Companies, you can do the same thing, simply share your best posts in your newsletters that go out, or promote them to sites that cover your industry so they can feature the posts on their site.  The point is, don’t bury your blog’s best content, find ways to share it with your readers.  That can only help grow your readership and bring more exposure to your blogging efforts.

BTW if you are interested in the Popular Posts plugin I used, here is the plugin page, or you can find it by searching for WordPress Popular Posts plugin from your WordPress dashboard.

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Understanding why Social Media works, in less than 3 minutes

Recently I saw a special on Pixar’s movies, and the documentary included the following scene from Toy Story 2:

After the video, the doll explained “You never forget kids like Emily and Andy.  But they forget you…”

The film’s director, John Lasseter, explained that if you saw this you didn’t think of these items as toys, but you believed they were real.  How easy is it to watch that video and think ‘Aw she got left behind!’

Pixar does a wonderful job of taking inanimate objects, and making them seem ‘real’ and more human to us.  This is a big reason why their movies work, because when it’s easier for us to view the characters as ‘real’, then it becomes easier to connect with them, and easier for us to become interested in the story that they are a part of.

And if you think about it, this is the exact reason why social media works for companies.  It makes companies ‘more human’.  Social media has the power to transform behemoth companies into an organization of people just like us.  When I was at #DellCAP a few weeks ago, I asked the group of ‘fans’ of Dell the reason why they chose to evangelize the company.  I explained that I wasn’t sure if I was an evangelist for Dell, but if I was, it wasn’t because of the products they sell.  It’s because of the people I have come to know that work at Dell.  And those connections have been formed via social media.  So if it comes down to my next computer being from Dell or Compaq….well thanks to social media, I already have several friends at Dell, and can’t name one person at Compaq, so guess who probably gets my business?

Just as Pixar makes inanimate objects ‘more real’, social media is making companies of all sizes ‘more human’.  Which makes them more like me, and easier to connect with, easier to trust, and easier to justify doing business with.

Not sure where all this fits into the ROI equation, but it’s a real benefit, right?

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5 smart ways to create additional content for your company blog!

How many of you have considered starting a blog for your company, but really have no idea how you could blog on a regular basis?  I get it, most bloggers have this problem, hell I constantly struggle with getting posts out on a regular basis and keeping the content fresh here.

But over time, many bloggers have learned how to either repurpose existing content, or to create new content that can be distributed via multiple social channels.  Here’s some ideas for taking content that your company is already creating, and using it on your blog.

1 – White papers.  Or case studies, or research papers.  You’re likely already sharing these with your non-blog audience, why not turn them into blog posts for your blog?  Did you write a white paper on ‘5 Ways the Cattle Industry Can Modernize For the Next Decade’?  Then why not turn that into a 5-part series of posts?  Maybe update the content a bit, add a tweak here and there, and you’ve gotten a couple weeks worth of blog posts right there!

2 – Internal Power Point presentations.  Some of these will definitely have content that you don’t want to share publicly, but if it’s fair game, add them to SlideShare, then embed them on your blog!  Each deck can be a separate blog post!  Just add a quick explanation, and there you go!

3 – Video interviews with company executives and customers.  This is how Robert Scoble made a name for himself at Microsoft.  He went around Microsoft interviewing the people that worked there, and blogged it.   The videos were remarkably effective in letting Microsoft’s customers ‘get to know’ the people that worked there.  You could do the same thing for your executives as well as customers!  The videos could not only be embedded into posts on your blog, they could also be housed on your YouTube channel!

4 – Industry events and conferences.  Oh you can create a TON of content at events that can benefit your blog and other social media efforts!  First, you can take pictures.  Those pictures can then be posted to Flickr, or Twitpic, or Facebook, or…..in a blog post!  Next you have video, you can create a ton of video about the event itself, and also you can interview company execs about the event, or thought leaders in the industry and speakers at the event!  Finally, you can write a blog post recapping the event itself!  THEN when you write that post recapping the event, you can also use the pictures and video you shot during the event!  Now you start to see why bloggers love attending social media conferences, eh? 😉

BONUS:  If you have a Twitter account, you can live-tweet the event!  Another favorite among conference attendees!

5 – Answer questions from your customers.  Many websites have a section or contact form where you can ask a question about the company, it’s products, or both.  Mine these questions for potential blog post ideas!  And when possible, mention the customer that asked the question you are answering, and link to her site or blog!  This just increases the chance that she will comment on your post AND promote the post to HER social network!

So there you go!  That’s 5 quick and easy ways to take existing content that you’re already creating, and use it for new blog posts.  Seriously, between these 5 ideas, couldn’t you get at least one more post a week up on your blog?

BTW if your company has been reluctant to start blogging simply because they aren’t sure where to get content from, show them this post.  Then I bet you can start brainstorming and come up with even more ways to leverage existing content your company is creating, into additional blog posts!

I want to thank CK for this post idea, and if you are a B2B company that needs help with social media and/or mobile marketing, definintely check out CK’s blog!

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Number of Twitter followers is the most overrated metric in social media

Seriously, it’s total bunk.  I know because I spend WAY too much time tracking my referral traffic from Twitter, and the people that send that traffic here via tweets and RTs.

Two examples of how # of followers can be deceptive:

1 – Several months ago a member of Twitter with 70K followers tweeted a link to one of my posts.  I got a grand total of 3 visitors from that tweet.  I checked, and the guy was following 80K people.  When you try to follow everyone, you usually end up following no one.

2 – Last year, @ShannonPaul RTed a link to one of my posts.  Shannon had around 10K followers at the time.  Her RT led to an additional 600 visitors to my blog that day.  After Shannon’s tweet, a ripple affect started, as people within her network started RTing her tweet, which led to more RTs in their networks.  But the chain reaction started because Shannon was well-connected to her network.  They trusted her and the content she linked to (like my post). So even though Shannon’s network was 14% the size of the guy with 70K followers, her network sent 600 referral visitors, while the guy with 70K followers only sent 3.

This is why I think there is WAY too much emphasis placed on number of Twitter followers that a person has.  Especially when attempting to determine that person’s level of influence.  From what I’ve seen, it’s far more important to see how closely connected a person is with their Twitter network.  If you have a Twitter network of 150 close friends, your effective reach is likely much larger than a person that has 10,000 strangers following her.  I know that when certain people, like Shannon or @BethHarte RT a link to my blog, that I am about to get a flood of traffic.  Because Shannon and Beth are both highly connected to the people they follow.  Roughly 66% of their tweets are replies, so they are constantly interacting with the people that follow them.  That leads to stronger bonds and connections.

So if # of followers doesn’t count, how do you define influence and authority?

Look, I’m not saying how many followers or subscribers or friends you have is totally worthless in determining how much influence a person has.  But it shouldn’t be the only metric you examine when trying to decide if someone has established trust and influence with their network.

For example, last year I worked with a client to create and execute a blogger outreach strategy to promote a webinar that client was producing.  In deciding which bloggers to reach out to, we looked at two key areas:

1 – Total readership of the blog.  This could include number of subscribers, or number of visitors.

2 – Level of interaction on the blog.  How many comments is the blogger getting, and is she replying to those comments?

We placed a far greater premium on the level of interaction, when deciding which bloggers to reach out to about being involved in the webinar.  Because we wanted bloggers that had actually connected with their readers.  I remember in one case we purposely did NOT contact a particular blogger that had almost 100K subscribers, because there was almost no interaction on their blog.  And in another case, we reached out to a blogger that had a far lower number of subscribers, but there was constant interaction on their blog.

The end result was that signups for the webinar exceeded the client’s goal by 100%.

Really when you boil it down, level of interaction and how connected you are to your network almost always trumps the SIZE of that network, when it comes to determining influence via social media.  Over a year ago I had a well-known blogger ask me why my blog posts always got more comments than his (despite him having 10X the traffic of my blog).

I told him “Because I can tell you the first name of almost every person that comments on my blog, the name of THEIR blog, and what they do for a living. Oh, and I thank them. And they know I mean it.”

Numbers of followers/friends/readers matters, but in my opinion how connected you are to them is even more important in determining influence and reach.

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Are you tracking your blog’s stats in real-time?

A fair number of you probably use Google Analytics for your blog’s stats.  GA is great for tracking information about your blog, and the trends that emerge from users interacting with your content.

But GA doesn’t give you real-time information on your blog.  For example, let’s say your blog averages 10 visitors an hour.  But let’s also assume that in the first 15 minutes of this hour, it’s suddenly gotten 237 visitors.

Obviously, something has happened to trigger that huge spike in traffic.  But if you are only using Google Analytics to track your blog’s stats, it will at best be a few hours before you can find out what is happening NOW to trigger a traffic spike.

This is where you really need a way to track your blog’s statistics in real-time.  There are several sites that will track your blog’s stats in real-time, for free.  I use Site Meter, and it installs almost exactly like Google Analytics does, you simply sign up for a free account, and add a small bit of code to your blog’s template, and you are done.

But the BIG reason why I love Site Meter, because it shows me what sites/sources are SENDING traffic to my site.  Here’s an example:

That’s a screenshot of the last 20 visitors here.  Now I’m not getting as much traffic so far today (mainly because I haven’t posted since Monday), but I can quickly see that those circled visitors all came from the same source.  That source ended up being a link that a Twitter user shared with his followers:

Notice that Tom linked to my post here, but didn’t mention me in the tweet.  So unless I was actively checking my referral traffic via SiteMeter, I would have probably never caught this.  And what’s worse, I checked Tom’s Twitter profile and found out he was following me and I was NOT following him!  So I quickly remedied that, and left this tweet:

So this is a quick example of the importance of checking your referral traffic via SiteMeter.  Here are some of the options I use the most:


Those options can give you a ton of real-time information about your visitors.  For example, if you just wrote a post about Kodak’s social media efforts, you can click on Details and it will show you if any of your recent visitors are coming from Kodak.com.  Or if you are attending an event in Tulsa, Oklahoma, you can use Location to see how many people from Tulsa are checking out your site.  Or Outclicks is a good one to see how visitors left your site.  If you just wrote a post asking visitors to subscribe, and you see most of the recent visitors are leaving via the link to subscribe via Feedburner, that’s a good thing!

So while I think Google Analytics is invaluable in tracking your blog’s statistics, for real-time information, I use SiteMeter.  Now you don’t have to use SiteMeter, there are other similar free services such as StatCounter, that more or less give you the same information.

Any other fans of SiteMeter?  Or StatCounter?  What do you use to get real-time information on your blog’s visitors?

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The one simple change that boosted my email subscribers by 650%

The prime real estate on your blog is the area called ‘above the fold’.  This is the area of the blog you see when you arrive there.  If you have to scroll down your blog to find something, it is considered ‘below the fold’.

As a result, you want to think carefully about the content that’s ‘above the fold’ on your blog, because there’s no guarantee that a visitor will scroll down your blog.  And simply put, content that’s above the fold is more likely to be viewed/clicked on than if it is below the fold.

To illustrate this point, I recently moved the area for my email subscriptions, and feed subscriptions via RSS.  Up until May 15th, the ‘Mack Live’ section was at the top of the 1st sidebar, with the ‘Subscribe by Email’ graphic just underneath that, so that a visitor would actually have to scroll down to fill out the form.  The area to subscribe via RSS was under it, completely below the fold.

So on May 16th, I decided to move both the email and RSS feed subscription areas to the TOP of the blog, or above the fold.  Here’s the results:

In the 22 days since moving the email subscription form to the top of the blog, I’ve gained 45 email subscribers.  To put that into perspective, it took me 150 days, from December 17th 2009, to May 15th 2010, to gain 45 email subscribers when the form was BELOW the fold.  And for the 22 days prior to the move, I added a mere 6 email subscribers, thus the 650% increase in email subscribers by moving the email subscription form above the fold.  Now I did start asking for readers to subscribe via email during my Twitter experiment for about a week in the posts, but that started on the 17th of last month.  I moved the email subscriber box up on the 16th, and picked up 3 new email subscribers that day, where I had picked up only 4 in the previous 15 days.

As for new subscribers via RSS, according to Feedburner, that’s increased by roughly 20% since the 16th.  And email subscribers are factored into that growth.

This again, shows the value of tinkering with your blog, or ABT – Always Be Testing.  And it shows that you need to consider the layout of your blog, where you put your calls to action, and the type of calls to action they are.  For example, at the top of the far right sidebar, I have an area where you can click to get a quote on consulting services.  I almost never get any clicks here, even though the email subscription form to its left is clicked often.  These are obviously very different calls to action, but in about a week I am going to swap the two, and the track the differences I see in both.  In theory, I would think the far right sidebar would be a better place to have the ‘Get a Quote’ section, since it’s how your eye tracks before it leaves a page, but I don’t know for sure.  So I’ll test it.

You should too.  Look at your blog, especially if it’s a business blog, and notice where your calls to action are.  I am constantly hearing from bloggers that they want more subscribers, and in most cases, they either don’t have a way for readers to subscribe to their feed, or if they do, it’s buried below the fold.  Here’s a quick and dirty way to improve your blog’s performance based on the position of your calls to action:

1 – Identify the key metrics you are tracking to determine your blog’s success.  It could be subscribers, or comments, or sales generated.

2 – Identify the calls to action associated with the metrics you track.  And this might be a good time to get some, if you don’t have any.

3 – Note the location of those calls to action on your blog.  If they are below the fold, that means a lot of people probably aren’t seeing them at all, and they should be above the fold.

But above all else, TINKER with your blog.  This is how you learn, by breaking stuff.

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How to set up Google Alerts for your business or company in 5 minutes!

If your company is looking for advice on getting started with social media, one of the first things you will likely hear is to start monitoring your company and brand.  And you’ll probably hear that you should ‘Set up Google Alerts for company and business mentions’.

But what if you have no idea what that means?  Then read on, as I’ll walk you through what is a very simple, but very beneficial process for your business.

First, you can set up Google Alerts through several different search sources, but for the purposes of this post, I wanted to focus on Google Blog Search.  If you click on that link, you’ll be taken to a page that looks very similar to this:

Now, I want to search just for mentions of my name, so I search for “Mack Collier”.  This is a very fundamental search tip, but by putting Mack Collier in quotation marks, Google Blog Search will give me results that include the exact phrase ‘Mack Collier’.  Where if I searched for simply Mack Collier, it would show me all results that included the words ‘Mack’ and ‘Collier’.  So if you know you want to search for an exact phrase, put the query in quotation marks, and you’ll get much better results.  Here’s what the screen looks like now:

That might be a bit hard to see, but notice that at the very top of the results, Google adds this site, as well as my other blog, The Viral Garden!  But if you scroll down to the end of the first page of results, you find this:

Ah ha!  Now we’re cookin’!  That gives me the option to take those results and create an email alert (This is normally what people mean by a ‘Google Alert’) for the results, or I can search Google News for the same term, add a blog search gadget to my Google homepage, or (and this is the one I like), subscribe to the results via Google Reader.

Let’s first look at creating an email alert for this term, when I click on Create an email alert for “Mack Collier”, I see this:

On the right, you see a box with 5 different input windows.

The first is for the term you want to create the alert for.

The second box is a dropdown menu where you select the source you want the results to come from.  The choices are ‘Everything’, ‘News’, ‘Blogs’, ‘Video’, and ‘Discussions’.

The third box is another dropdown menu where you tell Google how often you want it to email you results.  Your options are ‘As it happens’, ‘Once a day’, and ‘Once a week’.

The fourth box is where you set the length of the email, and your options are 10 or 50 results.  Keep in mind that if you are getting a decent amount of results for your search term, you may need to get more frequent email updates in order to catch all the results.  For example, if you want to set an email alert for the term ‘iPad’, and you only want to see 10 results per email AND you only want to get one email a week, well you are going to miss a LOT of results.

The fifth and final box is where you specify what email address you want the results set to, or if you want them set to a feed.  We’ll cover subbing to results via a feed in a moment.

Set the options you want, and you’ve just created your first Google email alert!  Piece of cake, right?  At first, you’ll probably start out by just searching for your company name.  But quickly, you’ll probably want to branch out and create email alerts for specific products you sell, or maybe key executives.  Then you might want to start getting alerts for your competitors as well.

Then one day you realize your inbox is under attack from all these freakin’ email alerts!!!

Is there a better way?  I think so, it’s called subscribing to these results via feed.

So how do you do that?  First, sign up for Google Reader (which is free, but you’ll need a gmail account, which is also free).

Now remember when we searched for “Mack Collier”, and one of the options at the bottom of the page was ‘Subscribe to a blog feed for “Mack Collier” in Google Reader’?  That’s what we want to do now, instead of creating an email alert.  What this will do is send the results for the term “Mack Collier” directly to my Google Reader, as they happen.

When I click on ‘Subscribe to a blog feed for “Mack Collier”‘, the search results then are shown in Google Reader, and reader asks me if I want to subscribe to these results:

That’s it!  Then as new results come in for that search terms, the feed results in Google Reader will show up in bold.  Here’s a screenshot of my Reader and some of the blogs I am subscribed to:

Note that some of the feeds are in bold, and these have a number after them. Such as Servant of Chaos (2).  That tells me that since Servant of Chaos is in bold, that there are new entries from that blog that I haven’t read yet.  And the (2) tells me that there are 2 posts that I haven’t read yet.

Once you become familiar with Reader you’ll really love it, I think.  You can not only have your alerts sent there, but of course you can subscribe to blogs and read them there as well.

Now as a monitoring tool for your company, what type of alerts should you set up?  I think your focus should be on three areas:

1 – Company-centric search terms.  Such as your company name, prominent products and brands, as well as key executives.

2 – Competitor-centric search terms.  Same as above, but for your top 2-3 direct competitors.

3 – Industry-specific terms.  Use this as a way to get a sense of trends in your industry.

Also keep in mind that with Reader, you can create separate folders for each of these areas, in order to better organize your efforts.

Does this post help?  I just know that so often we mention ‘oh just set up Google Alerts’, but to companies that are new to all this social media stuff, they may have no idea what a Google Alert is, or how to set one up.

So now you do 😉

BTW I am constantly writing Social Media How-To posts like this, so if you’d like to make sure you always get my updates, please consider subscribing!  Thank you!