Keep informed on the market trends without forgetting yourself
Thursday, February 5th, 2009
As we have seen in the previous post, a very effective way for companies to keep informed on what happens on the market is the use of RSS feeds.
Once companies have learned to monitor what is around them, they will have to remember to keep an eye also on the opinion that the consumers and the Net in general have of them. Just as looking for news on a daily basis is a long and tiring job that can be made easier with news aggregators, there exist other tools which make it possible to automatically receive information on one or more chosen keywords. One of these is the activation of Google alerts.
To access it you need to have a Google account, but compared to the service offered it is a possible obstacle that can be easily overcome.
For every account, you can activate a variable number of notifications, starting for example from the name of your company, so that it can detect any post, news, site, comment, and in general everything that is published on the web concerning your brand. The report for every research will be sent to your email or through feed with the required frequency.
When matched with a research carried out directly by the companies, Google Alert is a valid tool to get to know not only what is being said on a specific brand, but also to identify those who speak about it, and thus analyze which sectors have raised the highest interest or curiosity. Consequently, companies can concentrate or modify the core of their business and the related marketing campaigns in a more effective way.
On the other hand, the research can be concentrated on the name of a competitor, on one or more main keywords for the market of your interest, on a specific product that has just been launched.
As I have already said, it is good to keep on monitoring the contents on the Net also with other tools or methods because, as useful as Google Alert can be, it is not infallible.
