Online Reputation Management For Dummies

Learning More About Your Commenters

Under normal conditions, as you use your listening tools, you track your commenters in general terms (although it can be really useful to identify your biggest fans). In those circumstances, you don’t need to research every commenter. Now, however, you need to learn all you can about the people commenting. This gives you a better context in which to

Understand what’s going on

Make an educated guess about what these people want from the interaction

It’s also really important for you to find out how broad a network your commenters have and on which social networks they’re most popular. Routinely listen across relevant channels for words like “hate,” “sucks,” “bad,” “not working,” and so on, in conjunction with your brand name. Google Alerts can be very handy for setting up these routine searches. (For more on Google Alerts, see Chapter 7.) You should also track who is linking to your site and read that person’s blog posts and articles. When you locate your commenter, take a few moments to figure out what’s going on. Carefully read the content, whether it’s a tweet or a long blog post, and try to understand the commenter’s point of view.

Approach commenters ...