Did you know that Social Media is a great way to get a feel for what your market is thinking? You can create a specific campaign to gather information as well as monitor your brand on the interwebs. The 2 really work hand in hand – what people are saying about you can and should affect how you engage with them. Here are a few quick steps that you can follow today:

1. Listen for your brand being mentioned across the web. Services like Google Alert and Saved Searches in Seesmic for Twitter make it easy to view a running thread of what others are saying about your company name.

2. Set up something apart from your business as usual website – think blog, Facebook Fan Page – great place to ask your fans questions. Conversely, encourage them to leave feedback good, bad or ugly. Generally, as long as you deal with it timely and effectively any and all feedback, even the bad stuff doesn’t have to be detrimental to your brand.

3. Remember that people will talk honestly and openly about your products and services in open forums. Get out there and find out where these forums are. You may have to go off the beaten track – there is more than just Twitter and Facebook. Some of your raving fans (or even haters, see People of Walmart) will setup their own groups on blogs and Ning platforms- its worth doing a search there.

The proactive person will not only monitor brand mentions, etc..but will respond and engage with the community as well as refine processes where needed. Remember to be transparent at all times. If you are going to jump into a forum discussion, make sure to say who you are – don’t just get in there and gloat about what a fantastic company you have.

How are you using web 2.0 to find out what your market thinks about your brand? If you aren’t using this method yet, how could you?

Seems every business owner and their dog is blogging. That is probably because the benefits to your company can be vast if done properly. If you are already blogging, I’m sure you’ve read about how it is good for driving traffic to your site if update regularly (for starters, Google loves all the new content). But what if your blog is just not bringing the sizzle and it does not actually have any readers. Have you assessed who you are trying to attract, is it inline with what you are blogging about? Are you giving them a reason to actually visit your blog?

Often times people forget what I like to call the 1-2 punch of blogging. First, through your blog you want to evoke an emotion or a feeling from your readers. The second part of the punch is to add value above and beyond your normal product offering.

A great reason to blog is to give personality to your comapny or brand. This is a space online where you can explore not just what your company does, but what feeling do you want your business to evoke in people. Take for example if you own a clothing business for kids. The fact of the matter is that you create clothes to clothe people, the squishy feely part of the business is that you create clothes to keep precious little people safe and protected from the elements. How could you turn an emotion such as “safety” and “protection” into a blog post that will attract your readers? Remember, people are often driven by emotion when making a purchase. How can you drive that emotional pull through the roof?

Ok, so your an online shop selling the same goods as about 25 other bazillion shops around the world. With your blog, you can set yourself apart by adding an extra service such as a regular how-to feature (care for, clean, match, etc…), downloadable ecards, other uses of your product, client testimonials and success stories are all great uses for your company blog. If your regular feature is engaging enough, it will bring people back, um, regularly of course. Leave the selling of the product to your actual product website. Don’t forget to get your readers involved – polls, requests for feedback and other interactive elements also make a successful blog.

Think about a feeling your business can evoke in others. Can you deliver the 1-2 punch through blogging?

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Wordpress is an open source blog publishing platform. Open source means that it is in the hands of the people, constantly being worked on and improved as the internet involves. These same people are a great community resource that can help you out through asking questions in forums. But, don’t get me wrong, this does not mean that free = cheap and budget.
In this case, Wordpress is standards compliant, robust and well tested in house before each stable version release. It is by far the best CMS (content management system) for your business blog or website. Here are 5 reasons why you can’t ignore Wordpress for your business’ website or blog.

the powerful CMS system

This means no more being unable to update your website when you want, or being at the mercy of someone else. If you can use Word, you can use Wordpress. Once your domain, theme and plugins are up and running its simple to add and edit text and pictures.

Wordpress is inherently SEO friendly

By default, Wordpress has amazing SEO features – all it takes is a little tweaking and you can also extend these capabilities with free Wordpress plugins.

Did I mention that Wordpress is free as are their Wordpress plugins?

Thousands of developers are creating free plugins for everything from opt-in systems, google analytics and image galleries.  A few plugins can make a major impact on your site.

An extensive range of themes to suit your needs

Their are magazine style themes, video, content-rich, sales pages. Whatever you need to fit your business needs, their will be a theme to match. The only trouble is choosing from all that is on offer. With a little CSS and HTML knowledge it is easy to configure themes to fit your company branding as well, no generic styling here.

Create your own community of raving fans

Wordpress commenting, discussions and ability to frequently update encourages repeat visits and sticky content. Not only is creating a community good for your brand, but Google will like the fresh content.

If you would like to find out more about setting up your own Blog, check out the Real Social Girl packages.

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Welcome to another installment in a regular Monday Series of posts called Buzz Tips. I will be answering questions mainly on Social Media, Twitter, and Wordpress blogging from the Girlstoys subscribers.  To those of you that know me around the twitterverse and on various forums, I answer alot of questions about the internet, internet marketing and Twitter among other social media and marketing topics so I figured, why not turn it into something regular.

To have your question answered all you have to do is join up to the newsletter by entering your email address and name in the form on the right sidebar – easy. Then send your question to ghada [at] girlstoys [dot] co [dot] nz

Todays’ question is:

Their are a handful of blogs that I try to read regularly, but I’m not sure the best way to do this. I know that RSS feeds can let me keep up to date with changes to a blog, but how do I use them and how do I read the feeds?

Google Reader is a great way to track all your RSS feeds in one place. All you have to do is locate the RSS button on the blog, normally they are in a pretty easy to find place in the header or the sidebar (Mine is under the “Stay in Touch” section of the sidebar – generally they are orange colored icons with a broadcast type symbol). Click on the RSS button and you will be taken to a page that will ask you if you want to subscribe to the feed. Choose “google” from the options. As long as you are logged into your google account, the feed will show up on your google reader page and will update automatically as the blog’s feed is updated. You can also choose to add RSS feeds manually by typing in the blog address after clicking on the “add a subscription” button on your Google Reader page.

The google reader interface is user friendly. If you already have a google account, and use gmail its all pretty similar. Just visit the Google reader page as often as you wish to check your RSS feeds in one place.

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