In a follow-up to last week’s post on how-to “Simplify,” this entry will explore our final strategy for dealing with the changing expectations of the web audience: “Pay Attention.”

PAY ATTENTION

It is critical that you pay attention to what’s being said about your company. Whether or not you decide to participate in the online conversation, it is likely that conversations are still happening about you. There are a number of tools you can use to monitor your website.

For example, Google Analytics is an easy-to-use free service that can tell you an amazing amount about the users visiting your site.  For example, when we were redesigning Yamana Gold’s website, we looked at the Company’s analytics in preparation for the User Profile exercise.  We were surprised to learn that one-third of the Company’s web traffic was coming from Brazil.  A deeper look revealed that a Portuguese job-posting site was directing traffic to Yamana’s careers page, which was entirely in English.  We quickly implemented a page written in Portuguese to service these users.

Other services to check out:

• Google Alerts- free service that will email you once a day with any news or blog articles mentioning your company
• Technorati- the largest blog search engine in the world. Search for your brand on Technorati, and subscribe to RSS alerts that let you know when someone blogs about you.  
• Backtype- monitors blog comments. Backtype lets you find, follow, and share comments from across the web.  
• Social Mention- a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services.
• Radian6.com- provides an ongoing social media monitoring service for a fee