A large part of my job here at OpenSRS is monitoring our brand online. By that I mean that I spend a lot of my day online listening to what people are saying about OpenSRS and Tucows. In some cases, it’s a customer who’s having some trouble navigating a domain transfer. In others, it might be a positive comment about some of our work on ICANN issues. We feel it’s important to be out there listening wherever people are talking about us.

We also feel that we should be listening to what people are saying about our competitors. So another part of my job is to monitor conversations about some of the other hosted email providers and domain registrars out there. And believe me, what I hear isn’t always good. Fortunately, these complaints are excellent sales opportunities for other registrars. But unfortunately, as OpenSRS, they’re not directly sales opportunities for us.

They are, however, sales opportunities for you, if you’re listening. We use a number of free tools to track mentions of the names of our own brands as well as those of our competitors and we suggest that you do so, too.

One of the easiest to use is Twitter, a “microblogging” service that lets you say whatever you like as long as it fits into 140 characters. People “follow” your account to be notified when you update, and you can follow people whose updates you’d like to receive as well. Setting up a Twitter account is fast and free. We use Twitter several ways, actually. We have an OpenSRS account (http://www.twitter.com/OpenSRS) which we use to notify followers about blog posts, promos, and other news. We also use the account to reply to people who are having issues. We also have an account for our status page (http://www.twitter.com/OpenSRSstatus) which allows people to track the status of various OpenSRS services without having to visit the Status page on our site.

Once you’ve set up your Twitter account, you can use the search function to look for mentions of your brand or your competitors’. Then, you can engage when there is an opportunity to help someone or to suggest your services when they’re unhappy elsewhere.

Here are a few general principles we’ve found helpful when deciding to engage:

• although your account should be in the company name, speak with a human voice, not a corporate one.
• listen more than you speak. Twitter can be a great source of feedback and ideas, even when you don’t directly respond.
• never reveal private information about customers.
• give people the opportunity to take the conversation to email, where the 140 character limit and privacy concerns won’t hamper your ability to communicate.

Finally, John Jantsch has put together a great resource page for anyone considering using Twitter for business.

p.s. Are you already using Twitter this way? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!