Yesterday, I wrote a post about incentivising agents to contribute content to real estate social media sites such as ActiveRain and Trulia Voices (a Q&A product where consumers can pose questions to real estate professionals). I was basically saying that rewarding agents with points for their contributions could lead to a lot of 'noise' on these sites, but there was little alternative to these point systems as incentives. In the post, I incorrectly implied that Trulia Voices rewards agents with points for answering consumer questions. Within a couple of hours, Rudy Bachraty from Trulia had left a comment on my post explaining that Trulia does not reward agents with points at all, instead they have a list of most active contributors.
Recently, I've been reading a lot in the blogosphere about Trulia Voices and trying to get my head around the product. I've noticed a running theme, Rudy (or sometimes even Trulia's CEO Pete Flint) always appear in the comments of any blog post where the product is mentioned. They're there taking on board user criticisms, correcting people where they've misinterpreted something about their products (a la my good self) and generally being an active part of the discussions surrounding their product, very good for brand transparency.
If someone was talking about you or your company online, wouldn't you want to know about it? I'm sure you would, if they're complimenting your service you can chip in and say thanks but more importantly if they're saying something disparaging you'll be aware of it and you can try to rectify the problem.
The simplest way to stay afloat of what's being said about you online is to set up a Google Alert. I'm sure many of you do this already, but there may also be a lot of people who haven't even heard of this simple to use (and free) product from the gods at Google. Google Alerts allow you to track any search term and then whenever anything is published online with that term included, you'll be notified with an email. I track 'Poppy Dinsey' (my name) and 'Zoomf' (my company). You can also track your competitors too, it's always good to see what's being said about the competition!
If you're using Twitter, you can also do a similar kind of tracking for tweets. Full explanation of Twitter Tracking can be found here.
So much is being published online every minute of every day, it's impossible to know what's being said about you and the brand you've worked hard to build unless you take advantage of a product like Google Alerts. I'm sure that's how Rudy finds out when people are talking about Trulia Voices, although I could be wrong. Maybe he'll appear in the comments of this post and clear that up for me?!
Posted by 
Charlie Arthur, CCIM, ABR
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Rudy is everywhere isn't he! I try to keep an eye out and protect my name (well... you know what I mean!) and brand, but wow, what a job if you think about it. Thanks for the post!