Track Internet Gossip About You

Even if you are a store-based retailer with no website, you still might have a very active web presence—a web presence you don't know anything about. That's because many of your customers are spending time on Twitter, MySpace, and/or Facebook, and with all the time they're spending there, they are bound to run out of interesting things to say. So if they went shopping in your store recently, there's a chance they're talking about you behind your back.
     What are they saying, and how does the conversation among the participants develop? A set of researchers at Indiana University found that with online social networks, any criticism of your store tends to get even more negative as the stories bounce around. The researchers also found that criticism is much more likely to crowd out praise than the other way around. People don't want to be caught recommending an online friend go shopping at your store only to have that online friend announce afterwards to every Twitter twittee that the friendship is over with a flaming, "How could you ever recommend I go there?" It's socially safer to criticize the store. Then the online friends might never give you business, avoiding any chance they'll discover it if the criticism happens to be all wrong.

• Work hard to develop your Advocates—the customers who enthusiastically recommend you to others and are ready to actively argue against unjustified criticism of your store. With online social networking, those Advocates are swimming upstream.
• Know what's being said about you on the Internet. Set up a Google Alert (www.google.com/alerts) for your store name. If the name of your store has more than one word, place the whole name in quotes for the Google Alert.

     To protect your profitability, check to protect your good name.