This post will briefly explain how chambers of commerce and business associations (anyone, really) can “listen” to what’s being said about them on the web. 

The first service is Google Alerts.  Google will monitor the web, news sites, etc., for your keyword(s) and send you email alerts when those keywords are matched with a link to the original page.  You can choose to search blogs, web pages, news, video, groups or comprehensive and you can choose to have the emails sent as it happens, once a day or once a week.  You may want to experiment with your search terms a bit to get the best results. For example a search term of chamber of commerce may return results where the word chamber and the word commerce are used anywhere in the article and you’ll get news about tons of chambers.  However a search term of “Boston Chamber of Commerce” (include the “quote marks”) may yield more desired results. 

You can create as many Google Alert search terms as you like.  You could even set up alerts for important members (I know, I know…they are ALL important J ) or key prospects.  When you see news items come across for these businesses, use that information to help you generate new member sales or help you with retaining that member.

The second is a Twitter search.  (If you’re unfamiliar with Twitter, check out Twitter in Plain English.)  Enter your search term to see who’s been “tweeting” about you on the popular micro-messaging service.  From that screen you can set up an RSS feed of those search results, then subscribe using the reader of your choice to always be kept up to date on who is Twittering your search terms.  One note with Twitter, though - each message can only be 140 characters long, so you may want to use shorter search terms like Boston Chamber rather than The Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce.  Once you find a tweet that mentions you, you can usually click through to view it and the person who wrote it.  From their profile page, you may be able to identify who they are and help them if they have a question about your chamber or associations.   See a recent post of mine about a Chamber Twitter success story that used such a Twitter search.  (And another note about keyword searches for “chamber” – you’re likely to get a few “chamber orchestra” results, too)

There are LOADS of services on the web that let you listen like this – so are free, some are not.  I’ll have more details about some of these additional services and examples of how you can use them in future posts.