If you sold air conditioners you probably wouldn’t open up a shop in Antarctica.  You go to where your consumer is, and find an area that uses your product. The same goes for promotion, if you want to promote your brand, and expose it to a pre-qualified audience you need to seek them out.  So how do you know if there are people talking about you?  Do you wait till your ear rings? Social media has found it’s place on the internet, and it’s not going away anytime soon.

So what does this mean for an event promoter, or other consumer based organization? No matter how big or small your event may be, you better believe that someone is talking about you on the internet. Good or bad, there is dialog happening and you need to make yourself part of the conversation.  You may have not realize yet, but although you may not deliver tangible products it is still essential to provide some sort of customer service. Not only will this dialog help you in understanding the needs and expectations of your audience, but you will also build trust and respect, which could affect the loyalty from your audience. In business, the thing that makes a GOOD leader GREAT, is their ability to listen and learn from their employees to assist in making decisions. I find that in a service based industry the same holds true.

The internet is pretty big, so how do you make yourself part of the conversation? Here are 2 great techniques that I use, not only for Find Fight, but for several other ventures and application i have developed.

Google Alerts

This is a service that is offered by google which notifies you via email or RSS feed about the latest web pages that google found containing your criteria. So for example if you are interested in people talking about your event in blogs, videos, forums, etc., then  you might want to create an alert for the name of your event.

Then What?

Okay you found the blog post, or YouTube video about your event.  Now you have three options:

1. read and observe the discussion and comments
2. comment and make your self a part of the conversation, offering additional insight, asking for feedback, or anything that may help in continuing the conversation.
3. link to and publicize the content on any blog, website, or social media outlet that you may have: “Check out this great fight clip that Joe Smith made at my latest tournament!”  This is a win/win for both you and the producer of the content.  Publishing their links makes the publisher feel appreciated, and will hopefully encourage them to publish more stuff regarding your brand.

Screenshot of Google Alerts

Filter Twitter using TweetDeck Searches

Twitter is all the rage right now, and you should make sure you are a part of it as soon as you can. Twitter is a micro-blogging service built around conversation, based on answering the simple question “what are you doing?”.  Believe it or not, for some people, “What are you doing?” may  be directly related to your brand. For example, “Getting ready to go to {YourEventName} Tournament”, or “Just got back from {YourEventName} Tournament”.

Imagine how valuable it could be if you could listen to what people where saying about your event at this very moment! With TweetDeck you could do just that. You could create search criteria like “your event name”, or maybe something like a specific martial arts style that is relevant to your event such as “Boxing”.

TweetDeck will then filter out all the conversations happening around the world on twitter and list them down for you to read in your steam.

Then What?

Much like the Google Alerts example you have several options.

1. Follow the users speaking about you! If the person is talking about your brand then they must be interested in your brand, and would probably be interest to follow your tweets.
2. ReTweet the message that they sent. The act of retweeting will introduce your @twitterName not only to the person who spoke about you, but all the people that follow them. This increases your chances of being seen by their friends that may have similar interest and may also decide to follow you.
3. Respond to the tweet and start a conversation to build a relationship with your audience. “Great to hear you made it out to the tournament! Hope to see in march for the next one!”

Bellow is an example of a filtered search using TweetDeck. If people are interested I could go more in depth about twitter, and other 3rd part applications that could help your stay in touch.

UPDATE 4/8/09

I wanted to add to this list a new product that Yahoo! launched which shows much promise. It is called Sideline, which validates the power of Twitter for realtime search.

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