This was on national news!
5 years ago this incident would have either, ended right there, or been handled by customer service. Now, it’s on national news, repeating for a week, a PR disaster for Disney and probably the end of the line for this employee dressed as the rabbit.
In today’s digital world, it’s extremely easy for people to capture and share information. A disgruntled employee, unsatisfied resident or parent, or God forbid one of your employees doing something unethical on camera can easily get published online and hurt your community’s good reputation.
Too many times, I see bad reviews of a community with nothing done to repair the reputation. This is why, it’s crucial to have someone monitoring your community’s reputation online, and proactively reaching out to these dissatisfied people. Even more so as technology advances.
Well, what used to be extremely hard to monitor and watch, can now be set up in an afternoon. Not only can you monitor your reputation online, but you can gain valuable insights into your prospective residents' needs.
The rest of this article is devoted to giving you strategies and free tools to achieve this with as little time possible.
Using Google Alerts To Monitor Your Senior Living Community
Google alerts is a great way to monitor anything you can think of online. You can get alerts sent to your email or RSS reader about any phrase or keyword you can imagine. You can set these alerts to come in as they happen, daily or even weekly. You can get a notification any time your community’s name gets picked up by Google alerts. This is why I strongly recommend setting up an alert for your community’s name.
If someone leaves a review on a local directory, you’ll get a nonfiction. If your community get’s mentioned by a local news source online, you’ll get alerted. Any time your community’s name is mentioned you will be alerted. How great is that?
You can take it a step further, and setup alerts for your top 5 competitor’s names. This way, you can monitor what they’re doing online, their reputation and make sure you stay one step ahead of the game.
How To Monitor Social Networks
Another free service to monitor beyond what Google Alerts can pick up is called Topsy. When you go to Topsy.com, it’s set up like a search engine, except it’s more like a social media data harvesting machine. When you do a search for your keyword or community name in our case, you will get a ton of options to choose from. You can search for links, tweets, photos, videos, experts, a specific date, etc. And the best feature is that you can setup an email alert.
You’ll just have to sign in with your Twitter or Facebook account. Set up alerts for your company’s name and your competitor’s names, and you’ll easily be able to monitor your reputation, spending only a couple minutes every week.
How To Manage Multiple Social Media Accounts
There’s plenty of software to manage multiple social media accounts. From HootSuite to TweetDeck, there’s no shortage of tools to use (many with free versions). These companies let you manage all or most of your social media accounts from one interface. One service I’ve been using and like in particular is SocialMotus. It’s a fantastic social media management and monitoring tool. You can manage your Facebook and Twitter accounts from this one platform.
What I particularly like is how you can set up keyword streams and monitor relevant conversations around specific phrases. So you can monitor specific words like, “help”, “complaint”, “bad”, etc, and quickly respond when a complaint or bad review happens with regards to your community. Note: there are free versions of all these software, but if you want the kitchen sink of what they offer, they do have paid versions as well.
I hope this article has revealed the importance of monitoring your senior living community’s reputation. I’ve revealed some of the tools many marketing agencies will use to monitor and manage your communities’ reputation. While you won’t have an experienced social media person managing your accounts, you can spend a half day setting up these various tools and sleep a little more soundly at night knowing your reputation is being watched.