27 April 2008
We don’t live in the information age anymore!
Posted by Jerry Kidd under: How to...; Product Reviews; Sales Tips .
We used to live in the information age, but we don’t anymore.
That’s a pretty bold statement, but here is what I mean. The Internet, more specifically the World Wide Web, has flooded us with information. So much so that we are constantly bombarded from the time we get up until we go to sleep. We are assaulted by email, text messages, phone calls, newspapers, magazines, television news, radio news, RSS feeds and on and on. (And we used to complain that we didn’t have time to read the paper every morning!)
In addition to all of the above ways that we are hit with too much information, there is a quiet revolution taking place. And that is that we are moving into the age of referral or recommendation. People are increasingly turning to each other to make purchase decisions as a way to make sense of it all. They are using sites like www.Yelp.com and other social networking sites to help them make decisions about what products or services to use.
In speaking with an agent a few weeks ago he told me that he was selected as the agent for a buyer because she found his name in a www.Yelp.com posting by one of his previous satisfied clients! And he had no idea what Yelp was nor how he was mentioned there before she brought it to his attention. In his case, it was a positive commentary, and it brought him a transaction. But, what if it wasn’t good? Would he have even known about it?
How many other places are people talking about YOU? And what are they saying? How can you find out?
Here is a painless, two step process:
Step 1: do a Google search on your name. Enclose the name in quotes and see what gets returned. Try a few variations of your name like this: “Jerry Kidd” or “Gerald D. Kidd” just to make sure you get it all.
Step 2: then setup a Google Alert (http://www.google.com/alerts?hl=en&gl) for your name and the various permutations that you discovered in step 1. It’s free and it’s fast. You can search on videos, News, Blogs, Web Sites and Google Groups. You can choose to aggregate the searches into one or more emails per day if you wish.
