Four tools to identify your online consumer

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Today we have the pleasure of giving you a blog post from one of our favourite bloggers, Gini Dietrich. She’s smart, funny, has the most *awesome* dog (called Jack Bauer) and she knows PR & social media like few people do! Check out her post, be informed and share your thoughts in the comments!

It’s often been said that content marketing is not the Field of Dreams: If you build it, they will not come.

You could quite possibly have the very best website, blog, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and content, but if no one has the ability to engage with you, or find you outside of search, you’re not going to have the Field of Dreams.

Sure, all of those things are extremely important, especially if you’re building something that is of great value to your consumer, but if you don’t leave your owned media and venture out into the social world, you’re missing a great opportunity.

You see, digital communication and marketing is not about you. It’s about your consumer. And it’s not just nice to visit them where they’re already participating online, it’s imperative.

There are many tools you can use to listen and monitor the online conversations, if you’re not already doing so. By listening, you are able to determine where your consumers are already participating online.

1. Fliptop. Fliptop is a tool that will let you upload email contacts from your computer, an email marketing platform, social media, or Salesforce. It will give you 100 free social profiles; anything beyond that is a paid option. It’s an easy way to test the software to see if it’s something you’d like to consider paying for and using. It returns demographics, title, company, all of the social platforms the person uses, and their Klout score.
2. Qwerly. Qwerly is a little more sophisticated and should be used by someone who understands APIs and how to insert a key into your Web properties. This is a paid tool that takes the person’s name and location, and returns their bio, social networking profiles, usernames, and influence score (such as Klout).
3. Gist. Gist is a tool you insert into your email server (such as Outlook or Gmail). Every time you email someone, it returns information such as their most recent blog post, what they’re reading, their shared photos, and their social networks
4. Xobni. Xobni is the Batman of email. When installed in your email server, it returns so much information it’s almost scary. It gives you the social platforms, just like the other tools, but it also shows you which attachments you’ve exchanged with that person, what time they’re typically on email and responding, how many emails they’ve sent you or haven’t responded to, and more.

Are a good percentage of your consumers (or target consumers) spending time on Facebook? If so, that information tells you to build a Facebook presence.

Same with Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest,Tumblr, Instagram, social TV, and more.

You always want to draw people back to something you own, but do it by using the tools your consumers are already using instead of forcing them to do something that’s easier for you.

If you take the French (the we, we, we) out of everything you do and focus on what works best for the consumer, you’ll win every time.

Gini Dietrich is chief executive officer of Arment Dietrich, author of Spin Sucks, and founder of Spin Sucks Pro. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn.