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The web is massive. Probably a lot bigger and complex than Al Gore ever thought possible. It’s a gigantic, complex organism that only gets more bigger and complexer with every passing day. As the web has grown and permeated each of our personal and professional lives it has also become more important. For many of us it’s not “the internet” anymore so much as “my life.”

If you’re involved in running any kind of business the web presents a couple powerful opportunities; marketing with near endless reach and business intelligence on an unprecedented scale. Unfortunately there’s a caveat to all this – knowing how to take advantage of it at all.

To give you a leg up, here’s  3 simple steps you can take to overwhelm yourself with information about your business, website or industry.

1) Listen to the web

We all want to let the world know just how awesome we are, and the web lets us do that with aplomb. This means you, yes you, can put your ear to that proverbial train track and hear the grumblings of a  customer service train wreck long before it jumps the tracks.

To get the information train out of the station (ok, ok – last pun I promise), grab a free RSS reader account (I use Google Reader), and do one or all of the following:

• Make a list of all the relevant stuff you want to listen for – Marty Weintraub recommends covering all manor of things – like brands, products, personnel, competition and industry phrases. You should scale this to your business, of course.
• Search for each item you want to track in Google Blog search, BackTweets, backtype.com, Delicious, and Twitter
• With each query grab the RSS feed URL and add that to your Google Reader.

Bam. You’re now listening the the web. You can add new tools to listen to new channels as they come along – or use different tools to accomplish what the above do. The tools are unimportant -  monitoring what other people are saying about you and your business is the end goal.

2 ) Verify your sites across the various Webmaster Tools

Believe it or not, search engines will actually provide you with metrics and reports about how they see your website.

Browse on over to the three big search engine webmaster sites:

• www.google.com/webmasters
• siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
• www.bing.com/webmaster

Then Verify your website by adding a meta tag to file to the root folder of the site and crack open all the goodies.

You’ll see stats about crawl errors, links, keyword relevancy, site maps and other standard metrics. You’ll also have options to set a preferred domain and manage Google’s Sitelinks. For years webmasters have had to hypothesize about all this data – and now the search engines give it to you for free. Sweet.

3) Claim your local business listing

With Local Search you don’t even need a website to be part of the search engine results. Google Local Listings often represent local businesses based on little more than geographical information and online reviews (or complaints.)

To me, these Google Local Listings serve a wonderful aggregation function – and provide business owners a unique opportunity to manage customer service and experience. You’ll see customer reviews across any number of review sites, and mentions across Google maps and other user generated content. For certain sites you’ll even see sentiment analysis – restaurants are gauged by food, service, ambiance, value and more.

You’ll get a 10,000 ft view of how your customers see your business – which is truly valuable.

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About Iris Professional Services
Iris Professional Services is a computer consulting company operating offices in both Seattle and Portland. Businesses throughout the Pacific Northwest rely on our expert IT consultants for all their network IT support services.