4 Tools for Understanding Your Customers' Online Activity

Last week we talked about developing a really strong listening foundation that can propel your online efforts into something that is profitable and worth your time.

We discussed the five steps in social media we always recommend to new clients who are just beginning to branch out online:

• Listen
• Assess
• Engage
• Measure
• Refine/Improve

We're at the assess phase now, which means we need to look at where our customers and prospects are already participating online.

Remember, this not the Field of Dreams. If you build it, they will not come. So you need to figure out where your audience is participating in order to determine where you're going to spend your time. There are several tools you can use to begin to understand your audience's online preferences. Some are free and some are paid. We'll explore both.

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.

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).

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.

Xobni. Xobni is 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.

The only thing we don't like about Xobni is it takes up a lot of memory -- and in Outlook it tends to crash frequently.

The difference between Fliptop and Qwerly vs. Gist and Xobni is the first two give you a snapshot of the people in your customer relationship management database, and the latter two give you access to the people you are emailing at that moment in time.

Both groups are useful in assessing where your audience participates online. Once you have a good snapshot using one of the first two tools, you can begin to build your community where the majority of your customers and prospects are already participating.

Then you can use Gist or Xobni to enhance your community building as you proceed, which we'll discuss in more detail during the engage portion of this series.