Retailers Monitoring Bloggers and Microblogs

Posted on August 13, 2008

Retailers have been reaching out to bloggers for quite a while now. The smart retailers are monitoring social networks and the blogosphere to determine when it is the right time to jump in and contact a blogger. The right time might be when a blogger appears to need help using a product or when an article or blog post needs a correction. Internet Retailer has a article about how a few months ago Garmin, a GPS retailer, contacted popular blogger and twitterer Chris Brogan. Internet Retailer says Garmin monitors the web using Google Alerts.

GPS navigation retailer Garmin discovers bloggers through monitoring the web using Google Alerts, monitoring social networks and receiving word-of-mouth from customers. One blogger it found had a hard time finding his way around. He was constantly getting lost, and this personality quirk was a trademark. His name is Chris Brogan, and he evangelizes on social media and travels quite a bit on behalf of his social media company, CrossTech Media.
Garmin staff saw that Brogan's posts received a lot of comments on a regular basis, and that he had nearly 12,000 followers on social network Twitter. So one of Garmin's bloggers sent Brogan a Nuvi GPS device on the house.
"He was in Boston one day and got lost and blogged about it. And he mentioned it would be great if he had Garmin GPS. That mention of Garmin triggered a Google Alert," says Kyle Johnston, web and digital creative director at Garmin. "I sent him an e-mail and within two minutes he and I were on the phone. We then approached him like you would a press inquiry. We sent him a GPS unit, said we follow his blog and are very interested in what he has to say, and said hopefully you won't get lost so much anymore."

Chris Brogan explains how it happened in this post. He was tweeting in April about how it would be helpful if he had a GPS to keep from getting lost in Boston and that's how Garmin ended up contacting him.

I get lost a LOT. Boston isn't an easy city, and I'm not a very good directions person. Between the two, I had lots of opportunities to tweet that I was lost. In fact, @newmediajim once helped me find where I was in Manhattan while he was home in DC.
One day, I started tweeting things like, "Dear Garmin: I'm lost. If I had you, I wouldn't be lost any more." I did it to see what would happen. I did it a lot. And then one day, I got an email. "Dear Chris, we listened. May we send you a journalist evaluation unit?"
I have no obligations to Garmin to do anything with the unit, no request to blog about it, etc. And yet, when I use the thing, I tweet, "Not lost, because Garmin sent me a unit to test out," or versions of the same.

It probably helps to have a lot of followers on Twitter like Chris Brogan does to get noticed in the first place. But it is good to see some smart retailers are monitoring the Twitter and blogosphere noise looking for problems and opportunities.

Here's one of Chris Brogan's tweets about the Garmin GPS which took place in May, 2008.