It’s easy to gauge what customers think about your business on the web. But to do anything useful with their feedback, you need a Social Media Strategy.Before the Internet, it wasn’t easy to find out what your customers were saying about your business. Unless they actually called your customer support line, or wrote you a letter, getting feedback from them often involved customer satisfaction surveys and focus groups.But now it’s easy to track the views of your customers. Customers have the option to discuss your service on Twitter; leave comments on a reviews website; talk about you on a blog; or even start discussing you in a forum.The feedback made through all these channels will also influence whether other people may buy from you in the future. If someone searches for your business on Google and is then faced by several entries of people moaning about your service, the chances are that they’ll decide to not buy from you.Monitoring what people say about you on the web, and then doing something about that feedback is called having a ‘Social Media Strategy’.Find out what people are saying about youThe first part of developing a Social Media Strategy is to find out what people are saying about you.If you host a forum or have a blog your customers may well give you feedback directly, which of course is easy to monitor.To track people making comments about your business elsewhere on the Web, set up a ‘Google Alert’ for your company name and domain name. Every time Google discovers a new mention of your company or domain, they will email you a link to the place where your company is mentioned.Twitter Search is another great tool to find out what people are saying about you on Twitter. Since you won’t have time to keep searching for your company on Twitter, use the RSS feature of Twitter Search to give you a live feed of new mentions.Get involved in the conversationOnce you start to find how and when people are talking about your company, the most important thing is to get involved in that conversation. If customers have criticised you on a forum or blog, then make a post yourself to let them know you’re sorry they had a bad experience. Try to find out what went wrong, and whether you can do anything to resolve it. A little bit of attention can turn a negative customer into a positive one. And since others will be reading the thread, it’s a great showcase for your customer service. Even if you can’t reconcile them, at the very least you’ve shown willing to engage with their concerns.When you get good feedback, it might be nice to thank the customer. Make a judgement as to whether those thanks are best made publicly below their post or if it’s best done privately on email.The same rules apply on Twitter. Try to follow anyone mentioning you on Twitter to show that you are interested in them. Again, when appropriate respond to their gripes, or thank them for their praise.Foster positive reviewsIf you get positive customer feedback sent to you directly, it can be a good idea to ask those people to post a review on any influential review sites applicable to your market. Reviews websites are increasingly important in helping customers make choices. And Google have recently boosted good reviews websites up the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), so they are far more likely to be read by other people searching for products in your market.Here’s some well known reviews websites; you probably already know ones that are just focused on your industry.truste-marketing.co.ukwebuser.co.ukmaxxsave.co.ukdooyoo.co.ukpricegrabber.co.ukreviewcentre.comshopzilla.co.ukciao.co.ukdealtime.co.ukHave you already used any of the techniques we’ve talked about here? Have you had any positive or negative experiences with it? Please feel free to give us some feedback below.