On my personal blog I posted an article that explained why tequila is not sustainable and how the practices that are in use are terrible for the environment. My post was published at 5:45 PM. At 8:09 PM Mike Morales posted a comment that said tequila could be produced in a sustainable fashion and that he would post more information later on.

I did some research and discovered that Mike is a PR person for all tequila producers. He must have alerts set up to tell him when people talk about tequila. This enables him to listen to the conversation, if something positive is said then he can promote it and if something negative is said he knows about it and he can publish a counter argument.

This is a great example of how listening to the conversation online can pay off. He pays attention to the online conversation. He did not attack me; he just said that I didn’t have all of the information. He then directed me to a Facebook page that discusses the sustainability of tequila production. There are 65 fans of this page and links to many articles on the topic, including mine.

Mike could not address false claims or spin negative claims if he was not listening to the conversation. He could shout from his Twitter page, Facebook fan page or blogs for as long as he wants about how great tequila is but he might not be in the same place as the people are that are saying negative things, so they would never have heard his rebuttals. It is possible that readers of my blog have never heard of Mike and would not have stumbled across his counter argument had he not commented on my page.

You can do the same. Google alerts are free and they tell you when people use your name or phrase and where. You can search Twitter in the same way. If you run a Twitter search you will find all of the people that used your keyword in their post. You can turn your Twitter search into an RSS feed so you never miss a post.

When one of these searches turns up someone that has attacked you or said something in correct or that you do not agree with you can respond to those comments. You can respond on your blog or on theirs, or both. When you do this the readers get both sides of the argument.

You do not have to comment on every post but sometimes you might want to, so its good to know.