Managing your online reputation means keeping informed about what is being said about your brand, proactively protecting it via the conversation channels such as Social Media and dealing with any negativity.
If you have an unhappy customer, it’s possible that they won’t express their dissatisfaction to you. There are thousands of people everyday who go online and comment negatively about companies and products on other websites. The result of a negative online reputation (rebember the Toyota crisis back in February?) can have obvious financial implications and this is why it is so important to keep track of what people are saying about your brand.
There are many different ways to monitor your online reputation.
The easiest way to find out what’s being said about your brand is starting with simple searches using Google, Yahoo and Twitter Search. However, manual search can be time consuming so you might want to consider signing up to some free tools:
- Google Alerts allows you to enter queries (like your company name), the type of alert (blog results, news items, comprehensive search) and the frequency of the updates (once a day or once a week). The results will automatically be e-mailed to you.
- TweerBeep works in a very similar way and reports the Twitter conversations that mention your company or products.
- Technorati is useful to find out who’s talking about you in the blogosphere and lets you subscribe to the results using the RSS button.
- Yahoo Pipes Social Media Fire Hose is a comprehensive and immediate tool to track mentions on Social Media sites such as Twitter, Flickr, Digg, etc.
- TweetDeck lets you monitor any subject within Twitter and provide updates using a very effective dashboard of realtime information.
Do you use any of these tools? Which would you recommend?
June 7th, 2010 at 10:23 am
Thanks for the list of tools, these will be very useful to find out how your brand is doing, however how would you use these, is it just a add-on to a toolbar?