By: Will Critchlow
The headline is a quote from a new Wired story: The See-Through CEO (via Marketing Pilgrim).
So Wired thinks online reputation management is one of the biggest trends of 2007. Being on the sharp end of Internet marketing meant that we have been experiencing the need to track mentions of our customers online for a while now. It was this internal need that led us to develop reputation monitor.
It’s good to see more and more companies realising that more open-ness can bring them more business – but everyone needs to realise that the more visible you are online, and the more your customers discuss you online, the more carefully you need to stay aware of the discussion.
I found the following quote from the Wired article one of the most telling:
Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. And that’s one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before.
The most powerful reasons for monitoring your reputation online are the scare stories – the examples of stories that ballooned out of control, having started on blogs – again Wired gives us an example:
When Shel Israel and blogger Jeff Jarvis wrote about wretched treatment by Dell’s customer service, their posts were so gleefully linked to that for a while they appeared as the number one and two search results for “Dell.”
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By: Will Critchlow
How does a story appear in my feed, and what does this mean?
Of the millions of new blog posts written every day a small percentage of them may be about you. In order for one of these blog posts to have made it in and out of reputation monitor a number of things will have happened.
Firstly something in the blog post will mean that one of the feeds we monitor on your behalf picked this up for one of the phrases you chose to monitor. 99% of the time this will be because the blog posts mentioned one or more of the words in your search.
Next “we go and have a look” at the page to work out whether the page is actually about you. In many cases the phrase that meant it was picked up by the search doesn’t mean it is actually about you. For example not every mention of the word apple means that it is about Apple computers. Reputation monitor grades each post on how likely we think it is to be about you.
You can choose what level of posts you want to see. For the ultra paranoid, you can see everything that we have found. For those of you with less time available to read all the garbage that gets generated from these searches you can just see pages that we are confident are about you.
What happens if I share my name with someone famous?
If you share your name with a baseball player for example (e.g. Andy Beal and Andy Beal) then you might want to filter out pages that mention baseball. In this case you can just put a comma-separated list of words and phrases into the handy box (e.g. baseball, pitcher).
We recommend you don’t enter anything into this box until you know for certain that you want to exclude it.
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By: Duncan Morris
How does Reputation Monitor work?
Reputation Monitor is a tool that helps you keep on top of what is said about you online. It is important for any company to track what is being said about them online in order to protect their brand.
Reputation monitor allows you to enter searches that indicate a story is about you. For most people this is likely to be your company name (e.g. apple or distilled), your product name (e.g. ipod or reputation monitor) and a company spokesperson (e.g. steve jobs or will critchlow) (Just an excuse to mention Will in the same sentence as steve jobs!). Once we have these phrases we monitor a number of rss feeds on your behalf. We are going to continue adding feeds to improve the results, but already the feeds we monitor include:
By monitoring these feeds we get a list of articles that are potentially about you or your brand. In reality, there is a load of garbage mixed in that isn’t about you, and that you really don’t want to have to sift through. What reputation monitor does is to grade each page it finds with the likelihood that the piece is about you.
There are two ways you can see the results, the first is to log in, and see the results in your browser. By viewing your results this way you can re-order them if required and filter on our score.
In our opinion, the best way to see the results is to subscribe to an rss feed that we publish. This rss feed will show you all the blog posts we have found that are above a threshold score that you have defined.
That, in a nutshell is how reputation monitor works. We are always trying to improve the tool so please let us know anything that would help you monitor your reputation online?
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By: Duncan Morris
What is online reputation monitoring?
With the growth of the internet has come the growth of social media and user generated content. Put simply, this means there are now more people than ever that are potentially reading and writing about you or your company. The audience for this content provides an enormous opportunity but also an enormous risk. The reason that reputation monitoring is so important is that with one negative or incorrect mention of your company this audience could ruin your brand taking with it all the time and effort you have spent building it up in the first place.
You brand should be one of the most important things to your company. Being aware of any negative or incorrect articles about your company could be the difference between a story that fizzles out or one that sweeps round the internet destroying your brand in the process. If nothing else the time and effort it would take to re-build your brand should be incentive enough to monitor each mention of your company so you can respond where necessary.
Of course the brand we are talking about may not be a company name or a product, but could be the name of a individual.
There are a host of great articles that go into a bit more depth, such as
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By: Distilled
Welcome to the Distilled Blog. Here we will be posting news and updates about our new project Reputation Monitor
Distilled is a small, but rapidly growing web design and search marketing company, based in Waterloo, London. Initially Will Critchlow, and Duncan Morris will be the hosts of this blog, but in time, we may well get others involved.
Anyway, we hope you’ll subscribe to the RSS feed and signup to Reputation Monitor (you can also signup in Dollars).
Regards
Duncan
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