I just read Kelvin’s post on Marketing Pilgrim about Gordon Brown’s reputation management. Worth a read.

We have toyed with doing a reputation wars between two politicians, but we need to improve our tools a little bit first. At the moment, reputation monitor is slightly better suited to monitoring companies and brands than high profile individuals (unless those individuals live online and have an obvious website people link to when talking about them - it works pretty well for tracking mentions of me, for example).

The main problem we face when tracking mentions of companies and brands is whether they are actually about the company or brand we want to track rather than something else with a similar name. When you are talking about someone like Gordon Brown or Tony Blair, most mentions of someone with that name are going to be them and the challenge instead becomes working out which mentions are particularly significant and also how positive or negative they are.

Sentiment analysis revisited

Automatically understanding the sentiment of a mention is something I have talked about before. It’s something we would definitely like to get into reputation monitor. We are working on it and we’ll probably write more here about the challenges as we go along. Wish us luck!

US Presidential election reputation management

Also on Marketing Pilgrim, is a reputation study they have done on the 2008 Presidential Election Candidates which looks interesting. I don’t know how they pulled that together, but I’m betting a bit of automated sentiment analysis would have helped!

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