Do you want to know what is being said about you and your brand online? If you do, you should be aware that anyone can influence how the general public views your brand. It is really easy for anyone to post anything about you on various social networks, blogs, microblogs, forums, and any other Web 2.0 channels. It is becoming a daily routine for many businesses online to monitor these conversations taking place.
Due to the overwhelming complexity and size of the web, and with the speed at which news travels, it is difficult to constantly monitor what is being said online. This is a huge problem for many, but if you want to solve this problem, you need a ORM (Online Reputation Management) strategy in place which serves as an early warning system to alert you of all the news regarding your brand. This can also help you respond and remedy where needed.
There are many ORM monitoring systems available online that can do this for you. These ORM systems informs you of all the information and news related to your brand and can also help you gather market insight and intelligence. A proper ORM solution is not just for monitoring your own brand online, but also to monitor current trends and statistics.
These monitoring systems can be quite expensive, but if you want to start monitoring your personal and brand name online, here’s a couple of tips to help you manually monitor your reputation online.
Monitor your reputation online
- Setup Yahoo Alerts and Google Alerts to send you a message as soon as your name is mentioned online.
- Use various blog aggregators such as Technorati to watch for your brand name mentions in blogs.
- Search for your brand name on Google Blog Search and save the results as an RSS Feed that you can subscribe to.
- Track for all mentions of your organization name, product names, brand names and key employee names.
- Monitor industry related websites and do a search for your competitors.
Online monitoring service
Once you have set up an online monitoring service in place for your brand, you should be able to track and research other relevant information such as competing brands, industry related terms, and general news related to your industry.
Monitoring your brand online can give you immediate feedback as the information appears. Monitoring is useful and important for controlling what people are saying about you online. Unfortunately, online monitoring is not enough. Sometimes, when you see your company name mentioned online with a negative comment by an angry customer, the damage is already done and you should counter the negative comment with a positive and honest one.
The best way to build up your reputation online so that the positive comments and mentions out weights the negative ones, is to actively control your space online. It is very important that you analyze your current space online in order to take the necessary action to control it.
I have found that Google Alerts is more accurate than Yahoo alerts. By checking manually is the best way to monitor your reputation online.
That is true Assif, but depending on the size and reach of your business, to manually check your brand reputation is not always possible. Investing in a proper ORM strategy and system can help you.