Brand Reputation Monitoring: No Longer an Afterthought

Thanks in large part to the growth of social media (see image below), monitoring your brand reputation online is no longer a "nice to have" program but an essential part of any business operation. The benefits of proper monitoring are gained by understanding both positive and negative discussions about your company on the internet. For instance, in the social web 2.0 world, many brand mentions are time-sensitive opportunities for social engagement, whether to strengthen a positive discussion or mitigate a negative PR crisis. Ignoring or delaying an engagement opportunity can have negative impact on your brand's reputation.

*Social Media Growth: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter

However, the number of sources that allow publishing user-generated content is immense (and growing!). The discussion could happen anywhere. Combine this with the dissemination of information via the new so-called "real-time web" and you have a real challenge as you monitor your brand's reputation. Now, information is not only being generated and published in real time, but it is also instantly searchable.

Twitter is currently the real-time posting, browsing and searching tool du jour, but Google has been implementing its own real-time search capabilities. For example, this blog post will come up in Google's general web search results within 15 minutes of being posted. (Oddly, there is a longer delay in Google blog search.)

So, on the list of ways to look at brand reputation we have social networks, news sites, social bookmarking, blogs (and blog comments), audio/video/image sharing, online forums, Q&A, message boards and microblogs! I probably missed one or two categories, but the point is obvious: It's an impossible task trying to manually monitor all of these properties. The good news is when there is a business pain (and this can be a big one), a visionary entrepreneur with a solution will be right behind trying to fix it for you. And, in the case of brand monitoring, there have been more than a few tools developed to help.

Over the years I have used many brand monitoring tools. Here is a basic list of good services that should get you going in the right direction:

• Techrigy: A great service that has come a long way since its founders started it in a basement three years ago. It has been referred to as "Google Alerts on steroids" and has more great features than I can mention here. Not only can you see trending graphs over time, but you can also drill down into a specific date.
• Social Mention: I really like this tool, but it still needs some work. Social Mention covers numerous social networking and media properties. Options in search results are blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news, video, audio and Q&A, or you can search all of these and get combined results. However, the service needs to fix the ‘results by time' filter, which currently doesn't work. It's also a little frustrating when attempting to view time-based queries. What I would like to see is some graphing capability so I can see trends over specific periods of time.
• Google Alerts: A decent service that many use, but the quality of the results is generally not strong. Once you sign-up, links to new documents are sent to you via email. This one is a must-have since it's Google, but I'm surprised they haven't done a better job with this.
• RSS Readers: Google Reader (web), Viigo (BlackBerry). Since I am a heavy Blackberry user my preference is Viigo. The service provides a great starter RSS list and you can choose more from their well-categorized menu. In addition to standard blog RSS, Viigo allows you to setup custom search feeds on specific terms. For example, a search term for "IntraLinks" could be setup through Google, Bing or Yahoo. New items will be marked next time I use the application and I can save items for later reading.

This list is by no means complete, but a good starter for brands which are currently free. (Note: Techrigy falls in the ‘freemium' category). When your budget allows, paid monitoring services are also great options. Some of the well-known paid services are Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Buzz Logic, Cymfony, Trackur and CIC Data (focuses on buzz, brand and word-of-mouth monitoring in China).

While the world of social media has made monitoring your brand a bigger challenge, there are plenty of tools out there to help. Having easy access to alerting and monitoring services makes sure there is no excuse for not knowing what is being said about your brand. I wonder: How soon it will take the brands I just mentioned to respond?