Ten years ago, word-of-mouth marketing was simple. Businesses would treat their customers well, enjoy the referral business and ongoing attention they offered, and create an organic network of loyal, friendly customers. The typical customer base – particularly for offline businesses – was relatively small, and the rewards of success significantly less lucrative than they are today.
Then social media became a reality. Companies that were once ‘too small’ for long-term branding efforts became thrust into the limelight, empowered by online user reviews and granted thousands of loyal customers through passionate discussions and online exposure. More than anything else, the exponential growth made possible by social media built some of today’s most profitable and well-known online companies.
But it also left thousands of businesses unable to control their reputation. The offline world gave small providers security; without the multi-million-dollar revenue and star talent required to feature in a business magazine, there was little chance of their business ever seeing real public attention.
Now, with the cost of publishing hovering just above zero, the potential for businesses to be subject to online conjecture is greater than ever before. Major companies and small local businesses alike are equally able to be publicly praised, blamed, or shamed for their actions – occasionally forced to deal with inaccurate stories and utterly nonsensical anonymous claims.
These twelve tools have a single focus: helping you control, measure, and moderate your company’s brand or online image. Some are statistical, others visual, and others built around old fashioned survey data and market research efforts. All are effective, especially when paired with a customer-focused company and a marketer willing to foster discussion.
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Google Alerts is one of our favourite discussion monitoring tools. A simple application with a light business focus, Google Alerts allows its users to set up content monitoring alerts for certain phrases, search terms, or multimedia content. It’s user-friendly, remarkably simple, and has the potential to dramatically change how a business operates, especially when paired with a savvy operator.
We recommend that businesses start slow on their Google Alerts efforts, tracking major phrases and popular search keywords and only responding when absolutely necessary. With a month of statistics and search information under your belt, it’s easy to gain a realistic and balanced perspective of your business’s online reputation and support base.
Think of Google Alerts as a maintenance tool; a non-specific and general option for monitoring buzz and measuring how popular your company is online. It’s easy to live and die by the data Alerts generates, though it’s not a particularly sound PR strategy. Set up once-per-week alerts and you’ll gain useful information on your image, without affecting productivity or business output.
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What makes Social Mention deserving of our number two spot? Their own website puts it best, advertising the service as “like Google Alerts but for social media.” Social Mention is a simple search tool with a specific focus: giving individuals and corporate entities the ability to view any and all discussions about them through blogs and social media platforms.
What separates Social Mention from Google’s similar service is its deeper analytical monitoring options. Alerts offers users the ability to check when and where their brand was mentioned; Social Mention gives users tools to measure the depth at which their brand was discussed, the passion of users involved, and the likelihood that the discussion will continue.
The service is available through its website or as a convenient Mozilla Firefox search plugin. While the search plugin will save time for power users, we don’t recommend installing it if productivity is of great importance. Set up a once-weekly alert using Social Mention and you’ll gain a clean weekly discussion summary, without the potentially addictive always-on power of the browser plugin.
3. Omgili
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There’s more to online conversation that just social media. Discussion groups and online forums have been mainstays of internet conversation for the better part of two decades, and remain some of the most active and potentially lucrative places for online marketers to be.
Unfortunately, they’re also some of the most difficult platforms to monitor. Forum software often ends up buried in Google’s search results, locked down due to a lack of page authority and limited keyword density. Similarly, discussion groups are often barred from public display, giving users few choices for interacting with company reps and spokespeople on their own platform.
Omgili aims to cut down on the ambiguity surrounding discussion forums. It’s a do-all discussion board search engine, and it’s a vital tool for ensuring that your business is up-to-date with how it’s publicly perceived. Social media platforms and aggregator may make up the bulk of light discourse about your company, but it’s forum threads that have the power to make or break your image.
4. TweetMeme
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TweetMeme is a news aggregation website with a twist – instead of taking user submissions from all over the internet, it archives and displays content only from Twitter. This gives it some unique value for marketers; not only does it bring together stories that have the potential to be about your brand, it gives your business a list of hot topics to work into social discussion.
We like to think of TweetMeme as Twitter’s very own Digg. Paying attention to the front page is a great way to stay up to date with the internet’s most important news, but it’s far from a substitute for true interaction. Browse through different sections of the website and you’ll gain an understanding of different industries and possibly inspiration for a few blog posts.
What you’re unlikely to gain, however, is a deep understanding of what your users are talking about regularly. We recommend using TweetMeme to search for power users to monitor independently in the future. Type your brand, business name, or product into the search occasionally, then use the results to shape your Google Alerts and Omgili email alert preferences.
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When it comes to passive reputation monitoring, there’s little Google Blog Search can provide that Alerts and Social Mention haven’t already covered. However, Blog Search can be a powerful tool for actively checking up on blogger coverage and monitoring how effective your own promotional efforts have been.
Need to check how viral a company blog post has become? Use Google Blog Search to monitor coverage using your company’s trading name and the post’s title. A quick one-off search can reveal hundreds of results, each built around keywords that your Google Alerts account configuration may otherwise leave unrecorded.
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Few online businesses need more than the most basic in reputation management – a quick scan using Google Blog Search and a weekly keyword alert is enough to keep their public face under control and their discussion relatively useful. However, large businesses can often have difficulty dealing with the sheer amount of discussion they generate, finding basic tools almost completely useless for monitoring meta discussions and overall coverage.
Nielsen are most well known for their TV ratings, but it’s their NetRatings monitoring software that’s attracted the attention of hundreds of major online companies. If your business prefers to deal with public attention in a ‘big picture’ sense, the NetRatings software suite could provide the most useful and actionable data of any online service.
7. HowSociable
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HowSociable is one of our favourite social media reporting tools. It’s simple, effective, and perfect for gaining the initial information required for a complete social media monitoring campaign. Type in your company’s (or product’s) name and you’ll be hit with a series of numbers, each outlining your visibility level across different social media outlets.
This allows you to gain a quick, simple, and non-intrusive summary of your brand’s online power and marketing worth. It also allows you to separate the social good from the bad; if your products aren’t aimed at consumers but at other businesses, HowSociable allows you to view how much of your online coverage is coming specifically from business-focused social networks.
8. WordPress
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WordPress is more than a mere online publishing platform. The popular content management system has gained a huge following amongst webmasters and marketers, and its immense power as a social media monitoring tool is certainly a reason for its success. WordPress includes a number of features of immense value for marketers by default, including a basic analytics tool and trackback summary function.
Before you launch any conversation-focused marketing campaign, ensure that your website is fitted with basic tracking and analytics tools. A blank WordPress installation is the ideal place to start; add Google’s Analytics package to your website and you’ll have a comprehensive platform for checking which parts of your campaign are and aren’t effective.
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If you want to avoid the intricacies of specialised software, Twitter’s own advanced search page is a great place to start monitoring discussion about your brand or products. The Advanced Search page includes operators to help customize and refine searches by location, date, and even the approval (or disapproval) of the person tweeting the information.
Users can further refine their searches to include tweets with outbound links, messages which have since been retweeted, or tweets which included a topic-specific hashtag or @ command. Thanks to Twitter’s open API and developer-friendly attitude, the Twitter search engine is available in several other applications, giving you a simple and ultra-specific discussion search whenever you need it.
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Created in 2006 and refined over the past four years to keep up with current social media trends, Reputation Defender is a simple reputation management tool with a focus on individuals and family users. Prices start from $14 monthly and give users basic coverage of their online identity, emailing weekly reports based on blog posts, public coverage, and their personal Google search results.
While we suspect that Reputation Defender’s abilities could easily be replicated with free tools, the software’s low price and simple usability make it a worthwhile option for freelancers aiming to keep their reputation shiny and free of worry. If the small monthly cost isn’t a problem, this software suite could spell the difference between a major contract and a missed opportunity.
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Visible Technologies isn’t an analytics service per se, but the developer behind a series of useful and business-friendly online monitoring applications. Our favourite is truPULSE – a social media analytics application which gives users instant access to online discussions, demographic data, and mainstream media outlet coverage.
It also allows users to monitor and control their social media profiles from one control centre – a particularly useful feature given the amount of profiles often required for complete social media interaction. Items can be monitored, posted, and stored in a easy-to-read RSS feed or offline report.
Pair truPULSE with a dedicated social media assistant and you’ll gain a powerful understanding of just how your company is covered and discussed online. Thanks to its simple reporting and display options, this application suite is one of our favourites for monitoring data independently and sharing with an organisation.
12. Tweetvolume
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Tweetvolume is online analytics made simple. Built by a team of marketing consultants and powered by Twitter’s own application programming interface, this ultra-simple web application searches Twitter for three popular phrases at a time, returning conversation data and giving business owners an idea of how frequently their products or services are discussed.
While not particularly useful for dedicated online marketers and reputation management specialists, Tweetvolume is a simple tool for gaining a very basic understanding of how often your products are talked about. We recommend searching once weekly, giving you an infrequent and productive way to check how popular and favourable your business has become online.
