Latest news
Online reputation and buzz monitoring: gold dust or fools' gold?
The infant online reputation and buzz monitoring industry is taking bold steps towards maturity. But before you decide which specialist agency to work with, get to grips with the wide range of free online tools available, advises Chris Reed.
Oscar Wilde famously said that the only thing worse than being talked about was not being talked about. With Google now returning almost 12 million pages which mention him, he would no doubt feel comfortable with his levels of notoriety. But how do you know which of those pages are worth looking at?
Unfortunately, navigating the maze of services that have popped up over recent years to help you track what people are saying online (and even feeling and thinking) about your brand, issues and competitors can be both confusing and misleading.
There are literally hundreds of services providing different combinations of overlapping, complementary and competing offers. As with any infant industry, some offer gold dust, and others just fools’ gold.
Before engaging a specialist reputation management agency, first think about which of the free online tools can best help you assess the online buzz, and spend some time getting familiar with them.
Many of the free tools, especially when used in combination with each other, can help generate a well-rounded view of what is happening to your brand’s reputation online.
To help track the basics, free tools available include:
· Google blog search and Google news which both deliver as-it-happens coverage on RSS feeds
· Technorati , which, despite some recent ups and downs, illustrates the relative importance and authority of a particular blog based on the number of inbound links
· Blogpulse offers a very useful trend search facility, as well as keyword searching
· Yahoo Pipes , which is much more technical, can trawl through pretty much every web2.0 site and delivers results into an rss feed
· The search engines built into Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Del.icio.us are also really useful
· However if all you want is an at-a-glance search, you can’t go wrong with Adictomatic – complete with cute robot, which simultaneously searches the search engines for you.
These tools are improving. They can be pretty time-consuming to set up but the effort taken to do so will soon be rewarded.
A number of companies are now looking to provide more holistic and in-depth monitoring services which package the information available in a more user friendly way. These paid-for tools are getting better, though they’re not perfect yet.
e-consultancy, the publisher of internet market reports, recently published its “Online Reputation and Buzz Monitoring Buyer’s Guide” (subscription required), a thorough review of the services offered by online reputation and buzz monitoring agencies.
Before engaging an agency, be clear about what you want to find out. We carried out a similar review last year to decide which suppliers to work with and recommending asking these sorts of questions.
· How big is their data set? What blogs, messages boards and media do they check? Over what timescale can they look back?
· How often do they update their service? How quick are they to innovate, and offer new tools – particularly things you (or your client) might suggest?
· How easy is it to drill down from top level information to get to the individual blogs which might illustrate what the data is telling you?
· Where are they based and how is their customer service? In this international marketplace a provider on the other side of the world who does exactly what you want may be a better fit than someone on your doorstep
· How do they present the results? Do they make it relatively easy to demonstrate the results to people who are not familiar with blogs, Twitter or online forums? Will they help you, and your colleagues, illustrate the relative importance of posts or comments?
Once you’ve got the right agency on board, the second half of the task is identify the data that you need and present it in a way that will inform you. Perhaps nowhere is the adage of “too much data, too little information” more likely to be true. There is an art to working with, and analysing, the results to ensure you understand the sentiment, and to prevent data-blindness.
Regardless of how sophisticated the software that filters the data, there is no substitute for intelligent professionals who understand your business objectives as the starting point. They will be able to estimate the importance of the sentiment and irony, and identify the mis-identification of a brand name in a way that even the most sophisticated programme simply can’t.
Once the artificial intelligence has sifted the results, it’s time for the PR intelligence to get under the skin of the findings and present the results in a relevant and useful way that will help you and others decide how to prioritise.
So, Oscar Wilde. If you’re reading this, and want to know what people really think of you, do get in touch.