Brand Monitoring

7:54 pm in Small Business Social Media by admin

Brand Monitoring

Overview: Corporate Reputation

Although an immense majority of consumers purchases products and services offline, they make use of the Internet to research, obtain opinions, and read reviews of other consumers in order to come up with buying decisions.

As different forms of social media and consumer-generated media continue to grow, information about products and services are generated and listed rapidly in search engines.  Thus, most leaders in business have determined the need to monitor and do something with what is said about them online whether positive or negative.  It pays to listen and read about feedbacks regarding your company, products/services, or brands so that action can be taken as well as resolve and deal with any issues that can make or break your corporate reputation.

Corporate reputation is a vital factor considered by most successful organizations.  Having a positive reputation yields confidence, trust, and profitability while a bad reputation reduces the opportunity for profits and decreases confidence in consumers.  Today, unfair opinions, erroneous rumors, bad news, and malicious gossip are rampant as the Internet provides various types of information in great speed.  For some companies, it can be difficult to deal with negative feedbacks from the Internet due to speedy distribution of information.

Online Reputation

Prior to the advancement of the Internet, distribution of information was slow, which makes it easier for companies and organizations to develop their responses against negative news about them.  Today, with the continuous growth of social and consumer-generated media websites, the public can easily air out their opinions and views, which can either mark a positive or negative reputation to a company or brand.  More often than not, consumers give their confidence to published views and opinions in order to make their buying decisions.  Every view, feedback, or information from the Internet, which is obtained by potential clients, can affect a company’s reputation as well as the buying decisions of consumers.

Nowadays, consumers make use of search engines for obtaining information while companies and organizations hope to be on the top positions of search engine results.  Consumers make use of search engines to gather significant information in order to help them make buying decisions.  However, if the information they gather associated with your company or brand is unfavorable, it can greatly impact their buying decisions.  Ultimately, negative information can affect your company in various aspects such as financials, image, investor relations, recruitment, sales, and corporate reputation.

Brand Monitoring Tools

Brand Monitoring tools are referred to as systems that monitor and analyze consumer-generated media, publicity, search engine indexing and ranking, and overall web presence of a company.  These tools are used in order to protect as well as manage your reputation through active involvement in search engine results.  The primary purpose of reputation management tools is to obtain high ranking and indexing in prominent search engines for positive corporate communications and websites.

When it comes to brand monitoring, several different reputation management tools can be used to protect your company and brand.  These include the following:

  • Using websites such as Technorati and Feedster for monitoring your company and brand in blogs
  • Tracking names including company names, brand names, product names, and employee names
  • Seting up Yahoo and Google Alerts for monitoring the use of your brands and company name in the news
  • Customizing RSS readers for monitoring brand
  • Monitoring websites related to the industry you belong to

These brand monitoring tools can address the problem of negative publicity through early warning systems that alert you on any news associated with your company and brand so that you can resolve any problem immediately.  These monitoring systems also help you assess developing trends as well as obtain market intelligence.

In the event that you have already chosen the most suitable tool for your company and brand, you would be able to track more information including industry terms, competing companies and brands, and general news about the industry.  Monitoring through proper use of brand monitoring tools allows you to control any adverse or negative information within the range of your space in search engines.

Other brand monitoring tools that you can use to monitor social and consumer-generated media include Radian6, Scout Labs, and BrandsEye.  The most important features of Radian6 include real-time alerts, workflow improvement through its conversation sidebar, comments section, and graphing sentiment.  Scout Labs, on the other hand, is a cheaper tool for managing your online reputation as compared to Radian6.  The features of Scout Labs include useful dashboard and tools for graphing that generate real-time analytics.  Finally, BrandsEye is the cheapest among the three tools mentioned.  Its features include bookmarked and saved items that are discovered, fine-tuning results, monitoring brands, employees, competitors, and executives, receiving alerts through Email or RSS, and tracking sentiment and trends.

On the other hand, apart from monitoring consumer-generated media, you should also analyze your current search engine space so that you can act upon it.  Analyzing the information affecting your company and brand is just as important as monitoring such information.  Your space in search engines is changing constantly due to additional websites that are involved in search engines.  Thus, you have to gain understanding of your competition as well as the environment of search engines.

The process of analyzing your search engine space involves looking at the websites that are listed in search engine results for your company or brand.  Make your own list of those websites based on the information they provide, that is, either positive or negative.  After which, discern the types of each website whether they are blog, forum, and review sites among others.  Provide a value for each website based on the degree of influence they make on consumers and Internet users.

After categorizing the websites, it is time for you to nourish your online assets.  Online assets include websites, which you can utilize to top search engine results.  These include your corporate site, product sites, sister sites, employee blogs, corporate blogs, partner sites, and corporate communications.

  • Corporate Site – You can improve your corporate website to reach the top ranking by making sure it is fully search engine-optimized.  If you have several brand websites, make sure you provide equal attention as your corporate site.  All of your company websites should appear at the top ranking either for your brand or company name.
  • Sister Sites/Micro Sites – If you have sister websites or micro sites, make sure that they have an optimized page that talks about your corporate website.
  • Employee Blogs – You can make your employee blogs optimized for search engines in order to reflect your company or brand.
  • Corporate Blogs – These blogs can have the goal of supporting a particular business department such as customer service.
  • Partner Sites – These websites can be your suppliers, retailers, and distributors among others.  You can ask them to include information about your brand or company.
  • Corporate Communications – Make sure that you have a system of publishing all communications relevant to your company or brand including articles, press releases, case studies, testimonials, and white papers among others.  Make sure that you publish them in pages of your website and are search engine-optimized.  You can also publish your corporate communications to online wire services or online industry publications.

Finally, managing your corporate reputation involves influencing the results through active participation in conversations and discarding negative websites.  Apart from monitoring social and consumer-generated media and analyzing search engine space, it is also important to be able to influence conversations relevant to your company and brand.  Make sure that you are able to participate actively in every opportunity you come across with so that the consumers’ perception of your brand and company would improve.  It is also much better if you could lead the conversations related to your company and brand.

When and Where to Use Brand Monitoring Tools

Brand monitoring tools can be used in sources of reputation problems and opportunities.  The sources of reputation problems and opportunities include the following:

  • Consumer complaint sites
  • Competitor attacks
  • Counterfeit products
  • Blogs, forums, and consumer opinion sites
  • Social network sites
  • Counter-intelligence

Consumer complaint websites are also known as flame, attack, or boycott sites that are established to attack companies and brands.  Thus, you can make use of brand monitoring tools such as Yahoo and Google Alerts to monitor such websites.  These sites are organized and should be dealt with as soon as you have been alerted.

From the name itself, competitor attacks come from your competitors that have intense interest of pulling your business down.  They can conduct undercover tactics that smear your reputation.  More so, competitor attacks may be in the form of consumer-generated media or social media.  As such, you can use tools such as Board Reader.  Board Reader features quick links to alter sorting of results and refine results bar.

Counterfeit products are products that pose as part of your brand or product offering.  These products often have low quality and can damage your business by losing sales as well as harming both your brand and company reputation.  You can monitor counterfeit products by using Serph. Serph features crisis management alerts, blog posts versus comments, social media comparison, and social media differentiation.

Blogs, forums, and consumer opinion websites are the most prominent websites used by most consumers to obtain information about your company or brand.  Blogs can generate and influence the views of readers.  It can be challenging to manage your reputation on blogs because information is exchanged quickly.  Nowadays, blogs are millions in number and have become the most dominant form of consumer-generated media.  Even small blogs or unpopular blogs have links to large blogs sites that in turn, supply leads to every kind of media.  On the other hand, industry forums can also damage your reputation if you would not be able to monitor them.  Forums are usually based on categories.  Various posts can be generated including developments, issues, and news regarding the industry you belong to.  These posts encourage conversations and discussions, which make it fatal for your business specifically if negative comments are posted.  In addition, consumer opinion websites are established for soliciting feedbacks from consumers about specific products/services, companies, and brands.  Consumer opinion is important and significant for most consumers specifically when making their buying decisions.  Most consumers consider such opinions valuable and informative.  As such, these websites should be carefully dealt with and monitored.  You can use Technorati, BlogPulse, or GoogleBlogSearch to monitor blog, forum, and consumer opinion websites.  Technorati features individual blog search, subscribing to search feeds, brower and OS plug-ins, and subscribing to tag feeds.  BlogPulse features basic and advanced search engine tracking, conversation tracker, and buzz tracker among others.  GoogleBlogSearch features RSS and Atom Feeds, Hot Queries, iGoogle Gadget, and latest posts.

Consequently, you should be able to build a working relationship with the contributors of forums and blogs so that you can actively participate in the conversations.  It is a fact that you should not hide the truth to consumers.  This is one principle that reputation management aims to uphold.  You should always be honest when participating in online conversations.  You can do this by responding directly to critics.  Thus, instead of losing the confidence of consumers, you counter-attack your critics by telling the truth.

It would be much better if you can send or present your critics with evidence that clarifies the issue at hand.  This is specifically applicable if inaccuracies in the blogs or forums are posted against your company or brand.  If you reflect truthfulness and pursue conversation with your critics and contributors of forums and blogs, readers will gain confidence in you.

Social network websites are popular websites that generate a great amount of traffic everyday.  Social network websites include Facebook, Multiply, MySpace, and Twitter among others.  More often than not, participants in this type of website share a common interest.  Thus, endorsements of products/services, companies, or brands are highly shared among members.  These social network websites should be carefully monitored since they can be powerful instruments that can either ruin or promote your brand.  You can make use of HowSociable, Collective Intellect, and Addict-o-Matic for monitoring social network websites.  HowSociable features non-stop monitoring and multi-protocol support.  Collect Intellect features simple and easy-to-read user interface that provides traders a quick view of what is currently happening with industries; hosted desktop; email delivery; real-time feeds from message boards, blogs, and other kinds of unstructured data; minute-by-minute refreshing or contents; and inherent methods for search refinement.  Addict-o-Matic features bookmarks that can be personalized based on your preference; quick identification of information and news from various sources; ability of user to suggest sources in addition to what it has on its list; makes use of RSS feed to gather information; and provides information from more than 200 blogs.

It is inevitable that even the most confidential information about your company, brand, or products/services can be revealed on the Web.  This can happen through an error of your employee, which can be malicious or intentional.  You should be able to monitor such leaks in order to protect your business.

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