Brand Monitoring

The simple way to find out what people are saying about your brand is to simply create a Google Alert so that you’ll get an email anytime your brand name is mentioned.

However, Google Alerts are limited – and aren’t designed to be an online brand management tool. That’s why you need to use a variety of online tools to find out what people are saying.

Here are the steps you need to take:

How to Choose Keywords to Monitor

When developing a method to monitor what people are saying about your brand(s) on the web, it’s important to think about all the various keywords people might be using.

Here are some keywords to think about monitoring:

  • All your brand names
  • Trademarks/copyrights
  • Clients
  • Competitors
  • Spokesperson
  • CEO (and other executives)
  • Products
  • Common misspellings, typos
  • Company name abbreviations or initials

After you develop your list of keywords, it’s time to decide where and what you’d like to monitor.

Where to Monitor Your Online Reputation

If you’re online reputation is important to you, it’s important to monitor all of the following on a daily basis:

  • Blogs (particularly industry-related blogs)
  • Twitter
  • Social Media Sites
  • Social networks (MySpace, Facebook)
  • Wikipedia
  • Blog Comments
  • Message Boards, Forums, Threads
  • Consumer Websites (RipOffReport, Consumerist)
  • Article sites
  • Video Sites (YouTube, Moveo)
  • Photo Sites (Flickr, Google Picasa)
  • Tags

So here are some simple ways to monitor, archive, and manage your online reputation:

Start an account with an RSS reader
I recommend using Google Reader, but there are dozens of free ones to choose from; including: Bloglines, Rojo, Fastladder, NewsAlloy. Make sure to use an RSS reader that will let your organize and create new feeds, which is why Google Reader is one of the best free options.

The RSS reader will allow you to easily subscribe to the following content:

Monitoring Blogs

Monitoring Comments

Monitoring Twitter

Message Boards, Forums & Threads

Social Media

News Search

Other Media to Monitor

Other

Online Reputation Services

With the advent of Atom and RSS feeds, it’s very easy to monitor where and when your brand name is mentioned online with a feed reader.

However, this can be a time-consuming process – especially with the potentially hundreds of mentions of your brand name online (and countless spam sites and pages unrelated to you).

Thankfully, there are a wide-variety of services that can help you monitor your online reputation:

BuzzLogic
BuzzLogic is a company that helps enables marketers and publishers to tap into online influence to create and execute effective social media strategies. In essence, BuzzLogic enables its customers to pin-point who is influencing the online dialogue specific to the topics related to the company, then either market directly to those influencers, or reach their audiences though targeted advertising.

Collective Intellect
Collective Intellect specializes in comprehensively tracking, filtering and ranking media content for the Fortune 500. The founders have worked in Business Intelligence for years, creating tools to solve the problem of filtering unstructured information.

Copyscape
Copyscape provides brand managers with an easy way to track websites that are stealing and/or duplicating content.  As you know, web plagiarism is a growing problem, and the sooner you can find and stop a webmaster from stealing your content — the better.

Lexalytics
Lexalytics has developed technology to extract metadata from any document source, allowing companies to analyze, understand and react to information from outside sources or from within their own company. Lexalytics’ suite of products and services offers the ability to extract entities and relationships from various content, summarize information and determine the sentiment or tone of any source.

Nielsen BuzzMetrics
Nielsen BuzzMetrics is the global measurement standard in Consumer-Generated Media. With solid data-mining technology, superb research and Nielsen’s unrivaled experience in media measurement and client services, we help today’s companies, brands and business professionals better understand the influence and impact of CGM on products, issues, reputation and image.

Scout Labs
Scout Labs allows users to track brands and reactions to those brands. In essence, the company helps companies make sense of the mass of positive and negative things that are said about their brands in blogs, user generated videos, and images. The company is currently in private beta, some companies involved in beta testing with Scout Labs include CBS, eBay, AvenueA/Razorfish and BBDO West

Techrigy
Techrigy’s products enable organizations to know what’s being said about their brands, products and people across the social media eco-system. Techrigy’s SM2 solution enables organizations to monitor and analyze conversations, including sentiment, across blogs, social networks, wikis, online video and other user-generated content on the web. Ultimately, Techrigy helps organizations embrace social media, manage risk and identify market trends in real time. Techrigy was founded in 2006 by Aaron Newman and Jay Mari, both experts in enterprise security. Visit us in Rochester, NY

Trackur
Trackur is an online reputation monitoring tool designed to assist you in tracking what is said about you on the internet. Trackur scans hundreds of millions of web pages–including news, blogs, video, images, and forums–and lets you know if it discovers anything that matches the keywords that interest you.

Trendpedia
Trendpedia finds trends in social media. Trendpedia searches online and finds the articles that talk about your topics. Trendpedia organizes the articles in a trendline that shows the popularity of the topic over time.

Visible Technologies
Visible Technologies is a company that helps corporations manage their online reputations by becoming more aware of and responsive to user generated media on the net. Visible Technologies was started in 2003. Since 2003, they’ve expanded into offices in New York, Seattle, and Boston. The company employs a diverse group of over 60 professionals, with decades of online technology and social media skills.