Free Online Monitoring Tools for Online Reputation Management Part 1

ORMAdmin — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 22:59:59 +0000

A large part of online reputation management is ensuring you are keeping up to date about what is said on the web about your company. Of course, the web is no small network of sites so manually doing this would be a difficult task and require regular (and extensive) various searches on Google to check what is being said about your brand. But luckily there are some (free + paid) tools that do the bulk of the work for you and monitor & search the web for mentions of your brand name(s).

Google Alerts

One of the greatest, most well known and probably most well used tools is Google's Alerts. Google has thousands of computer servers scanning the web for new content for its search engine and you can set it up so when it finds new (or updated) pages about a certain topic (keyword), it emails you.

You can select to have it email you as it finds things, or daily/weekly digests. Generally it will find most things that are posted. But given the size of the web it can't find everything so it is recommended to rely upon other tools to monitor keywords on the web.

Backtype

As of the time of writing (Sept 2011) Backtype is being acquired by Twitter, so this may change for better or for worse. But at the moment you can use it to search Twitter for your company mentions. They index a massive part of Twitter and if your company URL, twitter account or hash tag is mentioned you can be sure to find it via backtype.

Monitter

This is another tool that works with Twitter - Monitter. Enter your keyword (e.g. your company name) and it gives you a real time feed that continuously updates of the latest tweets mentioning that word. This can be very handy if there are lots of mentions for your company every day. If there are only a few mentions a day, not so much.

BoardTracker

Rather than search the usual social networking sites, Board Tracker tries to index and search as many forums and message boards as possible. You can search by keyword and it searches it massive database of posts. You can set up email alerts too.

What is Online Reputation Management?

ORMAdmin — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 23:29:06 +0000

Online Reputation Management is a somewhat new term (within the last five years or so) that is becoming more and more crucial for businesses. To boil it down to its basics, it is stopping business customers finding 'bad' reviews or pages about that business.

Typically it will be things such as a review site (or local directory with user comments) where there is an unfair (in the eyes of the business) post. This negative post will often be on the first page of search engines like Google and potential customers may see it. So the idea behind Online Reputation Management (ORM) is to try and stop those negative posts and pages appearing in the first few pages of search engines. (People very rarely go past the first few pages in search engines so the main and initial focus is often to get these negative pages away from the first page of Google, Bing, Yahoo etc).

This is distinctly different than SEO - search engine optimisation. They share a lot of common methods but the end result is completely different. If a company wanted to optimise their site for search engines they would ensure THEIR site was 'higher up' in search engines (position #1 when searching for their keywords). Online reputation management is the act of ensuring the OTHER websites DON'T show in the top results for certain keywords. I.e. ORM is more about hiding other sites. SEO is about making sure your site is found.