As you’re reading this article, almost certainly someone is discussing or talking about you or your brand somewhere on the internet. Hence, it is very important to monitor search engine result pages, blogs, reviews/ratings, social networking and news websites for keywords related to your company.

This practice is called Online Reputation Management (ORM). I’m not going to describe the benefits of ORM as there are some good articles on this subject and a free guide too.

We understand that online reputaion management can be extremely time consuming, and unless you know which sites to include in your searches you may not cover everything. For this reason we are developing a new free tool to make this process easier. Some of the features include:

  1. Ability to choose search terms to track
  2. Comprehensive search of a wide variety of internet resources such as search engines, social networking, news, press releases, and ratings/reviews websites.
  3. Creation of custom alerts through RSS feeds

We need your help! :-)

The online reputation management tool is currently in development phase, we will release a beta version of the tool very soon.

Have you got any suggestions or can you think of any features that a reputation management tool should have?

If the answer is yes, feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.

Tags: None

Discussion

Posted by Lee Odden on Oct 7th, 2008
Lee Odden from TopRank Online Marketing suggested (by email):
Hello Tino,
Thanks for asking and I'm glad you like http://www.toprankblog.com.
An ORM tool needs to collect raw data from many different social sources, evaluate and score resources to identify influence, provide actual contact management functionality with those sources.
Many monitoring tools count links and comments in their influence algorithms but comment and trackback spam as well as splogs skew those metrics horribly.
Ad hoc reports should be possible as well as ongoing monitoring that pings the user via email ala Google Alerts when certain criteria are met.
Since most monitoring tools are keyword based, it would make sense to build in a keyword research tool based on keywords and tags used. Sort of like Wordtracker but focused on social media.
Hope that helps.
Posted by andymurd on Oct 7th, 2008
I can think of two features that would make a reputation management tool stand out... 1. Automatically classify mentions of your keywords as good, bad, angry etc.2. A timeline so I can link product changes to keyword mentions.
Posted by Brett Borders on Oct 7th, 2008
Brett Borders from Copy Brighter Marketing suggested (by email):
I would like to see a tool monitor the Google and Yahoo search results
very well.
A really detailed monitoring of brand mentions in the top 1000 results of
all the major search engines.
Not so much stuff like Twitter and Social Media...blog mentions, etc. There
are already a lot of tools that track "buzz" but most of my clients are
concerned about Google search results.
Thanks,
-Brett
Posted by Patrick Altoft on Oct 7th, 2008
Patrick Altoft from Blog Storm suggested (by email):
Hi,
I think the main thing is some defining feature set that makes it better than Google Alerts.
I've yet to find a tool that does a better job and I know lots of large companies that rely purely on Google Alerts.
Cheers
Posted by Joshua Porter on Oct 7th, 2008
Good to hear from you...thanks for emailing!
A quick answer to your question would be:

What is the primary activity that you are supporting?
What features directly support that activity?

In other words, what are people *doing* when they're using your reputation management software? If a feature does not directly support this activity, don't add it.
Here's a post that shows how Amazon has added only features that directly support shopping over time. http://bokardo.com/archives/how-social-is-amazon/
First off, though, the tool *must be dead-simple* to track keywords...do that, get some users, ask them how they like it, and then you'll have 10-15 features you can consider. Build a single core feature (track keywords) and build outward from there.
Defining a more specific feature set would be impossible at this point. I don't know what I would need to: who is your audience, what are they doing, what is their motivation, etc...
Let me know how it goes! I would love to hear what you're working on...it sounds really interesting. (I say this because I use a couple keyword tracking tools already that are less than stellar)
Cheers,
Josh
Posted by Halfdeck on Oct 9th, 2008
Hi Tino,

Other comments covered the main issues pretty well. My generic advice for building any tool is make sure you build something that you yourself use on a daily basis.

BTW once you build the beta you might wanna ask Andy Beard for a critique. He is good at giving quick, in-depth feedback on tools. You'd have to convince him its worth his time but if he agrees I think you'll find his feedback helpful.
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