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by: Jessica Davis
With the creation of social media websites, consumers now have an avenue to relay their message and let their voices be heard. Therefore, keeping your ear to the ground around social media websites can give you a great perspective on how the websphere feels about your company, your website and your products or services. If a customer doesn’t feel a product is quality they may blog about it. If a visitor has a poor experience on a company’s website they may tweet about it. If a client truly enjoys the customer service received they may post to a message board. And with each of these actions a company’s reputation swings in the balance.
It is important for companies of all sizes to listen to their social iPod. Pay attention to what is being said about your company, your website, your products and your services to ensure you are able to handle negative press or use positive press the minute it hits the websphere.
While reputation monitoring is a fairly new industry online, there are several fabulous resources available to companies as well as individuals. The idea behind reputation monitoring is to keep up with the wave of opinions that may affect your bottom line on a daily basis.
Google Alerts enables anyone to create an email alert sending a notification every time something is published in the websphere that includes a certain keyword. So, if you want to be notified anytime something is published (including blog posts) around the keyword XYZ Corporation (or your company’s name), you can simply set up a Google Alert.
Twitter Alerts work in the exact same manner as Google Alerts, except you are notified every time someone tweets about a certain subject, links to a certain URL or uses a certain hashtag.
Trackur is a premier online reputation and social media monitoring product. It was created to track everything said about a person or a company via the Internet. The premise of this tool is to scan websites (including news sites, blogs, videos, images and forums) for previously setup keywords and return a list of urls. From this point, it’s up to you to investigate these sources. You should note however, that unlike Google Alerts and Twitter Alerts, Trackur is available for a fee.
Reputation Defender is very similar to Trackur in that it scours the Internet for references of a person or a company. However, they go a bit further and offer consultants to assist clients in working with the data they collect. As with Trackur, Reputation Defender is available for a fee.
Your online reputation is an extension of your business reputation and should be treated as such. With a bit of research, you can find additional tools to assist you in monitoring and affecting your online reputation, but please heed this note of caution: there is a thin line between monitoring your reputation and playing big brother. Customers have every right to publish their opinions about your company, it is your responsibility to offer quality products, a user friendly website, great customer service and correct any wrongs as soon as you find out about them. You will always have customers who are not satisfied, what sets a good company apart from a bad company is how they react to that unhappy customer.
