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Whereas online reputation management was a specialist term to describe a fairly esoteric practice up until about 2 years ago, it has now become indispensable element to corporate communication strategy.

The reason is simple; “opinion making” and “agenda setting” transformed completely somewhere along the way from the one-to-many mass media paradigm, to mainstream’s adaption of interactive Web 2.0 channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.

Opinions are today less formed as a result of carefully crafted press releases distributed through classical media channels (press & broadcast). The Web 2.0 “share with a friend” or “re-type” functions allow for viral distribution of information and conversations that also reflect on a cultural change in our society: Online sharing of experiences have become an important way of self-expression. First, providing valuable information to “friends” or “followers” can gain a community member status. Second,  the ability to “rant and bash” can warn of a bad product or service…

These two dynamics, the promotion of good, interesting or funny information, vs. the warning function is what online reputation management is all about. Online communities are both a potential target group, and an important source of feedback revealing customer experiences.

To locate this information you’ll need more than Google Alerts and other B2C search engine tools. Sure, they deliver information, but in an unstructured form that makes it very difficult to make any sense of it.

Professionals use semantic text recognition software to locate and comprehensively analyze their company name, competitive intelligence and the latest industry trends. Not only are they able to track who, where, when, and what kind of opinions circulate; they also improve internal communication and knowledge management with virtual project management and calendar functions.

The advantages of proactive online reputation management, as opposed to a defensive PR-in-crisis strategy are significant. To get started you need find some people for your community management team (read more about that here) and an online reputation management tool.

You can register for a free trial with Imooty right now!

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Starting out with social media monitoring, most people begin with Google Alerts. However, if you’re serious about social media monitoring, you’ll want to shop around for a professional tool.

The problem with Google is that the search results are based on a variety of factors including your own search history. Obviously, if your search history is irrelevant to your new query, you’re unlikely to get any good data.

Also, Google’s secret algorithm determines the relevance and authority of links, which for monitoring purposes is inappropriate. For example, you’re likely to miss out on obscure, but relevant industry blogs, that don’t play by Google’s SEO rules…

Next, you’ll find it’s one thing to locate the information, but something completely different to get a grip of the data. How do you handle your social media monitoring search results? Not with Google alerts, that’s for sure.

So where to start?

First, define which social media platforms you’d like to pull information from. Where does your market segment hang out? Slumming around on My Space, Friend casting on Facebook, or Tweeting on Twitter?

Next, define your keywords. Say you’re a lawyer looking for new clients, you’d want to use some keywords describing your field of expertise.  If he’s providing intellectual property (IP) services, he’d want to monitor anything related to “patents”, “trademarks” and “copyrights”. But he’d then get lots of noise from competitors marketing their IP services!

By simply adding additional keywords, such as “pirate”, “infringement” or  “question” our IP expert would narrow in on individuals with a particular problem… That way, he’d reduce the number of search results dramatically, spend a lot less time going through irrelevant search results, and find those with a specific issue to resolve.

Depending on the answers to the above questions, you can either choose an agency to do the job for you, or try one of the do-it-yourself social media monitoring services.

Worst kept secret: Choosing the do-it-yourself option will save you big time!

If you want get down to business right here, right now, sign up for Imooty’s FREE 4 week social media monitoring trial!

Goldman released its quarterly results yesterday, a stunning 3,5 billion in profits! Meanwhile, the firm is also being sued by the US Securities and Exchange commission (SEC). So what’s that got to do with online reputation management ?

Well, since the SEC filing on April 16th, Goldman appears to have gone into damage control mode. It looks to be one of  the most controversial financial fraud cases in recent times. The charge is that the banking giant mislead investors by not informing clients about some risky hedge fund investments that ended up causing substantial losses…

So how does this affect Goldman’s reputation overall and does it make sense for them to engage in active online reputation management ?

No, in this case it doesn’t. Although an SEC filing would spell major problems for almost any businesses BUT Goldman, (trading partners become caustic about transacting with SEC fraud ’subjects’), it is unlikely to become an issue for them. Sure, the ongoing case and speculations is going to put a dent in how the firm is being perceived publicly, but does that really make a difference at the business end of things?

Goldmans clients are afterall bankers whose perception of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ barely extend beyond profit and losses. With $3,5 billion in profits for last quarter, Goldman is good and the online reputation management team has little to worry about.

Still, if you’re not Goldman and are looking for a cost effective tool, read some of our online reputation management articles and sign up for the FREE Imooty trial.

Online Monitoring: In this video, we’ll show you how easy it is to get started with Imooty’s online monitoring tool. By entering a few keywords, you’ll know when people are discussing your brand, keep track on business partners and competitors, and stay up to date on the latest industry trends… Knowledge is power and the way to carve out a competitive edge for yourself is setting up an online monitoring system:

This video has a preview of Imooty’s social media monitoring tool.

We’ll first go over Imooty’s keyword navigation and see how you may navigate according to news, blogs and other social media sources. Next, we’ll see how social media data is saved and categorized in the media library.  Lastly we’ll show how to locate special sub-topics in Imooty’s social media monitoring dashboard.

Register for a free trial of Imooty.eu social media monitoring tool today!

Is social media monitoring a good way to generate leads? Someone actually asked me this the other day. A good answer is sometimes found by asking a new one: Have you noticed that people often use status messages to announce particular interests and things they’re looking for?

In the ‘old days’ you might have invested in a direct mail campaign to drive traffic to your site. You could also have created a pay-per-click campaign to gain visibility, make Google some extra cash and to decrease your dependence on SEO. However, with social media monitoring tools, there are ‘real time’ opportunities to connect with people looking exactly for what what you have to offer.

There are of course an over-abundance of social media monitoring tools offering their services, however, the real work is identifying the keywords to use in your campaign. This process is indeed similar to SEO; just as you want your website to be indexed for words and phrases people use to search for your (type of) products and services, you’ll want to monitor keywords that people use to describe interests running parallel to what you offer.

For example, if you’re in the business of making designer shirts from orders received through your website, you may want to monitor “custom-made shirt”, “tailor-made shirt” and/or “made-to-measure shirt”. Simply monitoring ‘designer shirts’ could also work, but there’s a risk that’s too generic.

In this process, you may also want to compare ‘your’ keywords to those used in connection with competitors product and services. It’s also a good idea to monitor key industry terminology to pick up the latest industry trends and detect new directions where customer interests may be heading.

Chances are that you’ll find social media monitoring a cost effective alternative to traditional market research. And best of all, with Imooty.eu, you can try it out for free!

From time to time, we get the question “what’s the risk of not having a social media monitoring tool?” The question reveals a perception that “social media is just an add-on to other media outlets”. It’s not. Social media has a different set of rules and is reshaping entire markets.

With social media, people are engaging and interacting around context, not necessarily personal relationships. Whereas we used to connect around place (neighborhood, community, schools, associations, etc.) we now link to online personas that share our intellectual interest and emotions. For many, traditional media is no longer the main source of information. Increasingly people turn to social media looking for “someone just like like me” and consequently, many blogs and forums discussions are more important in shaping opinions and perceptions than traditional media outlets.

Likewise, PR and marketing campaigns are no longer about one-to-many communication by distributing press releases and pushing “call to action”. Via social media monitoring tools, companies connect and interact with people that have expressed interest in a particular topic.

Still, the strategy of reaching out to people of influence has not changed. PR and marketing efforts still try to connect with “trust agents” that are likely to pass on a particular message to their networks. In effect, successful campaign management is engaged in one-to-one-to-many communications. The PR or marketing message gets forwarded from one-to-one-to-many if it connects with the interests of the person receiving it, AND if it provides value to his/her network.

The main challenge for companies using social media is therefore the blurring between marketing and communication. Marketers want to use it to sell, communicators to build relationships. Of course, social media is very much about being a real member of a community and providing value, rather than just chasing the next sale. That increases the number of people a company has to deal with, requiring more time and investment in building relationships.

The effect of social media monitoring and interaction will have a profound effect on the PR and marketing industry as we know it. PR and marketing efforts is increasingly about connecting with real people and because everyone is involved in a network, it’s not just up to the people working in the PR and marketing departments. A well thought out strategy will leverage the connections of the entire organization, leaving a more profound, valuable and documentable impact than any traditional campaign could ever hope for.

Want to start listening in on social media conversations? Sign up for the free trial of the Imooty social media monitoring tool today.

Why monitor social media keywords?

First, because search engines have turned into reputation engines. Today, people use search engines to “shop around” and check a brand’s reputation before making a purchasing decision. Locating discussions around your brand and identifying important opinion makers can avert brand attacks before the reputation is affected.

For example, media mointoring can lead you to spot negative comments in a blog or forum discussion, putting you in a position to interact directly with the dissatisfied customer. A proactive PR effort is the best medicine against crowdsourced social media complaint movements and on the other hand, locating positive mention is equally important. It too can be crowdsourced and distributed via social media, generating a number of back-links from fans or supporters of your brand. In turn, back-links and bookmarks will increase the visibility of positive brand mention in search engines.

Second, keeping an eye on what your competitors are up to, is always a good idea. Monitoring how they invest in media exposure will give you clues about their overall market strategy: By looking at where their brands show up (industry journals, newspapers, blogs, social media forums, portals, bookmarking sites etc.), you can assess their investment size and which market segment is being addressed.

Also, by measuring media exposure for different products / services you may establish what their strategy is for each line of business. Systematic media monitoring of your competitors social media keywords will enrich both short- and long-term knowledge of their commercial intent. That is valuable market intelligence when you fine tune your own social media marketing strategy.

Third, defining keywords that generically describes your products or services will enable you follow industry news and trends in social media. Whereas it normally takes several hours to collect and categorize data, a media monitoring dashboard will dramatically reduce the time required for locating valuable information…

In locating social media keywords, you first need to define your monitoring goals. Is it measuring ROI on online PR and marketing efforts? Online reputation management and locating competitive intelligence? Tracking industry trends and buzz? All of them? In which languages? The classic phrase is “garbage in, garbage out”. You are only as good as your data, and your data is only as good as your algorithm for getting clear about what your social media keywords are going to be.

Looking for a media monitoring dashboard? Try Imooty’s free media monitoring trial today!

Looking back at 2009, it was decidedly the year to get started with live search media monitoring. If you don’t know what “live search” is, think Twitter.

Never understood what Twitter was all about? Well, then think about this: If I was to go on a little R&R skiing vacation in Bad-Gastein (Austrian Alps), I could do one of two things: Check Google for pages mentioning Bad-Gastein, or search Twitter for the same term.

For the better part of 2009, Google would return a bunch of Bad-Gastein sites optimized for selling travel packages, hotels, spas etc. That’s where live search media monitoring comes into play. Although commercial service providers are relevant for my planning, I’d first of all want to know what the snow conditions were like, preferably from some unbiased source. The hotels, skiing resorts and service providers are unlikely to give me that, which is what makes people so exited about Twitter. It returns real life impressions from people who are there right now!

Google is of course not passively sitting back and has already struck a deal with both Twitter and Facebook which includes search results from them alongside their index and adwords.

This has significant PR implications and companies increasingly need to pay attention and interact with social media users. If a customer service representative is stonewalling customers the word will soon be out on Twitter, which in turn will reveal an unfavorable impression in Google search results. On the flip side, speedy interaction and online reputation management may have the opposite effect.

In other words, now more than ever, it pays to set do live search media monitoring of company and product names. And not just proprietary names, other keywords associated to the products and services should be monitored too. For my Bad Gastein example, it would make sense to monitor, “Skiing vacation in Austria”, “Skiing in Hohe Tauern” and “Austria ski resort guide” too.

For a comprehensive live search media monitoring system, take this opportunity to try out the FREE Imooty.eu trial.

Interest in Imooty’s online monitoring tool has picked up significantly over the past few weeks. As we launched the BASIC service in October, we were targeting the small and medium sized enterprise segment, however, we were soon approached by large companies looking for a user friendly environment to collect media intelligence.

Over the next few weeks we will test our online monitoring PRO features in a private Beta. The new version is scheduled to launch commercially in March of 2010. Imooty PRO will include a online monitoring team platform, semantic search and a information categorization tool. Please drop us a line if you’d like to participate in the Beta!
Looking back at 2009 we collected a wealth of practical experience from which we will benefit (hopefully) in 2010. In terms of theoretical knowledge, the most valuable read was without a doubt “Getting Real” by 37 Signals, mandatory reading for anyone developing an IT tool…

Want to start with online monitoring and don’t know how? Go to Imooty.eu and register for our free trial!

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