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If you’re the PR or Marketing lead in any of the two operations, this question is a real pain. Every day, its your job to be sorting out the mentions that could potentially have something to do with your organization; Is the agitated forum discussion about that last Paris Hilton gig, or the Hilton Hotel in Paris? It is menial, annoying and very costly as it relies on brute manpower to get through it all.

So, when monitoring the Hilton Hotel in Paris, Imooty uses advanced text recognition to eliminate the Paris Hilton mentions from the search results. But how do we do that? Initially, we feed the software with selected articles that clearly are about the Hilton Hotel in Paris and Paris Hilton, the artist. Having learned what the two categories look like, the software can start to automatically separate them from one-another.

Named entity recognition, pretty cool tool, is what that is.

The sheer amount of social media data to go through is what makes this problem a real issue. People now share common interest and experiences with like minded strangers and the total amount of digital information in the world double 2 times EVERY DAY!

What used to be called Public Relations, has become Community Management. Gone are the days of one-to-many communication (mass media) when getting a message out there was to get a journalist interested enough to consider doing a story. Social media on the other hand, is a one-to-one-to-many format and to keep track, you need more than a fancy way of counting online mentions.

The future is in analytical applications that educate users about things they don’t already know. It’s about gaining knowledge of the unknown, combining the data of the past with strategic solutions that help you move forward. Together with Yukka GmbH, Imooty offers interpretation of large data pools by way of computer linguistic tools.

Do you already use a monitoring tool and are looking for a smarter way to process information? Try our free media monitoring trial or drop us a line at info@imooty.eu.

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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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.

No. There’s no TGIF for your Social Media Monitoring team. It’s ON DUTY, 24/7, 365. That all the time, all of the time folks. This is one of the lessons learned from last months cyber activism attack on Nestlé’s Facebook page.

To summarize; Greenpeace took issue with Nestlé’s use of palm-oil as a key ingredient in many of its products, among others, the well known Kit Kat chocolate bar (Have A Break, Have A Kit Kat). The need for cheep palm oil drives deforestation and destroys carbon rich landscapes. Specifically, burning of rain-forests and peatlands to clear land for palm oil production releases significant amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere while disrupting wildlife habitats.

Enter the Greenpeace viral video campaign: A 60 second video clip is posted to YouTube showed an office worker having a Kit Kat break. Opening the chocolate wrapper, he finds an orang-utan finger inside. Message; give the orang-utan a break, stop Nestlé buying palm oil from companies that destroy the rainforests.

Nestlé’s response? Notifying YouTube that the visual identity of their brand had been infringed by Greenpeace. Effect: The video is taken down and supporters of Greenpeace feel censored. Next, they upload the video to other social media sharing sites. What’s more, rather than being discussed on blogs, activists now move the debate on Nestlé’s reponse to their own Facebook page. But wait, its Friday! There are places to go, things to do, people to meet… for Nestlé’s social media monitoring team.

Meanwhile angry comments flooded the Nestlé Facebook page. Response to criticism was slow, and when it came, it was reactive, focusing on defining rules for the discussion participants, rather than addressing the issues raised. The forum participants only got more agitated and soon enough, the discussion moved beyond the Greenpeace activists community, attracting mainstream and environmentally conscious Facebook users.

Lesson; When negative reactions surface, your social media monitoring team has to catch it. A wait and see attitude will only leave you to respond with reactions and that’s no way to show initiative. Early on in this controversy Nestlé did for example announce that it was ending its relationship with the palm oil supplier in question. However stuck with an seemingly inexperienced (and unprofessional) social media team, Nestlé got caught in a reactive response pattern, letting this announcement drift by without barely making a dent in the discussion boards.

Conclusion; If you encourage people to interact with your company through social media, you have to be there and be prepared to respond when the s#*t hits the fan… Social media is a two way street, so you can’t choose just to include the positive and sensor the negative. AND; There’s no TGIF for a social media team with a job to do. Social media monitoring tools were created for a reason, do not ignore them just because there’s a weekend coming up…

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!

Brand monitoring 2.0; Feeling increasingly overwhelmed by the never ending stream of information? Prefer sticking your head in the sand and wait for it all to go away?

The good news is that with the new media outlets, new tools emerge to leverage value from this endless flow of information. Learning how to use such tools can save time, avoid online reputation issues and help identify new business opportunities.

Lets start with the time management issue. Sure, there’s times you just want to browse around, check out some mainstream news or funny videos, but when it comes to specific monitoring activities, focus is the name of the game. Unless you have a clear idea of what you’re looking for, and a strategy for what to do with the data once located, you’ll quickly get distracted.

By identifying keywords that are important for your business, you will be in a position to find conversations about your brand, competitors and industry trends. Next step is to filter out the useful information and decide what to do with it. Oftentimes, brand monitoring data will be forwarded to a colleague in customer support, who will take action, addressing unhappy bloggers or forum participants. Positive mention will be of interest for the person in charge of SEO link building and the PR and marketing department. Other data, such as competitive intelligence and market trends, will be of interest for the R&D department.

Over the last months Imooty has developed a tool facilitating this type of work. Through a social media listening dashboard, users locate information on keywords across different social media sources and save posts to their media library. Users create projects, delegate responsibilities and define milestones, creating a sense of accountability when dealing with online media intelligence.

Want to take the Imooty tool for a test drive? Sign up for a free brand monitoring trial today!

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!

In a context of online reputation management, we refer to crowdsourcing as social bookmarking or collaborative tagging. So what does that have to do with brands and brand monitoring? Well, these days, pretty much everything. The latest example comes to us from Sears, a large department store chain in the US:

A couple had just bought a freezer from a Sears store in Dripping Springs, Texas. It would be delivered directly to their home free of charge. When the Sears truck arrived, the family dog, Toot, ran out to investigate the new visitor. As the truck was about to a stop, a loud yelp was heard. Toot had been run over and died shortly thereafter.

Understandably, the dog’s mom was upset and went to see the store owner. She wanted to bring closure to the tragic event. The owner apologized, but went on to say that it was not Sears fault. It was the couple had let the dog out in the yard. This did not help the woman to find closure and when she got home, her husband was unhappy about how Sears had treated her.

He called the store, the owner repeated that it was the couples fault, the dog should have moved. He would have been wiser in offering an apology without placing the blame on a distraught customer.

The couple bought a domain name, SearsKilledMyDog.com and created a website telling about their experience. Once live, they forwarded it to their friends and family, and posted it on Facebook. As with any viral story, the response was immediate. Within 24 hours, their website was generating heavy traffic, and the tragic tale was trending as number 1 on Reddit while becoming a Twitter phenomenon via The Consumerist.

At this point Sears customer service entered to execute online reputation management and active damage control. High level executives called the couple personally to apologize and offer restitution for pain and suffering. The couple felt they had been heard and the SearsKilledMyDog.com website was taken down. Next, Sears added their voice to the conversation raging at The Consumerist. They requested to add a response in the article itself;

“We are very sorry about the loss of the dog of a devoted Sears customer. As soon as we heard about this (which was at 5 PM CT on Dec-11-2009), our team acted swiftly to contact the customer who purchased the freezer from our Hometown Store in Dripping Springs, Texas. In fact, Will Powell, our business unit President, spoke to the customer just before 7 PM CT on Dec-11-2009 and extended our apologies and the customer graciously accepted. As a symbol of our deep regret for the accident, we offered to reimburse him for the cost of his dog as well as to refund the original sale.”

After the update, Sears identified the people with most influence who had Tweeted the article and sent them a link with the update. This enabled 3rd parties to post an update to the article via their own accounts, adding online reputation management credibility since such re-tweets would not come from Sears directly.

The conventional definition of crowdsourcing is that it is the completion of tasks that normally would be performed by in-house employees or contractors, and out-sourcing them to a random set of people (that’s the crowd). The Sears story shows how the term applies to online reputation management too. With engagement, sincerity and personal interaction, Sears was able to turn the negative crowdsourcing around to a positive.

Feel like getting started with online reputation management? Sign up for a free Imooty.eu trial today!

Last week, Kristoffer was featured in an interview at Krawattenträger, a blog on social media marketing. Apart from talking about Imooty’s development over the past years, he was asked how Imooty uses social media for marketing purposes. The answer is that we haven’t done much of that (so far). The best ROI for our target audience has proved to be good old direct mail and followups per phone.

Many companies seem to be embarrassed admitting to this. Sure, there are many cases where there’s reason to cringe at opportunity lost by not following a social media marketing strategy, however, it also not for everyone.

First step is obviously finding out where your customers are likely to hang out. If you’re a B2B service, it probably won’t make sense to pursue MySpace users. Secondly, the effort required to convert “fans”, “contacts” or “friends” into paying customers can be considerable so there needs to be someone in charge of community management. Then, the million dollar question, what’s the social media marketing budget? It’ll definitely not be enough registering a profile here and there and wait for magic to occur…

Trying to do too much will inevitably end up with a lot of things being done poorly. Don’t try being everywhere all the time, focus on delivering content that your audience will find meaningful.

To conclude, there’s no sense in rushing into social media marketing just for the sake of it. Research whether it makes sense for your product or service, find out where your prospects are, how they interact and assess what your cost is going to be.

Already do social media marketing and want to assess your ROI? Register with Imooty.eu for a free trial today!

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