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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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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!
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