Industry Digital Insights

It has become more important than ever to monitor your brand. People are consuming information and publishing information on your brand through an ever growing number of sources. Digital channels such as blogs, microblogs, forums, social networks, news aggregators are all allowing your customers to find information on you, and indeed write things about you that you have no control over.

The only area you have any editorial control over your brand message is on your own online property and the numbers of people engaging with you there is heavily outweighed by the numbers engaging with your brand in other areas online.

As a result brand monitoring and reputation management have grown in importance. If you are not taking this area of online PR as seriously as you should then positive conversations are happening that you are not leveraging success against and negative conversations are taking place that are infecting your brand unchecked.

This post is designed to give you an insight into tools you can use and implement as part of a brand monitoring strategy. They can be used in isolation but will be most effective as part of a combined focus on your brand and how it is being perceived by your customers or potential customers. These tools can be particularly helpful to monitor ‘buzz’ during significant periods of marketing activity such as the launch of specific campaigns, product launches, site launches or indeed during the release of significant company news.

There are core reasons why brand monitoring and reputation management have become so important, these range from:

1. The growing speed of communications on a global scale
2. The increased number of channels and media fragmentation
3. Shifting patterns of influence and the ‘cult of the amateur’
4. The decline in levels of trust and the need to close the gap between the brand promise and the brand product or brand service
5. The need to build solid relationships through the increased focus and quality of communications

With a brand monitoring strategy in place that uses specific tools a company then has a choice of actions that they can consider in order to act on what they are monitoring. In other words once you are monitoring what is your strategy of engagement? Brands can;

1. Respond, participate and engage in dialogue
2. They can simply monitor, watch and observe
3. They can anticipate and manage potential risk or leverage the positives
4. Or they can ignore and simply shout louder

Tools that can be used to assist in brand monitoring and reputation management range from;

1. Tracking blogs on specific subjects. This can be done through sites such as Technorati or Google Blogs search

1. coComment and backtype allow you to search blog comments to see what people have been writing in reply to particular posts. These can be aggregated into RSS feeds

1. YahooPipes is a great tool for aggregating RSS feeds from sites. For instance if I wanted to have a dedicated feed for a particular football team I could use the sports feeds from as many different online news resources plug them into the pipes application and aggregate only the articles from all the feeds for the particular club I supported

1. You can also use Google alerts to filter specific information based on Google search across all their search verticals such as news, video, blogs etc. The draw back here is that the result page does not have an RSS feature so you normally would have to navigate to the news page to see the results. Navigating to this page all the time to view the results is not always convenient so to get around this you can send the results to your Google mail account which then lets you create an RSS feed. This feed can then be plugged into your aggregator of choice. Using the Google advanced operators in conjunction with Alerts makes this tool particularly powerful, for instance, entering RBS OR Lloyds  source:forbes, will return a result every time Forbes writes an article on RBS or Lloyds.

1. It is certainly worth setting up accounts and feeds from social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Delicious. These sites then allow you to discover if users are tagging and saving your branded pages or tagging pages that mention your brand

1. For the time being Twitter has cornered the market in terms of real time search. Twitterfall allows you to filter your search on real time Twitter entries so you can search by your brand name to see current buzz and Backtweets allows you to search what urls people are putting in their tweet messages. Again these are all available by RSS feeds

1. Utilities such as Netvibes and iGoogle then allow you to organise all your RSS feeds from all these various sources in an manner that is easy to navigate and convenient for you to read thus negating the need for you to trawl all these information sources to seek out your information

We have looked at why it is important to take brand monitoring seriously and we have looked at some of the tools that can be used to facilitate this. The next and most important steps are to create and share with your team a brand monitoring strategy that outlines what objectives you want to achieve. This could be anything from monitoring buzz around a single campaign to a long term full digital engagement program to increase positive PR for your company.

The important thing to remember is that as well as the small amount of resource needed upfront to set up the monitoring tools, embarking on any kind of reputation management needs commitment and needs to be structured around a larger communication strategy that defines why and how you will engage with your customers in both the good times and the bad.