Industrial Strength Reputation Monitoring : Pubcon 2009

Brian Chappell | November 18, 2009 | View Comments

Last week was the infamous Pubcon Internet and Social Media Marketing conference held in Las Vegas Nevada. Over 4,000 fellow Internet marketers each year descend on the bright city. This year, I had the chance to speak on a panel about Reputation Management and Monitoring. I was excited to see this year that they had added an extensive amount of panels discussing social media marketing tactics. If you think SEO and Social Media still don't belong together at Internet Marketing conferences, then you are living in the dark.

Below you will find my presentation I gave at the conference where I discussed how reputation monitoring works, specifically focusing on the details surrounding a heavily talked about term, such as Walmart in this example.

I outlined and referenced my social media monitoring funnel and went into detail, discussing each section to great length. My discussion points can be found below.

Things To Think About With Regards To Reputation Monitoring Tools

• Not easy to manage all the mentions - tool is the most important part of the puzzle
• Do you try to build your own solution or go with a vendor?
• Self-made in-house tool - custom dashboard and monitoring solution
•  Industrial strength monitoring tools include Radian6, TruCast by Visible Technologies, Sysomos, Techrigy SM2, Cymfony to name a few
•  Does the service have an API?
•  How far back does the vendor have data for - Look for solutions that give you at least 6+ months
•  Does the tool have CRM integration? ie. Salesforce
•  Sentiment Analysis - how is it handled? Manual or Automatic - If its automatic what level of accuracy is it? Take Automated sentiment analysis with a grain of salt
•  Are there automatic SMS alerts built into the tool that facilitate notices when escalated issues arise
•  You need a tool that is flexible enough to work with your business. This can be accomplished by customizable User Interfaces, custom tagging and assigning of jobs to key individuals

Keyword Targeting

• For heavily talked about terms, don’t rely on “brand name” only keyphrase monitoring
• Utilize complex Boolean variables vs. a catch-all for your one word branded term - get specific
• Break out keyword buckets that clarify distinct campaigns being run:
• sub brands
• important people within the organization
• Competitors
• If you are trying to compare brand health with competitors then make sure you are using an equivalent number of positive and negative keyword modifiers: i.e. brand name + good, brand name + sucks
• Make sure you use enough negative key phrases to eliminate the noise. i.e. ring tones, porn, Viagra, and common branded terms that are not about your brand

Noise Elmination Considerations

• Getting a good clean stream of news is worth the $$ most tools charge
• Understand how your vendor or solution eliminates noise behind the scenes
• Sometimes there are lots of innocent sites that get axed: ie. Blogspot, Wordpress and other free solutions
• White list and blacklist sites
• Use specific keyword variations to filter excess noise
• Try not to modify keywords too often otherwise trends and analysis from monitoring metrics will become inconsistent and less useful
• If you really need to, outsource this process – find a cost effective way to get the noise removed
• Amazon Turk is a very powerful, robust platform that can serve this task well

Refined Mentions - Your Stream Of Data

• This is the data you are after, minimal noise, only mentions of your brand / competitors that you want
• Utilize an easy to read, flexible interface to handle the thousands of mentions - Steer away from clunky interfaces
• Have the ability to assign certain posts and threads to the right channels / individuals inside of the organization

Analysis and Trends

• Are you reporting on Social Media Metrics such as number of mentions, brand health, and other demographic details? All can be derived from a Reputation Monitoring Process.
• Define what you can do to better serve your customers
• Identify key global/regional trends
• Supplement your marketing department with information on bloggers/website owners that are worth reaching out to
• Don’t rely on auto-sentiment brand health. 70-80% accuracy isn't good enough to be completely hands off

Take Action

• ACT ON IT - doing something about the data
• Altering the brand health is not an easy task, stick with it for the long haul
• Make sure you have streamlined the process for key individuals inside of the co. to get updates and notices about relevant mentions / competitor analysis
• Find the golden nuggets inside of your streams

Optimize

• Continue to reconfigure and revisit the accuracy of keyphrases and negative keyphrases
• Crosscheck with RSS feeds, and Yahoo Pipes to  make sure you are finding all the data that is pertinent. Blogspot is heavily spammed and used by many for legit purposes
• Remember do not alter your keyphrases too much or will skew trending of results
• Utilize equivalent number of negative and positive keyword modifiers when analyzing brand health or comparing share of voice of competitors

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