By Sean Dowdall
“They have quite a reputation!” When you heard that about a brand years ago, that usually meant something bad. That has the same connotation in our digital communications world of today. Rather than look at online tools that are specifically designed to “fix” bad reputations, let’s take a look at tools that help brands promote a hopefully well-deserved positive reputation.
Monitoring is the essential starting point for reputation management. It provides an updated view of where and how your brand is mentioned online. This may be in social media posts, reviews, comments, online articles, blogs, etc. Sentiment is more advanced than simple monitoring. Sentiment is an indicator of the mention as being positive, neutral or negative. If you’ve found a tool that does a decent job with sentiment, please list that in the comments. In any case, monitoring alone isn’t enough or really much help if your brand isn’t getting mentioned.
The more advanced reputation management tools help you positively present your brand, manage SEO and engage your audiences, including marketing/sales, review management and customer care. Here are a few of the tools that have a variety of functions:
1. YEXT started as a location and listings management service that now offers advanced, AI-driven engagement interaction to help with sales, service and even employee communications.
2. SEMRush is a powerful SEO tool and continuously adds more functionality to help you manage your website and SEM.
3. Vendasta helps you manage all of your reviews in one place and see how your competition is doing.
4. Reputation provides listings, monitoring and multiple interaction channel management tools, including reviews, surveys and service tickets.
5. Google Alerts provides new website, blog or article mentions and is free and easy to use.
Whatever tools you choose, the basics of reputation management start before anyone says something new about your brand online. The basics are to always provide high-quality products and customer service, engage your audiences proactively and regularly publish informative content.
“They have a stellar reputation.” That’s what a brand wants to hear and will get if it is justifiably earned. Reputation management tools will help highlight that praise and spread the word around.
Do you agree? Feel free to comment below, send an email to [email protected] or tweet him @seandowdall.
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Sean, great thoughts. In this 24/7 world of “everyone’s a publisher,” I would agree that monitoring one’s reputation daily is imperative. In addition to Google alerts, such services as Meltwater and Cision allow users to monitor one’s own business mentions in print/online and broadcast. And Sprout Social is a great tool for social media listening. Cheers, David
Thanks, Sean. Yes! Reputation management is a proactive, not reactive, function that belongs firmly in the MarComm set of responsibilities. You’ve provided a great list of options here.
I love Google Alerts, and it can be really interesting to take a look at Google Trends to see what the world is talking about (and if your competitors are a topic of conversation).
Reputation is everything. With everyone having access to the internet nowadays, you have to be on top of what others are saying about you and your business. I find Google Alerts to be helpful. They are easy to set up, and I find that Google often picks up mentions that Meltwater and Cision do not.