'Net Features : 91409

Reputation Management and Monitoring for Everyone

MaureenA — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 20:03:00 GMT

Social media has turned traditional word-of-mouth on its head. Your customers can broadcast their thoughts of your company, products and their experience with you faster and easier than ever before – and reach a much larger group of people. Traditionally, you could assume that one person would likely tell a handful of people about their positive experience, or 10 people if they had an unpleasant experience. But that has grown exponentially with people broadcasting thoughts to hundreds of Twitter followers and Facebook friends.

So what are your customers saying and where? There are many online resources available that can track what's being said and where. Some resources cover all social media platforms such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc., while others are specific to the social media platform such as only blogs or Twitter. You can choose from management, monitoring or both. Management tools help manage conversations, social networks and other information - adding specific qualities to certain information. Monitoring tools provide you with the conversations and where they are occurring. Below are a handful of online reputation resources ranging from monitoring to managing, depending on your business goals.

WhoLinksToMe: Released in March, this tool analyzes inbound links to your website. The philosophy of this company is that links have replaced traditional word-of-mouth, making online management key to any business’ marketing plan. This is a free Web-based tool that evaluates links in real time. According to the original announcement, the company plans to offer more robust offerings for businesses.

BlogPulse: Produced by Nielsen (one of the most credible data companies), BlogPulse tracks blogs, linking to blogs, trends and conversations. It can tell you the most cited blogs, trends, links, phrases and more. You can add your blog for free to its blog search engine for content syndication and analysis.

TweetBeep: A free tool that also offers premium accounts with additional features, TweetBeep tracks conversations about you occurring on Twitter. You notify keywords or URLs that you want TweetBeep to track and you are notified anytime someone uses those words in tweets. You can set how often you want to be notified of TweetBeeps – making your response to those talking about you faster. For example, last week, Website Magazine received a TweetBeep about a reader who wasn't able to read an article on the website because they thought they needed to buy a pro-level subscription. Website Magazine saw the tweet, and responded quickly to let the reader know she only had to log in to read the articles. Quick response can turn frustration into satisfaction.

StepRep: StepRep is another free tool that monitors what people are saying about you, and helps manage your reputation as well as build it. StepRep can tell you everything from people are talking about you on Twitter to posting photos about you and even videos. In regards to managing, StepRep allows users to syndicate content through its website or add a widget to your site. In addition, StepRep has its own social network site where users can interact with customers.

Trackur: Built by prominent Web professional Andy Beal, Trackur monitors news sites, social media sites, blogs, images, videos and other websites based on your keywords. Trackur results are populated on a dashboard allowing users to add and refine keywords, view trends, and add sentimental tagging. The sentimental tagging allows you to tag items based on positive, negative or neutral sentiment. Trackur has different pricing plans to appeal to individuals and large companies. Pricing starts at $18 per month to $197 per month for the enterprise level.

Human Powered Reputation Management?
CARMA International: This organization looks at online measurement a different way. Instead of software and programs, it uses humans to determine how people are talking about you online. Recently, CARMA updated its methodology as well as introduced three additional features: Social Media Access, Tone, and Customization. Social Media Access allows users to combine social media coverage results with traditional media including blogs, tweets, forums and more. Users can choose to have this coverage display in an interface with the traditional media results or separately. Tone provides users with a rating on the tone of articles which was evaluated by CARMA’s team. And Customization provides users with additional data and charts.

You can take management into your own hands by using WordPress and the WP-O-Matic plugin. In September 2008, Peter Prestipino, editor-in-chief, wrote about his experience setting up the WP-O-Matic plugin to manage and implement campaigns within 30 minutes.

For those looking to read more about online reputations, check out a list of books on the topic.

Do you use an online reputation tool not listed here? Tell us about it below.

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Reading Up on Online Reputation Management

MaureenA — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Managing online reputation is vital to any business, so you may be interested in reading more in-depth on the topic. Below are four books on online reputation and how businesses can leverage the Web to create positive buzz and ultimately customers

“Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online” by Andy Beal and Judy Strauss. This book looks to help businesses to understand how to work with social media so their building their brands and generating positive discussions. It also provides tips on what to do when your reputation has been hurt.

“The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff” by Clara Shih. Shih helps businesses understand how to turn networking on Facebook into customers and sales. She discusses the challenges that businesses face in regards to hiring the right employees to legal issues.

“Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies” by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. The authors of this book help business professionals figure out how to use social media, understand the various platforms and how those users are unique to those platforms. The book also assists businesses with leverage the platforms for positive growth.

"Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking” by Andy Sernovitz. Sernovitz highlights real-life marketing examples and how companies did it all for free. He explains the different platforms and how businesses can make those platforms work for them.

Do you have a book you'd like to recommend?

Stay up to date on the latest Internet trends:
Request a professional subscription to Website Magazine,
the most popular print publication on Web success.

E-Commerce Web Page Response Times

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:52:00 GMT

Akamai Technologies and Forrester announced the results of a survey on website performance and its correlation with an online shopper's behavior. What they found is that consumers are seemingly growing more impatient with slow loading web pages.

Results revealed that two seconds is the new threshold in terms of an average online shopper's expectation for a web page to load and 40 percent of shoppers will wait no more than three seconds before abandoning a retail or travel site.

In 2006, Akamai conducted a similar study to understand consumer reaction to a poor online shopping experience. The 2009 study is a follow up to examine how customer expectations around online shopping have evolved in the past three years.

Additional finding from the joint study include:

- Online shopper loyalty is contingent upon quick page loading, especially for high-spending shoppers. 52 percent of online shoppers stated that quick page loading is important to their site loyalty, up 12 percent from the 2006 study.

- Shoppers often become distracted when made to wait for a page to load. 14 percent will begin shopping at another site, and 23 percent will stop shopping or walk away from their computer.

- Retail and travel sites that underperform lead to lost sales. 79 percent of online shoppers who experience a dissatisfying visit are less likely to buy from that site again, up 17 percent from the 2006 study. 64 percent would simply purchase from another online store, up 16 percent from the 2006 study.

Online Forum Advertising (With a Twist)

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:35:00 GMT

Does advertising within social media environments such as forums sound appealing? For many marketers it does but the problem is that those wanting to actively participate in the word-of-mouth conversations occurring are often called out as spammers thanks to often poorly disguised commercial messages.

PostRelease, launched by Cie Studios today, hopes to change that by enabling companies (through advertising) to reach audiences at the point where opinions are being formed and buying decisions made - on the forums. Companies can insert posts that contain relevant content into targeted online forum discussions using the automated system.

PostRelease posts can include text, pictures, hyperlinks and links to video. The posts are clearly marked as from PostRelease, and they remain in the lead position (toward the top of the post list page) of selected forum discussion categories for seven days. Once released from the top position, the post remains part of the forum discussion. These posts are archived as forum content, so they continue to generate responses after a campaign ends.

From the release: The approach is automated but audited – all posts are reviewed to ensure the content is relevant to the discussion topic. It is this quality control that sets PostRelease apart from banner and text ads: in its year-long beta, PostRelease click-through rates averaged 33 percent, with highs reaching nearly 90 percent.

By the looks of the PostRelease forum network, over 100 publishers are using the system, although it seems to be focused primarily on the automotive industry at the moment. I see a lot of potential in solutions like these for forum owners/publishers.

“Forums are where the real product conversations happen – they’re the uncut diamonds of the social web,” said Justin Choi, founder and president of Cie Studios. “Forums are an ideal place for marketers and consumers to meet, because product conversations are not intrusive, they’re integral. We’ve created a solution that enables companies to insert relevant information, helps consumers learn more about products they’re already discussing and gives forum owners a much-needed source of revenue.”