For Adequate Reputation Management, Tools Are Necessary

Much has been said about reputation management, in its theory. What about the practical aspects? Surely, it's not as easy as Googling your company's name. It's not, and you need the right reputation management tools to do it. Here are a few of the weapons you'll need in your arsenal.

Google Alerts
The fact of the matter is, by the time you see any results on a regular Google search about your company's name, the deed is done. However, with smart use of Google Alerts, you can catch mentions of your business within hours of the posting, rather than a few days afterward.

This takes a little bit of tweaking. First, you have a choice of four areas of Google or a comprehensive setting. If you want to narrow your monitoring down to specific areas for some reason, the four available areas are News, Web, Blogs and Groups. If you want to break it down into one, two or three areas, you will have to set up an alert for each one. Ultimately, it's up to you just how comprehensive you want your monitoring here to be.

You'll want to set up an alert for several key phrases about your company. The most important are your company's name (put it in quotes if your name has two or more words), your company's stock ticker, the company URL, the names of key executives, and your products or services. With this list, you should be able to catch just about anything that is said about your company.

Wikipedia
This may not be an issue for you. However, if your business is well known, there's a good chance that Wikipedia is a good place for PR. You can set up bio pages for your business and key executives. This way, you can watch them for changes, and you can follow who made what changes to your entries.

Technorati
This is a great search engine for blogs. Its most useful feature for monitoring your reputation is the Watchlist. Using this on your root domain, you can find links to your website, no matter how deep in the site they go.

RSS FeedsnRSS Feeds are a godsend in reputation monitoring. Just about everything has an option for email notifications or RSS Feeds. The great thing about RSS is that you can catch mentions of your company much quicker than by email notice.

Monitoring Services
Keeping up with the above services takes quite a bit of work to keep up with. Now, add to this the fact that there are many forums and other pages that have deep and seldomly crawled pages. They may also not have RSS Feeds. This is where outsourcing a company that knows the ins and outs of online monitoring comes in. We have the tools to dig into these pages and find out what you want to know—or would rather not.

In short, with all the work necessary to keep up with online reputation management, you will need someone dedicated to the task. This is one of the many services we offer at www.directhorizon.com. n