Who am I? Determining your reputation tracking phrases

In this first part of a series about ORM technique, I'll be taking a look at how to find mentions of yourself or your brand online. This can be logically broken down into two parts:

• What to search for
• How to find it

Let's consider the first part. You are running a mid-sized business selling a selection of branded products - all related names to these would be good candidates to search on. In my case, I would consider 'Quirk eMarketing', 'BrandsEye', and 'SearchStatus' to be good candidates. Gotchas to be aware of here are making your search too focussed or too broad - for example 'Quirk' might be too broad, and 'Quirk eMarketing (Pty) Ltd' is almost certainly too focussed. These can often be addressed by operators in your search phrases - more on that in a bit.

Then, you would probably want to search on the full names of the key staff who represent your company. What these people do reflects on your brand, and their own personal name brand carries weight which will grow over time and should be measured. Practically, it's your senior and media-facing people who will be good candidates for tracking.

Finally, you will almost certainly want to measure your competitors. Whether you chose to track them with the same depth that you track yourself is up to you, but you will use the same techniques to discover what to search for.

Having come up with a list of names to search on, it's now time to turn them into search phrases, such as those you would type into Google. This means you can use simple operators - characters that have special meaning - to fine tune the results you get back. The following operators are valid across pretty much all the search engines:

•  "quotes" match on an exact sequence of words
• + plus means whatever comes after it must be included
• - minus means whatever comes after it must be excluded

Your goal in using these operators is to obtain the maximum number of results while still keeping them relevant. For example, consider my first example, 'Quirk eMarketing' (note that all the single quotes (') used here are not present in the final phrase and are just for clarity in this post). Case is not taken into account when searching, so I'll lowercase to indicate this. Both words are not unique to my subject and used commonly, so the phrase 'quirk emarketing' means I will get matches if the words 'quirk' or 'emarketing' are on the page, and many of these matches will probably be irrelevant. In turn, using quotes for the exact phrase '"quirk emarketing"' will give highly relevant matches on that precise phrase, but will miss many other relevant mentions with similar but different phrasing. The best phrase here is likely to be 'quirk +emarketing', so that all pages containing 'quirk' must also contain 'emarketing' to be chosen. I can then add similar phrases such as 'quirk +marketing' to cover all the bases.

If your product or person name is too general, you will need to add your company name to it's search phrase, possibly with a + on front. Alternatively, should you share the same name with another well known company or person you can exclude their mentions with the - operator. For example, I can exclude mentions from the Quirk's Marketing Research Review site with 'quirk +emarketing -quirks.com'.

It's a good idea to test out your phrases across a variety of search engines, particularly those not as skilled as Google in finding relevant matches. You should be aiming for greater than 50% relevancy at least to reduce the time needed to sort the wheat from the chaff. By the time you're done, you should have a list of search phrases characterising your business and competitors, and likely to produce a set of relevant results on them. You're ready to find mentions of these phrases - something I'll be covering in the next post.