Managing BrandsEye Phrases - A How To Guide

In order for you to manage your reputation you need to know what phrases to track in order to get an accurate idea of what is being said about you online. This comprehensive How To guide will teach you how to select and refine your search phrases on BrandsEye, or your ORM tool of choice, to do just that.

1). Focus on your objectives
Before you even begin to enter the phrases you wish to track, you must decide on what you need your ORM tool to tell you. A good plan is the basis of success and the easiest way to construct a good plan is to look at your existing business units (or areas of your personal life) and look at each unit’s particular marketing objectives. It’s then a matter of deciding how to use ORM as both as a proactive and reactive tool to maximise on and manage these marketing objectives.

By way of example, consider a bank which has strategically decided to focus on their “personal banking” business unit as phase 1 of ORM rollout. Typically a personal banking department is heavily influenced by consumer media. As such, their phrases would include those which look, in particular, at consumer sentiment therefore providing the key research for the marketing department to measure their PR successes, refocus their marketing efforts and highlight potential problem areas within the brand.

2). Use Boolean Logic to get the results you want

When setting up your search phrases there are three major Boolean identifiers which you should be aware of: the Quotation marks (“ ”), Plus sign (+) and Minus Sign (-). A clever combination of these three will mean that you customise your results and constantly improve upon the quality of results which you receive.

Quotation marks (“ ”) are used to acquire an exact match. For example, if you were interested in Quirk eMarketing then you would create the search phrase “Quirk eMarketing”, this means that the words Quirk and eMarketing must appear sequentially in the brand mention for them to be considered. This is in contrast to broadmatching which means that Quirk and eMarketing must appear in the same piece but not necessarily sequentially - which typically results in excessive amounts of irrelevant mentions.

The Plus sign (+) is used to string exact matches together. For example, should you want to get mentions about Quirk eMarketing which also talk about BrandsEye then you would create the phrase “Quirk eMarketing” + “BrandsEye”. This means that both exact matches must exist in the mention but that they need not be sequential - much the same as broadmatching.

The Minus sign (-) is used to remove certain words of phrases. For example, should you be interested in the online chat service FRING then your base search phrase would be “Fring” but this will bring in a great deal of irrelevant mentions about teenagers with fringes etc. To remove these mentions simply update your search phrase with a Minus sign. For example: “Fring” - “fringe”. This will search for all mentions of fring but will remove any mentions with have the word “fringe” in it.

The best combinations for phrases would be to include the brand name ‘+’ the phrase that you intend to track. This will not only give you the most relevant mentions for the search phrase but also make sure that you spend less time rating irrelevant mentions. For example: “BrandsEye” + “reputation”

Through Boolean Logic you can also make sure that the phrases exclude certain irrelevant mentions. BrandsEye makes this process much easier for the layman - you can refine these search phrases by entering the “advanced” phrase entry mode (available on the “edit mention” screen) - which helps you step-by-step with this process.

3). Test the phrases

Before adding the phrases there is a simple way to quickly reduce the volume of irrelevant mentions and therefore save you time. Simply add the phrase to your favourite search engine and browse the results.

For example, if you wanted to track Craig Raw (BrandsEye’s and Quirk CTO) then you would simple type “Craig Raw” into your search results. After hitting submit you see that there are other Craig Raws who have an online presence. It’s then a matter of excluding them. Simply look at their mentions and exclude the most distinguished item about them. In this case it’s “water” as there is another Craig Raw who owns a fishing farm in Colorado. We can be quiet certain that our Craig Raw will never be mentioned in conjunction with water so, simply update the phrase to “craig raw” - water and then type it back into your search engine.

Then, simply look at the results and if there are no immediate irrelevant mentions then move to the next few pages all the while scanning for irrelevant mentions. When found, simply exclude them and resubmit the search.

Once you are happy with the results you will add your phrase to your ORM tool and the result will be a nicely refined, high yield phrase - exactly what is necessary.

4). Start simple

A common problem in setting up ORM tools is that users bite off more than they can chew. As a rule of thumb we recommend that you prioritise the areas of your personality or business according to their impact on your business model or personal objectives. Start with the most important areas of your life or business and then decide on two or three highly focussed tracking phrases.

Phrases must be short and related to the brand that is being tracked, and it is advisable that you use a combination of the phrase and its brand in order to make sure that mentions received are less likely to be irrelevant. In addition, one must use combinations of phrases that people are most likely to use when writing about your brand - this may also include common misspellings.

Good starting examples include:

•   “Microsoft Internet Explorer 7”
•   “Table Mountain National Park”

The objective here is to use these niche phrases to get a sense of the phrases which people who are talking about you use. You can then use this to decide on more general phrases. Another benefit of this approach is that you won’t be inundated with too many mentions enabling you to learn how to walk before trying to run.

5). Refine your phrases regularly

This aspect is very important in making sure that your ORM tool continues to track relevant mentions. We recommend that users regularly review their phrases to reduce the irrelevant mentions which are brought in. The process of doing this is simple and quiet intuitive.

When sorting mentions, simply keep an eye out - within irrelevant mentions - for particular phrases which are consistently irrelevant. It’s then a matter of excluding them by using Boolean Logic. For example: if your search phrase was “Janine Carpenter” (BrandsEye’s Chief Operations Officer) you would find that this name is shared with a dermatological doctor in the United States. As such, we can exclude skin, doctor, Columbia, acne. The search phrase will then become: “Janine Carpenter” - skin - doctor - Columbia - acne.

Therefore, it vital to constantly review your search phrases and continue to add new phrases that become relevant for the brand to track, and remove or modify those that have become irrelevant. This also makes sure that you receive less daily mentions and that those you do get stay as relevant as possible.

6). Only track as much as you can handle

There no limit to the amount of phrases that you can track on a daily basis with products such as BrandsEye but there is a downside. These types of tools go can gather information from as far as 3 years back in the search for relevant mentions. As such, you could easily become inundated with mentions which hold little value to your brand’s current climate. As such, it is advisable to grow the volume of phrases until you are using all the time you have set aside to manage your account. Once this is the case refine your existing phrases and once the time spend drops then add additional phrases. Rinse and repeat - a sure fire way to make the most from your Online Reputation Management efforts.

So, now that you know how to refine the phrases you are tracking, there’ll be no stopping you. Remember we’re always here to give you advice and tips on how to better utilise BrandsEye in order to get the most from your ORM endeavours.