How To Get the Most From Your Reputation Reports

In the wake of the recent US elections, and the stunning victory by Barack Obama I’ve been thinking a lot about the things he did to make his campaign a success. One of the things I personally think Mr Obama did very well was manage, with frightening efficiency, how the public spoke about him online. Knowing and responding to what people were saying about him, his policies and campaign gave him the ability to see what worked and what didn’t. It also gave him the ability to respond to attacks on his campaign quickly, efficiently and in ways that didn’t seem forced or reactionary. Now I know to run for the president of the United States, ensures that you have a massive team at your disposal, some of whom spend all their time just making sure they know what is being said about their candidate. The point is though, that having such comprehensive information about what the public think of you or your brand is actually not that difficult or costly when put into business context.

In this installment of the ’how to’ guide, I will be talking about the vast amount of information that the BrandsEye reports make available to you. In particular the Reputation Reports can, if you know how to use and interpret them, give you everything you need to help you manage and mold your reputation. In an effort to show you how to be more like Mr Obama, here are a few tips on how to get the most out of your BrandsEye Reputation Reports.

So you have your BrandsEye account up and running and you have set the ORM tool loose on the web. As BrandsEye scans the web, mentions of your brand are found and comprehensively tracked. But BrandsEye, unlike other ORM tools, does not stop with merely tracking mentions of your brand. With the addition of the BrandsEye Insight package to any existing account, you gain access to a multitude of specialised and useful reports that can help give deeper understanding of how your brand is perceived online. The first of these specialised reports is the Reputation Report. Because of its unique algorithm, BrandsEye uses the tagged data attached to mentions to generate a precise score that accurately reflects the state of your brand’s reputation. These scores are then plotted over time making it a very useful report to find out where things went right... or wrong.

To access the Reputation Report, click on the "reputation" link under "Reports" in the menu bar on the left of the BrandsEye interface.  This will take you to the Reputation Report page. The first thing you will see is something like this:

As you can see from the above screenshot, the first thing that you can do is filter mentions by what date they were published. We have asked BrandsEye to generate a report that contains mentions that were published between the 1st of September 2007 and the 30th of September 2008. This date range can be expanded or contracted as you wish, giving you the ability to look closely at your brand’s reputation at very specific points in time or more generally, as we have done. Once you have specified the time period, you can select a particular category you would like to be tracked on the graph. If we look again at the above screenshot we have chosen to track all mentions for the category "Quirk eMarketing". This will produce a graph that will illustrate the reputation of Quirk eMarketing which is generated from tracked online mentions over a yearlong period.

The Reputation Report also gives you the ability to compare the reputation of one category against another. For example, if you wanted to track your brand’s reputation in comparison to your competitors’ you are able to add another category by clicking on the ‘+’ next to the first category. The drop down boxes can be used to select a category against which you would like to compare the first. For example, in the screen shot below we have chosen to compare the reputation of Quirk eMarketing against Idea Bounty; one of our recently launched sub-brands.

Once you have decided which category’s reputation you would like to track, click on the "show" button that can be found next to the date range variables. BrandsEye will then generate a report, in the form of an animated graph, that will be displayed on your screen. It should look something like this:

There are a couple of things to note on this graph. The blue spikes spread out along the X axis represent the volume of mentions that Quirk has gained each day between the selected dates, in this case 1st September 2007 to 30th September 2008. So, for example, on the 12th of March there were 40 mentions of Quirk eMarketing online (as is pointed out by the arrow in the image). The numbers along the left of the graph represent the number of mentions found.

The second thing to point out is the line that runs across the graph. This represents Quirk’s reputation score, which has been calculated using the data tagged to each mention. The BrandsEye algorithm takes into account the source of the mention, its credibility, its sentiment, media source and a whole host of other factors before applying it to the graph. The numbers along the right of the graph represent the reputation score. For example, between the 17th and 24th of July Quirk’s reputation jumped up, taking the reputation score from 1.5 on the 17th to 2.0 on the 24th (see image below). Jumps in your reputation like this should put a smile on anyone’s face, but there is more!

Knowing that your brand's reputation jumped up over this period of time is useful information but, once again, BrandsEye does not only track your reputation over time, but takes this information even further to give you even greater insight. You will notice that along the blue line that represents Quirk’s reputation score over time, there are little yellow dots. These dots are significant mentions that were published at that point in time. These mentions are the most significant indicators to explain rises and falls in your reputation. In this case, the cluster of yellow dots between the 17th and 24th of July let us know that there were a number of significant mentions around that time that caused Quirk’s reputation to improve. Once more these mentions obliviously heaped praise on Quirk which means a pat on the back for us. By moving you mouse over these yellow dots you will be able to see the titles of these significant mentions which are also listed below the graph like this;

Each significant mention is a link that, if clicked, will take you to the page or website where that mention occurred. This allows you to see exactly what people were saying that caused your reputation to jump. Imagine knowing instantly which of your products your consumers are happy or unhappy about. Information like this is invaluable as a PR and marketing measurement tool: You will now be able to see what kind of talk or actions cause people to talk more positively about you or your brand and focus your PR efforts on moving towards this.. I would like to hazard that if John McCain was using BrandsEye, he would have realised much sooner how much damage a certain vice presidential candidate was doing to his, and his party’s reputation.

Going back to the reputation graph, there is a lot more information it can still give us. When you are in the BrandsEye interface, you will notice that when you mouse over the spikes that illustrate mention volume you can click on each spike. This allows you to drill down into the report and get a list of all the mentions that happened on that day. For example on the 7th of August 2008 there was a huge jump in the number of mentions Quirk got online; this is represented by the largest spike on the Reputation graph. If we then click on the spike it takes us to a list of mentions for that day and looks something like this:

What you will see here is a link to every mention that was published on the 7th of August. This allows you to once again delve deeper into what people are saying about your brand online. This is useful in a number of ways. If, for example, there is a high volume of mentions on a particular day and at the same time your reputation score drops, you have the ability to get straight to the mentions online that caused the drop to happen. This makes the Reputation Report an invaluable crisis preemption and management tool, because it enables you to get to the source of complaints and respond appropriately, which ultimately is always going to reflect well on your brand. In a similar manner, one could use the Reputation report to find mentions that have caused your reputation score to improve. This will allow you to leave a message of thanks which will re-enforce the positive sentiment and turn casual brand commentators into ardent brand evangelists.

As you can see, there is a wealth of information that one can get from the Reputation Report, all of which is essential when you are managing and trying to grow a brand’s reputation. The success of PR and marketing campaigns can be gauged by honing in on a specific date range where the volume of mentions and how they affected your reputation score is displayed. Crisis can be avoided by watching the movement of the reputation score, and dangerous mentions about your brand can trigger a direct and relevant response. Ultimately, the Reputation Report will give you a true understanding of your brand’s reputation - something which could both grow your business and save it in times of crisis.

Part of getting on the road to success is knowing what you are doing right and wrong and then responding accordingly.

This was proved by Barack Obama, who in the beginning looked like he had little or no chance of wining the election. However, by knowing what people thought of him, he had the ability to respond accordingly and make history. With BrandsEye, anyone or any brand can now do the same. Even our own South African politicians are taking a leaf out of Barack Obama’s book and starting to pay more attention to their online reputations.