Understanding the ORM Terminology

The internet and online world is often a confusing place when it comes to language. The web is littered with technical terms and new ones seem to pop up daily. The world of Online Reputation Management is just one of the countless realms existing on the web with its own terminology and lingo, and even within that realm BrandsEye has words and phrases that may be new to you. So in an effort to make it crystal clear here is the first part of the BrandsEye glossary of terms:

I Management

1. ORM  

Online Reputation Management is about understanding and managing the perception of an entity online, be it a brand, product, service or even an individual. 

2. Consumer Generated Media

Also referred to as social media, consumer generated media is information that is published online by individuals in their individual capacity. It refers to videos, photos, blogs, audio and more. It is also referred to as social media.  

3. Blogs & Forums

The favorite play grounds of the consumers. Basically a blog is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. For an example have a look at Quirk’s blog, GottaQuirk. 

4. Enterprise

In BrandsEye lingo, ‘enterprise’ is the term used to describe brands, business and industry.  For example, mentions of your brand can be produced or generated by an enterprise (like this post for instance).  

5. Directory

An alphabetical or classified listing of websites, blogs, products and services and other data for a particular industry i.e. eMarketing directory of suppliers. 

6. Mentions

Mentions refer to the instances when a selected brand, product,service, staff member or individual is talked about online, usually by clients or consumers. For example, a blog post discussing Google would constitute a mention for Google. 

7. Update

An update occurs every time BrandsEye searches the internet for mentions relating to particular phrases and keywords around your brand and updates your account with all new relevant mentions.

8. Search Frequency

Similar to an update, the search frequency is basically how often BrandsEye scans the Internet looking for mentions of your brand, product or service.

9. Alexa rank

A number indicating how popular a web site is compared to other sites, based on information returned by the Alexa Toolbar and Quirk SearchStatus. The number is the index of a given site in long ordered list of popularity by traffic. The most popular site is at index 1, the second most at index 2 and so on. This is a benchmark of how much influence a site has and consequently how much impact a mention of your brand on that site could potentially have.

10. SERP

The search engine results page is what is seen on a search engine when a search is performed. When managing your online reputation, you are looking to only have positive mentions of your brand, products and services appearing in the SERP's.

11. Online Reputation Score

This is an absolute gold mine of information and the most reliable indicator of what your reputation is like on the internet. Your final online reputation report can be customised using BrandsEye's filters, to reflect only the information that you deem important - resulting in an overall Reputation Score that can be compared with your competitors or (cheekily) between your CEO and yourself. This Reputation Score acts as the "spot price" of your brand at any moment and is graphed on a time graph for easy comparison. If you want to know more about this click here.

 II Rating

1. Sorting
Sorting is the process of reading mentions and determining their relevancy to your brand. The sorting process allows for a mention to be marked as Relevant, Duplicate, Spam or Irrelevant. All interactions at this point, teach BrandsEye to assist with the sorting process by intelligently reducing irrelevant and spam.

2. Rating
Rating is the process of tagging information onto each mention about your brand. This includes the media origin, sentiment and credibility amongst other things. This process allows for the automated reporting to take place.

3. Keyword / Phrase
In online reputation management, a keyword or phrase is a term that is used when searching the internet for mentions. Keywords and phrases can be things like your brand name, employee names, product offerings, competitor’s names and any other term that is closely linked to the reputation you would like to manage. You can find out more on how to choose keywords and phrases here.

4. Phrase Category
BrandsEye allows you to group your keywords and phrases into categories. For example you could have one category tracking keywords and phrases related to your products and another category tracking your competitors.

5. Root Category
A root category is essentially a base level category. For example, if you were tracking Google and wanted to compare it to Yahoo! Then both would be root categories. Within each root category is a number of sub-categories which contain the actual search phrases. For more on managing your phrases and categories here.

6. Tagging
Once BrandsEye has found and updated your account with new mentions, duplicate mentions are excluded by the filter and you have the opportunity to tag each mention, ranking it in terms of a number of pre-determined criteria. This will ensure that mentions requiring immediate attention are noted and less significant ones will sink to the bottom of the pile. For more on tagging click here.

7. Action Item Management
Mentions requiring immediate attention are highlighted and grouped until they are dealt with, ensuring that urgent interactions are responded to immediately - before negativity has time to fester.

8. Relevant
Marking a mention as relevant (during the sorting phase) means that it is related to the brand, of interest to yourself and will be included in your statistics.

9. Irrelevant
Marking a mention as irrelevant (during the sorting phase) means that it is related your particular key phrases but not relevant to your brand. For example to the brand Apple computers a mention about the fruit may be found but are irrelevant to your brand.

10. Spam
Spam is any mention which is either a collection of nonsensical words on a page or a direct copy of another site. Marking mentions within the sorting process as spam will teach BrandsEye to ignore similar mentions in future (with a 95% margin of certainty).

11. Sentiment
Once you have mentions of your brand that are marked as relevant, you are required to attach a level of sentiment to it. This is done on a scale of -5 to 5, where a sentiment score which sits at -5 means anger towards the brand is expressed in the post and 5 means celebration and praise.

12. Credibility
The credibility score is also attached to all relevant mentions of your brand. This score is there to determine the level of influence that a mention might have according to who wrote it and where the mention appeared. The credibility score is rated on a scale of 0 to 10 where 0 is an unknown and obscure to 10 who would be a well known authority or personality in the field. 

 III Reporting

1. Custom Reporting
BrandsEye also allows for fully customisable graphs and reports to be generated. These correspond to particular conditions which the user selects (such as authors credibility, sentiment, mention's source as well as websites traffic, Page Rank etc.) Reports centered on the variables of your choice can be created, ensuring that you find out exactly what you need to know about your brand.

2. Category
Score Gives you and idea of how many phrases in a particular category, BrandsEye has picked up, as well as letting you know the shift in your reputation score as a result of the mentions found for that category.

3. Media Segmentation Analysis
The graphic representation of the media sources from which mentions relating to your brand. This allows you to better understand how particular media types are interacting with your brand.

4. Sub-Brand Benchmarking
This allows for the reputation of products, individuals, or competitors to be compared against one another providing real-time SWOT analysis.

5. Sentiment analysis
BrandsEye measures the distribution of sentiment contained in mentions and automatically plots the information on a graph, allowing you to understand how your consumers and the press feel about you, your brand and your products.

6. Credibility analysis
Distribution of the credibility assigned to mentions is plotted on a graph, allowing you to understand the influence that your consumers have on your reputation and who you should engage with.

7. Automated Significant
Mention Management Mentions that have a high credibility or extreme sentiment (positive or negative) are automatically grouped for further attention.

8. SMS / Email / RSS alerts
Customised criteria can be specified, allowing for a variety of alerts and reports. For example, BrandsEye can send SMSs directly to your mobile phone whenever it finds an item requiring your immediate attention, an E-mail with a detailed report of the days mentions and an RSS feed can be set up so that you get constant updates on what mentions BrandsEye is finding and tracking.