BrandsEye

How To Get the Most From Your Reputation Reports

Daniel Neville — 2008-11-11T11:20:51+00:00

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.

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More Updates Go Live

Tim Shier — 2008-10-17T14:58:53+00:00

The beauty of using a tool like BrandsEye to monitor itself means that there is a steady stream of honest, unsolicited client feedback – a dream for any product development team!

Over the last week Craig has been very busy updating BrandsEye and three useful functionality changes are now live on BrandsEye.com. These include the grouping of phrases within a category for easier management, a nifty little change to exclude certain categories and their sub-categories in a single action – and better phrase and mention volume analysis.

Clever Category Exclusion:

The first change is of a slightly more technical nature. BrandsEye currently allows for daily reports to be sent to various stakeholders in your company (whether this be the MD or the marketing director). These parties may not want to see the same things in their reports though, and with the latest change users can specify to follow certain phrases, but not see them in their specific reports.

Take for example Quirk eMarketing’s BrandsEye account (screenshot above). It tracks a wide range of brands, sub-brands, staff etc. Not all of these mentions are relevant to me, the marketing manager – such as SearchStatus which is managed directly by Craig Raw (the same genius who leads the BrandsEye team).

As such, it makes sense that I receive a daily notification for all mentions with the exception of Quirk SearchStatus mentions. This new functionality makes this much easier. To set this up for yourself click “Contacts”, find your name and click edit. Next click “Daily Notifications” and you will be presented with a page similar to the screenshot below.

Next add an additional criteria item and set it to “rated category” with “isn’t nor child of” and select the category which you want to exclude from your mention summaries.

This can also be applied to specific reporting or mention management with equal ease.

Phrase Grouping:

Over the past weeks we have received a great deal of feedback from users requesting that the process for grouping new mentions be improved. As a result BrandsEye now allows for phrases to be grouped together much more easily.

In the past users had to either manage all new mentions together or look at them phrase by phrase but with this new addition it's much simpler.

Just click the “phrase” drop down, select either a particular phrase or the entire group of phrases and hit show – it couldn’t be simpler!

Phrase and mention counts:

Another cunning update is the inclusion of information such as the number of phrases and mentions for each category. The intention is to make it easier to spot problems in your ORM campaign and make it even easier to pick up on trends:

There are many more updates on the way so if you are already using BrandsEye please send us your thoughts and we will do our best to implement them.

If you're not signed up yet – what are you waiting for? $1 A month is just about a gift so sign up and enjoy the security that BrandsEye can bring to you and your brand.

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Rob Stokes on the Evolution of BrandsEye

Katharina Scholtz — 2008-10-14T15:26:22+00:00

If you give Rob, Quirk’s CEO, the name of your company, your competitor or your fiancé, within minutes he will know just about everything that’s been said about them online. This is not because he swallowed a wireless router as a child (we don’t think), but rather an ability born out of his and Craig’s insatiable desire to make things work better.

Being aware of the speedy viral power a message can have online, Quirk started monitoring its clients’ online reputations in early 2006. As Rob explained to me during our interview, they used a range of the tools available at the time – Technorati and Google alerts among others. These systems allow you to track mentions of your brand, key employees and just about any term you care to search for online. Unfortunately these tracking engines always brought each mention in more than once.

In discussing BrandsEye’s origins Rob points out that “the initial idea was purely a system to tap into tracking engines and de-duplicate, but once we got that going we realised there was much more to it.”

Two years later, there is indeed much more. The current BrandsEye system “tags mentions with meaningful data” like its sentiment and the credibility of its context and author, to name just three. This data is then pulled into an algorithm that provides a reputation score (on a pretty graph) which can be tracked over time.

This algorithm was worked out based on research and testing. “We interviewed a lot of PR agencies and marketing people to try to get a sense of what was important to them out of all those variables.” The algorithm was then “buttoned down” with rigorous testing on live data – BrandsEye performed a survey of the top four banks in South Africa over four months. There have been many improvements to the system since then and Rob points out that the BrandsEye “evolves as we learn and things change”. For example, content released by the brand carried more credibility two years ago than it does today. Changes like this, while tough to measure, have to be taken into account.

Many of the changes to BrandsEye are confirmed by and sourced from online feedback. “We’re big fans of launching quickly and learning fast”, explained Rob, saying that it’s the users who can really tell you what’s valuable about a system.

It’s useful to see a brand in the same terms. While any company or individual may tailor brand messages, Rob believes that “the only thing that counts is how a brand is actually perceived”. This is why he sees BrandsEye being used by more PR agency’s in future. It provides a pretty great source of aggregated information about how people are discussing any brand. By “crowd sourcing opinions” BrandsEye can thus provide information that not only signals a reputation crisis, but rather signals opportunity.

It was in response to online feedback, for example, that the BrandsEye Blogger package was launched; “we got a lot of positive feedback, but many said the system was too expensive for the individual.” So while 1 dollar a month won’t earn BrandsEye much revenue, the team felt this kind of package would be worth it in terms of the word of mouth it could encourage.

In an online world, BrandsEye can arguably only be seen as useful. I had to ask, however, whether online reputation represents a company’s reputation holistically. Rob answered that “in the first world we’re very close to everything being online…what is said in a newspaper is very important, and as the world converts to digital we’ll eventually get to the point where your online reputation is your reputation.”

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Managing BrandsEye Phrases - A How To Guide

Mango Malinga — 2008-10-14T07:03:25+00:00

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.

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BrandsEye Changes and Updates

Craig Raw — 2008-08-23T06:49:45+00:00

BrandsEye has been undergoing a rapid evolution since it's release, with user feedback showing us a lot of changes to the system that can offer better usability and just generally have the system run smoother. I've been working on and implementing changes that, while small individually, we hope will collectively make your experience that much better.

Below is a list of the changes that have gone live most recently (warning: they might not make sense to those who haven't used the system before).

Changes to the Home Page

We've moved things around a little on the homepage, to give direct access to the new mentions that will be coming in for whatever phrases you've chosen to track.

The “mark mentions” table has been placed first, which makes sorting that much easier.
We've also added a new volume chart (shown below) for the non-Insight packages, that will show the number of mentions per day broken down into categories.
Charts on the homepage will now prompt you to sort and rate if they have no data to display, instead of displaying a default message.

Confirmation of Deletes

Deleting a category now provides a confirmation page listing what will be deleted before the delete takes place.
This also includes the ability to automatically mark all mentions that are losing rating information irrelevant - this only applies to accounts with Insight.
Phrases can now be deleted. This will cause all mentions picked up by that phrase to be deleted, and you will be presented with a list of them before confirming.
A similar confirmation page has been applied to deleting contacts and rules.

Phrases

A phrase can be made to have all its mentions marked relevant via a tickbox on its edit page. This creates or updates a system created rule, which can be viewed (a good way to see how rules work) but is not editable.

Accounts

People who are listed as contacts can now edit their own passwords.

Bugs

There are at least 3 other bug fixes, including the Apply Now function on the homepage.

As always we're eager for more feedback on these changes or any other suggestions you may have, so please let us know via the new Feedback page!

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BrandsEye - Monitoring your feedback

Craig Raw — 2008-08-11T17:59:50+00:00

Whew! Last week was a crazy one, with BrandsEye Blogger launching at $1 per month to serve online reputation monitoring to all and sundry. While I think www.brandseye.com still needs some work around making BrandsEye easier to understand and subscribe to, the reaction of the online community has been really fantastic and we've had scores of signups since Wednesday.

Monitoring all of the feedback (via BrandsEye, naturally!) has kept us busy since then, and a common point that was raised was the three field login on www.brandseye.com. We went for 3 fields initially (account, email address and password) for the enterprise crowd who have many different people working on one account and need role separation and, dare I say it, accountability (ahem). However, it's also true that modern browsers only cope with saving 2 field logins, and we've all grown accustomed to pre-filled login fields on our favourite online services.

So, we've listened (thanks Josie, Uno, Gerhard, Erik, Cath, Marcel) and I've just updated www.brandseye.com with a 2 field login (email address, password). Your browser will save these just fine if you let it, and if your details correspond to more than one BrandsEye account it will ask you to select one before logging you in.

Please keep the feedback coming - we love it!

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BrandsEye Reputation Monitoring – now available for $1 per month!

Craig Raw — 2008-08-06T12:53:31+00:00

It's been awhile since I put up a post here, largely because of preparation for today - we have been working hard on getting a blogger-friendly version of BrandsEye out there! At $1 per month, BrandsEye Blogger complements our enterprise-level offering so everyone can start monitoring their reputation. There is also a Small Business option when you need to measure a little more than your name and blog, while the Enterprise package lets you monitor as much as you like. There are no contracts, and a simple email request will cancel your subscription.

So how does it stack up? Currently, the ORM space offers a wide range of tools, from the fairly limited Google Alerts for free all the way through to giants such as Nielsen at US corporate level expense. I think BrandsEye Blogger compares well - it's significantly cheaper than comparable tools such as Trackur, yet offers full media monitoring, customisable alerts and reports, and a host of other features not present in comparable products. It really does bring effective reputation monitoring into the hands of just about everyone.

The second part of this relaunch is the one that I've spent the last few years thinking about - not just monitoring your reputation, but actually measuring and managing it. We have developed some advanced features, including scoring your reputation to benchmark against competitors (see BrandsEyes own reputation graph here), indepth reporting (find out which sites or bloggers are the best to target for your next product launch), and highlighting of SEO link building opportunities. Each mention of a brand can be tagged with a variety of valuable meta-data, such as credibility, media source, and visibility on the page. It's the kind of information that PR professionals and companies will find invaluable, and we've named it BrandsEye Insight. It's a standard upgrade on the Blogger, Small Business and Enterprise packages.

To assist with tagging I've been working on a Firefox extension, which like SearchStatus plugs into your browser. This one adds a sidebar however, allowing you to download all the mentions you've picked up and tag them appropriately. It makes managing your reputation a breeze, and we use it ourselves here every day. It's also available on the $1 Blogger package!

Finally, BrandsEye now sports a widget (an iGoogle gadget, actually) that you can place on your website, blog or landing page. It will display any mentions according to the criteria you give it in a box on the screen, folding out descriptions and linking to the source. You find an example of it in action on GottaQuirk in the side navigation. It allows you to build credibility while keeping the content on your site fresh and interactive with the web at large.

It's exciting stuff. Since I drafted this post Stii Pretorius (Afrigator), Eric Edelstein (Springleap) and Charl Norman have all signed up for a BrandsEye Blogger account, before we could even take the new site live! Thanks guys!

All in all, for me personally it's a pretty big day, where all of these features I've been polishing are not only released, but released at a price that should suit everyone's needs and pocket. If you are a fellow blogger reading this, a short form and $1 (R7) per month stand between you and effective ORM. What are you waiting for?

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Measuring your brand online

Craig Raw — 2008-04-23T13:14:38+00:00

If you've followed the last few posts on this blog you should now have a selection of different phrases on a variety of search engines picking up mentions of your brands online. Well and good - it's likely that unless you've done this kind of thing before, you will have learnt a few things about how you are perceived online, and may have even started participating in the conversation.

You should also be developing a 'feel' for who is writing about you, be it a customer or the press, an anonymous comment in a blog, an accredited article, or even your own online PR. There are clearly distinct differences between these sources, and that suggests we delve a little deeper and treat the subject from an analytical viewpoint to determine a better idea of your position in the market - who is talking about you, and what platform they are doing it from. To measure this, we divide it up into measurable components, such as:

Title
Link
Relevancy (Relevant or irrelevant)
Date published
Language
Media Origin (Consumer, press, enterprise or directory)
Credibility (How much trust? How many hits?)
Rating (Good or bad?)
Linked
Phrase matches (How many times is the phrase mentioned?)

Of these, some are hard measures (such as phrase matches, linked and language) and some are softer (such as rating and credibility). Credibility in particular is a tricky one - how does one gauge trust online? It turns out there are a number of indicators, which will be the topic of another post. Rating is slightly easier - so long as there is a meaningful scale, it's not too hard to detect praise or criticism.

If you are doing your ORM manually, you can start a spreadsheet and give each of these values a column, adding a new row of data for every mention that comes in. If you're using BrandsEye, it's easy to tag each mention with these metrics as they come in. After a while, you will develop a surprising useful database that can be used to draw all kinds of insights into the market - are the only negative mentions from consumers, are you getting mentioned on sites with enough visibility, etc. It will also give you an insight into where to target links from and how your existing link building is faring.

This kind of information is a gold mine when developing your eMarketing strategy - after all, it's a global conversation, and you need to understand it to be part of it.

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Finding yourself - Tracking your brand online

Craig Raw — 2008-04-15T07:52:54+00:00

So, you've researched and created a list of phrases identifying yourself and your company. In this second part of the series, it's time to start looking for mentions of yourself online. The most obvious idea, of course, is to plug them into a search engine and read the results. Because all search engines are not created equal, and some promote certain pages over others on different criteria, it's important to choose a range of engines to get a fair representation of your brands online. This doesn't mean you need to check every search engine out there, or page to position 1,167 on the ones you do - what you are trying to do is cover what the vast majority of what other people are going to see spoken about you. In practice, unless you are Apple or Coca-cola, search results become repeated across engines and relevancy falls quickly beyond the first few results pages.

Which engines to choose? Of course, the major players, Google, Yahoo and MSN. Then, their vertical searches, such as Google Blog Search, Google News, Yahoo News and MSNSearchNews. I have focused here on the news and blog searches because they are likely to carry fresh content relevant across a wide range of subjects. In this same line, Technorati and Icerocket also factor as aggregators of opinion from millions of blogs.

Search phrases, check. Search engines, check. All good to go? Unfortunately, you are now left with what is a chore - a daily visit to each search engine, entering each search phrase, to read the latest - which is usually mostly unchanged from yesterday and, even worse, containing duplicated results. There is, however, some help out there - Google for example offers Google Alerts, which sends you an email every day with any changes in the SERPs, and the similarly named GoogleAlerts.com is a commercial service offering an RSS feed of Google results. Other search engines allow you to download an feed of a particular search phrase directly, which helps by keeping all the results in one place and marking those results you have seen as read. This is a good sight better, and is the recommended way to do basic ORM tracking. It does however still suffer from the problem of duplicated pages. It also has one other problem - high maintenance when adjusting your phrases.

Adjusting phrases is an important part of getting your tracking setup perfect. Although skill comes with experience, it's impossible to know beforehand whether your search is too broad, or (more difficult) too narrow. If it's too broad, you will soon find yourself sifting through multitudes of irrelevant mentions on similarly named topics - it's time to start excluding these results with the minus (-) operator. For example, 'quirk newsletter -cars' excludes certain used car sales results from a search on the Quirk Newsletter. Too narrow searches will bring back too few results - start to worry when you don't pick up your own online press releases you can find in a Google search.

Refinement of phrases should be see as a continual, evolutionary process, as the search environment and the market changes. Changing a phrase across all the engines is a chore however, and here I have to stop for a moment to mention BrandsEye - it allows you to maintain and update a set of phrases independently to the set of search engines, and at the same time solves the problem of duplicate results which is a considerable time saver.

At this point you should have the ability to retrieve mentions on your phrases, which gives you a start at tracking your named brands. This alone is probably going to tell you a few things you didn't already know about what others are saying about you online, and provides entry points to join the conversation. Still, it's largely dependent on you to remember who is commenting and what they are saying in order to draw any useful information out of the results. That is where measurement comes in, and will be the topic of another post. Technorati Profile

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Who am I? Determining your reputation tracking phrases

Craig Raw — 2008-04-10T07:55:21+00:00

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.

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