Online Reputation Managament (ORM) – Tools of the trade

Here is a list of tools (mostly free) that I have complied for monitoring brands online reputation. Gathering data is the first step in ORM, second  is interpreting that data and lastly engagement. These tools help  complete the first step in online reputation management cycle, gathering data.

Dashboards

•    iGoogle (www.google.co.za/ig) – Gives a dashboard approach to monitoring

your online reputation, set this as your home page and balance consistently monitoring your clients with useful apps (like Gmail and Facebook notifications).
•    Google Reader (www.google.com/reader) – Aggregator, makes checking your RSS feeds almost as simple as checking your email.
•    Outlook RSS feeds – Set alerts straight into your inbox, like it’s done with Tomato Source.
•    Side widgets/online feeds – Hundreds of readers exist, from your sidebar in Vista to your Facebook account.
•   Yahoo Pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/) – Feed aggregator and manipulator. Set up pipes for news alerts and overviews. Generally Awesome, for the advanced user.

Paid for dashboards
•    BrandsEye (http://www.brandseye.com/)  – Quirk’s BrandsEye is the greatest ORM monitoring tool I have tried to date, its complicated but highly customizable and affordable
•    SaidWot (http://www.saidwot.co.za/) – SaidWot is a simple to use and understand ORM tool, perfect for monitoring that does not need in depth analysis. SaidWot also gives a brand value to mentions which can help justify the online outreach budget.

Brand overviews

•    HowSociable? (http://www.howsociable.com/) – A simple, free, tool that can measure the visibility of your brand on the web across 32 metrics
•    Socialmention (http://socialmention.com/) – A social media search engine offering searches across individual platforms (e.g. blogs, microblogs) or all together with a ’social rank’ score. Whether or not the score is transparent enough to be meaningful is open to debate.
•    Kosmix (http://www.kosmix.com/) – Overview of a brand online posts across multiple platforms, use this for a quick brand audit. Or search for yourself and see what results you get!

Blog searches

Global
•    TECHNORATI Advanced (http://technorati.com/search?advanced) – Technorati’s advanced search page allows you to search for blogs (rather than posts) based on tags.
•    Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com/)  Google’s index of blog posts. The advanced search tab allows you to search based on additional criteria. Very good for searching between specific dates.
Local
•    Amatomu (http://www.amatomu.com/) – Amatomu is the original blog aggregator and only local category blog chart provider. Unfortunately its reputation and credibility is slipping.
•    Afrigator (http://afrigator.com/) – Afrigator is a blog a aggregator for all African blogs that choose to subscribe to it. It provides RSS feeds for blog searches and is the most reliable blog search service for local blogs. Unfortunately it does not have blog charts by category.

Buzz tracking

•    Google Trends (http://google.com/trends) – shows amount of searches and Google news stories
•    Trendpedia (http://www.trendpedia.com/) – Create charts showing the volume of discussion around multiple topics. Generates cool graphs.

Twitter search

•    Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com/)  Search keywords on Twitter which “self-refreshes”. See what’s happening — ‘right now’ in a specified location
•    Tweet Deck (www.tweetdeck.com) – one of the many dashboards for monitoring your own tweets and run live searches. Completely addictive for heavy Twitter users
•   TweetBeep (http://tweetbeep.com/) – Track mentions of your brand on Twitter in real time.
•    Twitrratr (http://twitrratr.com/) – Rates mentions of your search term on Twitter as positive/neutral/negative
•   Twilert (http://www.twilert.com/) – Twitter application that lets you receive regular email updates of tweets containing your brand, product, service
•   Twitter Grader (http://twitter.grader.com/)- Grade the influence of twitter users, useful for prioritising our responses.

Website traffic

•    Compete (http://www.compete.com/) – Competitor site traffic reports. Estimates only of monthly visitor data. Best used on large high-traffic Web sites.
•    Quantcast (http://www.quantcast.com/) – Use this on large high-traffic Websites. It allows you to compare multiple web sites in one handy chart. Estimates only of monthly visitor data.
•    Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/) – Comparative site traffic reports. Includes estimated reach, rank and page views.

Multi media search

•    YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/) – Search for videos and channels by keyword.
•    Flickr (http://flickr.com/search/advanced) – Search Flickr for photos, groups or people/users.
•    Viral Video Chart (http://www.viralvideochart.com/) – Displays top 20 most-viewed video (1, 7, 365 days). Includes view counts and charting.
•   Zoopy (http://www.zoopy.com) – The only local image and video hosted, great to save on bandwidth costs. Almost all videos here originate from SA.

If you have anything else you think would be useful please leave me a comment.

Crowdsourcing and the death of strategic thinking

For my first assignment in the Quirk eMarketing course we where asked to write an essay on the way the internet is changing advertising models with regards to crowdsourcing.

I took a critical view to crowdsourcing and by accident came to the following points that need to be taken into consideration before undertaking a crowdsourcing campaign:

Take aways for successful crowdsourcing:

•    Be where the community you intend to crowdsource is, don’t build a new platform to draw them in. If your community is on Facebook then you start your crowdsourcing commission from Facebook.
•    Small scale crowdsourcing is a great start. For example reward great  suggestions given to your twitter profile.

•    Compensate great ideas, don’t anger the mob by offering even less than you would have paid an agency for the creative.

•    Context is key, give a full brief and where ever possible offer insights into the strategy. Too easily crowdsourcing can lead to poor executions driven by untrained people. Critically evaluate whether the winning concept actually fits with your brand strategy.

•    Offer a moderator to monitor the environment and guide the path to successful on point submissions.

•    Keep poor products and exploitations away from crowdsourcing models, you will be exposed for what you really are.