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.

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.

I have heard (and laughed at) theories of how computers/machines will take over and destroy the world! I have a much greater and more imminent fear regarding the abilities of online technologies to influence our world views.

Google is making headways in its profiling, your search results may be very different to be the same search query I make. This is great, personalised results based on our unique context. But what if Google gets it wrong? Or worse still what if the profile that Google thinks we fit best into starts to change our cognitive processes.

Let’s take an example, a student starts doing some research on guns in South Africa involving several searches on the topic, this in turns changes the Google profile of that person. Google could then serve that same individual with more results about guns and violence in other seemingly unrelated searches. Google news, Gmail, Adwords, Google blog and scholar search could all lead to Google serving that individual more results based on guns and violence in South Africa. Eventually that persons world view will start to narrow and may be changed based on the way Google serves the world to that person.

In the end the potential lies that extremists will become more extreme and our worlds will shrink. Scary, very scary.

Computers taking over the world – Image from www.wikus.co.za

On a weekly basis Standard Bank (to whom regrettably I am currently a customer of) phones me to sell me products that I am already a customer of, or that are irrelevant to my profile. Every time I ask them to exclude me from their spam marketing list, but they continue to phone me (read spam). In one week I even received three calls selling the exact same product.

Last week I had enough and tweeted on my negative feelings towards them. Samantha Perry (@samanthaperry) sent me a tweet suggesting I contact @standardbankgrp. Within about two minutes Brandsh contacted me via email to resolve my problem.

It’s a #Win that it took them two minutes from me tweeting to them having found my details and contacted me. However not all was kosher, Brandsh contacted me on behalf of Standard Bank on their own email addresses. My compliant is with Standard Bank, I want them to respond not some 3rd party. Also the issue should have been resolved the first time I asked a consultant to mark me as do not contact on the system.

This is where it starts to get dodgy

Brandsh asked me to give them my banking account number via email. Huh? Consistently my bank is warning me about phishing scams and reminding me to never give out details and now some other (random?) person not working for the bank is asking for my account details over email? Wanting to see what the bank was up to I willingly passed over my details .

About 30 minutes later I got a call from Standard Bank (did I just not complain about you always calling me?) asking me to explain what my issue was (I just did that via twitter and email, but I take it that the bank themselves never got that, sigh).

The next day

Standard Bank has recently been taken to task on the social media front with the start of the Standard Blank community

I got sms spam from Standard Bank, and took the same compliant route. The response from Bransh was that they didn’t know of any SMS campaigns that day (great). Got another call from the Bank, again they had little idea why they were calling me, so decided they would call back after I explain my problem. Later they called (again) back and said it would take up to a month for their system to update (you’ve got to be kidding me right?).

Key take outs

• Fix your traditional query resolution channels, customers will spam your online ones if it’s the only channel they get addressed on. This will quickly ruin your online reputation.

• The company should contact the customers, not a 3rd party. Not to say that a 3rd party like an agency should be advising the company the whole time.

• 3rd parties should follow the company they represents practices (in this case asking for  account details over email is surely not in the banks policies).

• I love the investment in social media, but brands should first looking at fixing their internal processes before spreading spend even thinner across more platforms.

• Make sure to pass all the facts along down the resolution chain, its highly frustrating consistently repeating the same stories

• Lastly set rules for the number of times a single customer can be contacted with marketing materials and communicate all brand touch points to all your agencies

Meeting up with any old friend quickly leads me to telling them about my awesome new Totoya Auris 1.8 RS , I continue with how great the car is often leaving out the fact that my first choice was actually the VW Polo.

I have moved on past the shocking delivery service and the even worse dishonest and horrific vehicle financing saga. I’ve even blinded myself from the awful local social media engagement #FAIL.

I am delighted to subscribe to my models blog filled with nothing relevant to a buyer, ecstatic to register for Toyota’s post purchase non-functioning customer site, overjoyed in following their twitter feed (even if they flatly ignore my tweets and questions) and delighted with the brands priceless accessories list.

Once I pulled together how ridiculous my appreciation of the useless attempt by Toyota’s at social media engagement I came to realise how powerful brand loyalty and post purchase dissonance really is.

Maybe this is the same force Apple has applied over its customers?

There are a lot of great presentations on social media out there. This one stands by Brand Infiltration out for me, perhaps I just enjoy its controversial style.

Shift Communications (the creators of the original social media press release template) have published a corporate social media policy template. I love open source approach that Shift have taken, generally the PR world are not great on sharing and growing on intellectual capital.

I’m not a fan of company policies but even I cannot deny the importance of this.

Here is the template courtesy of Shift communications:

TOP 10 GUIDELINES FOR SOCIAL MEDIA PARTICIPATION AT (COMPANY)

These guidelines apply to (COMPANY) employees or contractors who create or contribute to blogs, wikis, social networks, virtual worlds, or any other kind of Social Media. Whether you log into Twitter, Yelp, Wikipedia, MySpace or Facebook pages, or comment on online media stories — these guidelines are for you.

While all (COMPANY) employees are welcome to participate in Social Media, we expect everyone who participates in online commentary to understand and to follow these simple but important guidelines. These rules might sound strict and contain a bit of legal-sounding jargon but please keep in mind that our overall goal is simple: to participate online in a respectful, relevant way that protects our reputation and of course follows the letter and spirit of the law.

1. Be transparent and state that you work at (COMPANY). Your honesty will be noted in the Social Media environment. If you are writing about (COMPANY) or a competitor, use your real name, identify that you work for (COMPANY), and be clear about your role. If you have a vested interest in what you are discussing, be the first to say so.

2. Never represent yourself or (COMPANY) in a false or misleading way. All statements must be true and not misleading; all claims must be substantiated.

3. Post meaningful, respectful comments — in other words, please, no spam and no remarks that are off-topic or offensive.

4. Use common sense and common courtesy: for example, it’s best to ask permission to publish or report on conversations that are meant to be private or internal to (COMPANY). Make sure your efforts to be transparent don’t violate (COMPANY)’s privacy, confidentiality, and legal guidelines for external commercial speech.

5. Stick to your area of expertise and do feel free to provide unique, individual perspectives on non-confidential activities at (COMPANY).

6. When disagreeing with others’ opinions, keep it appropriate and polite. If you find yourself in a situation online that looks as if it’s becoming antagonistic, do not get overly defensive and do not disengage from the conversation abruptly: feel free to ask the PR Director for advice and/or to disengage from the dialogue in a polite manner that reflects well on (COMPANY).

7. If you want to write about the competition, make sure you behave diplomatically, have the facts straight and that you have the appropriate permissions.

8. Please never comment on anything related to legal matters, litigation, or any parties (COMPANY) may be in litigation with.

9. Never participate in Social Media when the topic being discussed may be considered a crisis situation. Even anonymous comments may be traced back to your or (COMPANY)’s IP address. Refer all Social Media activity around crisis topics to PR and/or Legal Affairs Director.

10. Be smart about protecting yourself, your privacy, and (COMPANY)’s confidential information. What you publish is widely accessible and will be around for a long time, so consider the content carefully. Google has a long memory.

I’ve always thought that the company I work for is very progressive, after all we self title ourselves as being “Switched on”. Unfortunately I feel this has been undermined by the recent introduction of a new  policy that “prohibits employees from providing references of any kind (personal, professional, or otherwise) no matter how the request is received, and also prohibits voluntary references of any kind. This includes a prohibition on employees providing references on social networking sites (e.g., LinkedIn, Spoke, etc.) that allow recommendations or referrals for individuals.”

Does this mean I can’t congratulate an employee on a job well done on Facebook for example?

I think this policy is backward, I understand it’s to protect current employees and reduce the risk of litigation but I feel it lacks an understanding of social media. Are there benefits of internal references, or do they lack credibility?

Legal department?

Going into first world markets and experiencing the advancement of online outreach created a desire within to see the South African market advance to the same level of online engagement. I became frustrated at the lack of local online engagement, and I’m starting to wonder if it’s not the public relations space that is behind in this space but rather the blogger community.

Nic Haralambous at the recent Alt.conference argued that bloggers in South Africa lack a niche focus. He illustrated this with examples from the SA Blog Awards façade where bloggers such as Christopher M won an award for his ‘technology blog’ when very little of his blog has much to do with technology!

Many PR folk are all over Twitter, we are using online monitoring tools and tracking online conversation. When we start finding real online influencers with niche relevant markets then the two way conversation will start, until then I expect the focus to remain largely on traditional media.

Nic haralambous speaking at the Alt.conference on his passion. Picture by Paul Jacobson on Flickr licensed under Creative Commons.

Hardly hidden by the sale banner in the Cresta Truworths front window lie a set of three naked manikins providing sexual favours on one another!

Trueworths mankins going down on one another

Its bad enough that the staff of Truworths don’t want to dress the mankins in Truworths clothing, but positioning them in inappropriate positions can only be described as brand #Fail.