Managing your social network reputation (or eImage)

There is a great deal of research that has been done both in marketing and in information systems that shows that your reputation online can have a dramatic impact on the willingness of potential customers to d business with you and the prices you can charge for your goods or services (Ba and Pavlou 2002, Lee et. al. 2000, Standifird 2001, Standifird 2002).  Whether or not you decide to formally launch a social media campaign to promote your company or your brand it is important for you to monitor what people are saying about you online.  So you have an opportunity to contribute to the conversations that are occurring.

Entrepreneurs usually are trying to increase the visibility of their company or products.  Depending on how new you company is, there may be few if any people discussing or you online. Before you begin any social media marketing campaign you need to begin by tracking the conversations that are occurring around your products and services.  This will allow you to assess any changes that occur as a result of your marketing efforts.

One way to contribute to and help shape the dialog that occurs about your company is to use tools that allow you to monitor what is being said about about you online and track who is saying it.

Step 1: Sign-up for Alerts

A good place to begin is to sign up for a feed reader like Google reader or Bloglines.  Feed readers aggregate syndicated web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs in a single location for easy viewing.

Once you have a feed reader you can sign up for Google Alerts, RSS updates Google sends to you when they find new web pages that include the search terms that you specify.  The alerts track blog posts, news articles, videos and even groups. You can set alerts on your company or product name, topic terms, or even alerts about your competitors.  Google will then will notify you of stories, as they happen, so you won't miss it when someone is talking about things that are important to you online.

If you have a blog, then you will also want to claim your blog on Technorati, which is the largest blog search engine in the world. Once you register, Technorati tracks blog reactions (blogs that link to yours). Technorati allows you to subscribe to RSS alerts so that when someone blogs about you, you find out.

Step 2: Search for Social Mentions

There are a number of places where your company can be mentioned that will not appear in the Google or Technorati alerting feeds. This includes people using your name in comments on blog posts, in discussion boards,  bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. There are a number of tools that can help you search for and track these social mentions:

• Backtype is a tool for monitoring blog comments that allows you to find, follow, and share comments from across the web.
  
• Social Mention, Serph and Keotag are social media search engines that searches a variety of social media sources such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. It allows you to track mentions of your company, product (or competitors) across social media sources, like Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Delicious, Twitter etc.
• boardtracker.com, Boardreader and Big Boards allow you to get instant alerts from discussion board threads citing your name.
•  Twitter search, Twilert and TweetBeep are tools that you can use locate your name, or other topics in Twitter messages.
• If you have a lot of activity around your name you might want to use, Filtrbox, which only delivers the most relevant, credible mentions of things you need to track. Its "FiltrRank" technology scores content based on three dimensions: contextual relevance, popularity and feedback.

Most of these services allow you can subscribe to your results by either RSS or email (or both).

Using these tools you can track the amount and nature of activity surrounding your name.  If the social mentions are positive you can take steps to highlight the positive.  If the social mentions are negative you can take steps (promptly) to address any problems that have arisen.

Step 3: Track your Contributions

As you jump into social media you should develop a mechanism for tracking all of your company's contributions to the online social sphere.  This can be challenging if you are making contributions to a variety of social network sites or if more than one person is your company is actively contributing. There are tools available for you to monitor your social media contributions allowing you to ensure that contributions are consistent with your messaging strategy.

One tool that is ideally suited to monitoring your companies social media contributions is FriendFeed, a social aggregator. Friend Feed allows you to aggregate all of your social accounts, (e.g. Delicious, Twitter, Your blog, Flickr, and YouTube) into a single easier to manage feed.  FriendFeed allows you to conduct searches on your company throughout all social networks at once. It also allows you to analyze comments that people make on them.

Other tools you can use to monitor your activity on the web includes:

• coComment is another tool that will help you manage your comments across the web.
• Yacktrack lets you search for comments on your content from various sources, such as Blogger, Digg, FriendFeed, Stumbleupon, and Wordpress blogs.
• You can also use Commentful and co.mments to track your social comments on the web.

Step 4: Develop your Monitoring Plan

After you’ve selected which sources you want to monitor and the tools you want to use to manage your social media campaign management you need to create a plan for for monitoring all of the sources you have identified.  Your plan should include:

• A schedule for how often you will to check your monitoring tools.
• Who will be responsible for monitoring and updating each site or tool.
  

Your schedule will depend on the volume and types of comments you receive. When you start, monitoring each source once a day or week will generally be enough, but as your activity level increases you will probably need to monitor more often.  This allows you to respond to people that are discussing you, network with people who are talking about topics of interest, thank people who have complimented you.

Following these four steps will allow you to stay on top of your e-Image.  Contributing to and monitoring a variety of social media sources will allow you to manage your social network reputation and allow you to better project the image you want to have online.

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• Ba, S., and Pavlou, P. A. "Evidence of the effect of Trust Building Technology in Electronic Markets: Price Premiums and Buyer Behavior," MIS Quarterly, (26:3), 2002, 243-268.
• Lee, Z., Im, I., and Lee, S. J. "The Effect of Negative Buyer Feedback on Prices in Internet Auction Markets," in Proc. of the Twenty-first International Conference on Information Systems, Brisbane, Australia, 2000, 286-287.
• Schawbel, D. "Top 10 Free Tools for Monitoring Your Brand’s Reputation," Mashable: Social MediaGuide, http://mashable.com/2008/12/24/free-brand-monitoring-tools/
• Standifird, S. S., "Reputation and e-commerce: eBay auctions and the asymmetrical impact of positive and negative ratings." Journal of Management, (27:3), 2001, 279-295.
• Standifird, S. S. "C2C marketplaces and the Importance of Reputation Type," Electronic Markets, (12:1), 2002, 58-62.

Labels: online marketing, social media