Ten Ways to Track Your Online Reputation

Dan Schawbel wrote an excellent post on Mashable on the Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For. I have reviewed one of them on the AppGap – see Radian6 – Monitoring Social Media. You can find Dan’s view of Radian6 and 9 others through the above post. I list the complete ten below in this cross-post from AppGap with a very brief summary of what Dan wrote. See Dan’s post for much more useful detail.

1. Buzzlogic offers “BuzzLogic Insights” application. They let you know whose blogging about you and allow you to share this data within your company. They target two groups: marketers and PR people.

2. Radian6 lets you setup keywords to monitor on all forms of social media including blogs, top video and image sharing sites, forums, opinion sites, mainstream online media and Twitter.

3. TNS Cymfony offers Orchestra Platform, with a Natural Language Processing engine that automatically identifies, classifies, qualifies and benchmarks important people, places, companies and topics for you.

4. Nielsen offers Buzzmetrics, wich gives brand health metrics and consumer commentary from all consumer-generated media. There is ThreatTracker with alerts of real-time online reputation threats.

5. Trackur offers a key word monitoring plan for individuals, companies, enterprises, and agencies. Trackur was “built by one of the leading experts in reputation management, Andy Beal” who was was also a case study in my business blog book.

6. Brands Eye offers reputation management packages for bloggers ($1 per month), small businesses, and enterprises. It tracks every online mention of your brand, giving you a score that reflects the state of your reputation over time.

7. Reputation Defender offers four different services: Internet references of your child or youself, ability to remove your personal information from people search databases, and a solution for owning your Google results.

8. Sentiment Metrics helps you monitor what is being said about you, your brand and your products across blogs, forums and news sites. It tells you if the mention is positive, negative or neutral.

9. Visible Technologies offers TruCast, a comprehensive solution for social media analysis and participation used by enterprises and TruView which protects and promotes reputations online.

10. Cision claims to monitor over 100 million blogs, tens of thousands of online forums, and over 450 leading rich media sites. Their service is powered by Radian6.

It is important to monitor your online reputation and what others are saying, both good and bad. You should at least use Google Alerts, which is free. However, I frequently learn many things through Google Alerts about other people who share my name or worse people who only share my first or last name, or even worse, things like legislative bills. However, there are times I find very useful mentions that I would not have known about otherwise such as Lilia Efimova’s study of bloggers on Mathemagenic. If you want more and are willing to pay for it, try some of the above.

Do you know of other tools to add to the list above?

Comments

[Nathan Gilliatt]

Bill,

I started tracking this market in 2006 and have found about 175 companies worldwide so far. With so many companies, of course, they don't approach the market in exactly the same way, but most answer the basic question, "what are people saying about us?"

I publish a buyer's guide, The Guide to Social Media Analysis, which profiles 63 companies who went through my RFI and briefing process. The companies are listed here:

http://www.socialtarget.com/research/guide.html

Most of the attention in this space goes to free services and the most expensive services, but commercial services start as low as $5/month. Some vendors also offer free versions or free trials, which give a helpful introduction to some of the options:

http://net-savvy.com/executive/tools/monitoring-social-media-before-you-have-a-bud.html

For the extremely budget-conscious, MonitorThis is a convenient tool for setting up multiple search feeds for your name or company name:

http://alp-uckan.net/free/monitorthis/

[Amber Naslund]

Bill,

Thanks so much for the recommendation of Radian6, and for linking to the extensive review you did. We're grateful for your support, and through feedback like this and input from our community, we're excited to take the capabilities even further this year.

Cheers,
Amber Naslund
Director of Community | Radian6
@AmberCadabra

[Blake Cahill]

Bill,

Thank you for the mention of Visible Technologies in your post. If your readers are interested Forrester Research just published an updated analysis of vendors in the space. We are providing access to the report for free at the following link:
http://www.visibletechnologies.com/solutions/request_fw09.php

Blake Cahill
SVP of Marketing
Visible Technologies

[Ari Newman]

Bill, I know you are familiar with Filtrbox also. Our service now monitors millions of blogs, thousands of mainstream sources, and Twitter for mentions. We offer free basic accounts as well as monthly subscriptions. We'll be releasing an update soon as well!

Best,
Ari Newman
Founder and President
Filtrbox, Inc.

[Bill Ives]

Ari

Thanks for mentioning Filtrbox. As you know I wrote about it here in the the post, Create Web Monitoring Filters with Filtrbox http://billives.typepad.com/portals_and_km/2008/08/create-web-moni.html. I really like your offering. Bill

[Bill Ives]

Nathan - Thanks for the link to your guide and the suggestions. they are appreciated. I am going to look at it and Monitor This. Bill