Research Edge

On-Line Reputation Monitoring

What’s the value of reputation to the success of your business?  It’s priceless.  With the growth of social media consumers have more access to information about your company, both good and bad, than ever before. Businesses need proactive online strategies for managing reputation, and the first step is to monitor what people are saying.

An earlier post identified a number of tools to tap into on-line mentions and conversations.  You could perform periodic searches, but why do extra work when the process can be automated? 

Using Google Alerts is an easy first step.  At a minimum, you should set up notifications for your name and company.  By clicking on “advanced features” you can set the frequency of alerts (instantaneous, daily, weekly), tolerance for relevance, sources searched (web, blog, or news), and delivery method (e-mail or RSS feed).  You are allowed up to 1,000 different alerts. 

The trick here is to target the search so you are not overwhelmed with irrelevant items.  Carefully choose your keywords, and refine based on returned results.  For example, my company name is comprised of common words.  I encountered numerous ads for audio speakers and an African company with the same name in hiring mode.  Adding some Boolean logic (“research edge” –acoustic  –kenya) eliminated a lot of the irrelevance.  My own name is unique, but I need to include both my given and nickname (“cindy fromherz” , “cynthia fromherz”). 

Google Alerts will return mentions in indexed pages, but is less reliable for blogs and virtually useless for applications such as Facebook and Twitter.  You can set up a parallel set of alerts using a search engine designed specifically for social media.   Social Mention, for example, aggregates across most of the popular applications, and allows you to receive free daily e-mail alerts.   

For a comprehensive program there are other things you will want to monitor – key company personnel, brands, competitors, industry activities, etc.  Repeat the above keyword refinement exercises for each concept you need to track, using both Google Alerts and Social Mention. 

But the more searches you incorporate, the more tedious it will become to sort through the e-mail notifications.  Choosing to receive the alerts via an RSS feed rather than e-mail makes it more manageable.  I build dashboards for my own monitoring using iGoogle, grouping alerts into logical categories via its tabs.  Feeds are simple to set up with Google Alerts, under the advanced features tab. Unfortunately, I have not found a social media aggregator engine that reliably delivers results in RSS.  Depending upon the sources you wish to monitor, you will need to repeat the keywords using the RSS feature of specific engines – Technorati (blogs), Board Reader (forums), Kurrently (Facebook) or Twitter Search. 

Does initiating an on-line reputation monitoring system involve work? Undeniably.  But not nearly as much work as repairing your reputation after being trashed by a disgruntled customer!

Seventh in a series

Search Engines for Social Media

Do you monitor on-line conversations relating to your company, product or industry?  The growing role of social media in the business world makes this as important as examining financial statements.   There are many search engines that allow you to explore one or multiple sources of information to see real time results.

Several variables distinguish one search engine from another – the type of social media incorporated (blogs, microblogs, social networks, social bookmarks, comments, events, videos, images, audio, Q&A), the display/interface, and special focus or features.  Many products are evolving, adding features, changing emphasis, or even merging with competitors. 

Google and Bing have made perfunctory forays into the world of social media, but their performance in this area cannot compare to the specialized search engines.  I’ve included links to some of the most popular – play with them to find your favorites.

Aggregators.  Established engines for power searching across categories include Addictomatic, Who’sTalkin,  Icerocket,  Collecta , and Surchur.    Also try Social Mention, which ascribes “sentiment” to a post; OneRiot (which just merged into Topsy) for emphasis on “social influencers”; and Backtype, for tracing social impact.  Others have exotic names like Joongel  and Gajeebo.

Specific media.  If your primary interest is blogs, Technorati or BlogPulse are good bets.  For forums and discussion groups try Board Reader.  Use Samepoint or Omgili -“oh my god I love it”- to listen in on conversations. 

Specific programs.  Targeting Facebook?  Use Booshaka or Kurrently.   There are a huge number of tools to search Twitter – try Topsy,  TweetQA, and  Twazzup, but don’t ignore the excellent Advanced Twitter Search.  If you are into Google Buzz, Buzzzy will find what you are looking for.

A huge number of choices.   And these are only the search engines, not the tools designed to help you organize, analyze, post to, and otherwise manage social media!

Sixth in a series

Social Media – Navigating the Maze

Everyone by now has heard of Web 2.0.  It represents a shift from read only information on static websites to the sharing of user generated content.   It incorporates a dizzying array of applications and tools.   What exactly is it all about?

It is helpful to group the tools into broad categories according to function. 

Social Networking sites give you the opportunity to connect with others – friends, people with similar interests, potential customers – and to grow your connections.  Three top sites, in terms of both profile and user numbers are Facebook,  Twitter, and  LinkedIn.   LinkedIn was created specifically for professional networking, and remains the premier business oriented site.  However, Facebook via its “page” feature and Twitter are becoming increasingly important for business promotion. 

Social Bookmarking sites (such as del.icio.us, Furl, and Reddit) allow you to organize your favorite sites, tag them for keywords, and keep them all in one place.  You also have the ability to share them with others.   Feel free to look at my own del.icio.us bookmarks – I save lots of useful research tools.  Taking the concept one step further, Social Recommendation sites encourage users to submit items they like and give others the opportunity to vote on them.  Digg, StumbleUpon, and Yahoo Buzz fall into this category.

Social Content sites include YouTube (video), Flickr (photos), and SlideShare (presentations), to name a few. Users create and manage the content, generally making it available for public use.  This group also includes Wikis – collaborative websites that can be directly edited by anyone with access to them

Blogs - a blend of the words “web log” – are a type of web site or part of a website. They are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material.  Most blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even messages for each other via widgets on the blogs.  The material you are currently reading is in blog format.

Groups, forums, message boards, chat rooms were Web 1.0 vintage networking vehicles, but still host a huge volume of online conversations.  Each provides a venue for communities of users with a common interest to share thoughts and information.   They vary on such measures as real time versus post, free or fee, and requirements for moderator approval of posts. 

You can use a tweet to inform followers of a blog post that is also available through LinkedIn or a Facebook page, and save it to a bookmarking site for future reference.  It’s all interconnected!

Fifth in a series

Google – Are You Using All the Features?

Have you looked beyond the Google search box lately?  Explored past the header categories, to the “more”, and the “even more” pulldowns?  Google is continually adding features to make it easier to find what you are looking for on the internet. 

This is why the company hosts the world’s most popular search engine.  According to The Nielson Co., Google has a 65.1% market share, while Bing has moved into second place (13.9%), followed by Yahoo (13.1%).  Google is my search engine of choice for all purpose research.  And depending on the task, I often make use of its advanced features. 

Google has options to narrow your search by media type (images, video) or content type (news, blogs, products).  You can also specify the time frame (the latest, or within the past day, week, month or year).  It provides market summaries and time lines of trending topics.   Here are some other research tools:

Maps.  In addition to directions, Maps offers traffic info, web cam footage, bike routes, real estate listings, and more.  I use the “street view” to check out businesses and locations of interest.  (Drag the little yellow figure on top of the zoom bar into the map.)

Books.  You can view a search term and a few lines of context within a number of (but not all) books.  This is often sufficient information to answer a question, or to determine whether a book is relevant for purchase.  Related books are also suggested.

Scholar.  From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources for scholarly literature: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions.  Sources include academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.  However, only a portion of the content is freely available. 

Patents.  Google and USPTO have entered into an agreement to make bulk patent and trademark information available to the public at no charge. The listing includes over 7 million entries.

Translate.  This free service provides instant translations of words, sentences and web pages between any of 57 supported languages.

Labs.  This is Google’s experimental area.  It features some nifty tools that are not quite ready for prime time. 

Wonder Wheel.  Search terms related to the current query  are presented in a graphic display, providing additional relevant keywords and thus more options to gain information.

Third in a series

Google Public Data Explorer

Compiling commonly used government statistics can be a tedious process.   I was excited to discover a new Google product that makes it a snap…Google Public Data Explorer.  http://www.google.com/publicdata/home  The application is still in Google Labs, their playground for products under development, but it shows real promise.  Data sets are limited at this point, but new choices are being added.

Guided by the most frequent queries for information of this type, Google tapped into statistics from agencies including the World Bank, Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis, and Centers for Disease Control.   Featured are a variety of metrics relating to population, employment, GDP and personal income, world development indicators, cancer rates, and others.  Most can be broken down into subsets for further analysis. 

Here is the result of a query comparing the trend in unemployment for the metro New Orleans area to the nation as a whole.  http://bit.ly/av4WH4   Creating the entire graph required less than a minute, including adjustments to the time period displayed.  Note the Katrina related spike. 

This example shows how various states compare on cancer rates:   http://bit.ly/9bW64j  I had no idea that Maine led the nation!

The tool has nice features.  Data may be displayed as a line graph, bar chart, map, or bubble diagram.  There is the option to export for incorporation into a web site or e-mail.  (Although WordPress does not support the snippet currently generated; hence the links above.)  And if desired, the saved query automatically updates as new data is added.