Do-it-Yourself Reputation Management

I mentioned above that, in addition to the two more costly approaches to online reputation management services, there were two other options available. One is Trackur, which, though it does cost a monthly fee, is a much more affordable and scaled-back service than Umbria or Buzzmetrics. The other option, of course, is to take a do-it-yourself approach. To date, this is the approach we've taken at Newfangled.

The simple way to start doing this is to set up RSS feeds of search queries in Google Blog Search, Google News, and Yahoo! News, or even mentions in Twitter (go to search.twitter.com). This will alert you to any time the keyword or keywords in your query are used in blog posts or news stories. If someone mentions your company in a blog post, whether in a negative or positive way, you'll know about it quickly and be able to respond in whatever way is appropriate to the context. Your keywords should be individuals' names, your company name, product names, services names, industry-specific jargon, and competitors' names.


Back in July, I wrote a blog post reviewing the new Cadence Systems website as a companion to our newsletter on Developing an Effective Content Strategy. Within hours, Tom Diederich, then Cadence's Social Media/Web Community Manager (he's now the Manager of Community Management Services at Lithium Technologies), responded with a comment. He was able to do this so quickly because he had been monitoring Cadence's online reputation closely and got an alert when my blog post was published (see our comments to the left).

Earlier this month, I noticed a mention of Newfangled by Worthwhile.com among my Google Blog Search RSS feed (see image below) that I've set up for "newfangled." Worthwhile had written a blog post titled We've Got a Blog. Now What? and linked over to our September newsletter on blogging as a resource. I was able to post a comment thanking them as a result.



This approach may not be suitable for a larger, product-oriented company as it requires familiarity with and use of many different social media tools as part of one's day-to-day work; a consolidated tool like Trackur might be preferable. However, for a smaller, service-oriented firm like ours, the DIY approach has worked out just fine.   next >