Reputation Management Tools and Services

The concept of online reputation management has even created a new industry of consultants and applications that could help your company. Though the services that reputation management companies offer could be done in-house, many are offering a level of detail and analysis that most agencies would be unlikely to provide to themselves or their clients.

These companies include Umbria, a division of J.D. Power and Associates, which provides in-depth data collection and analysis of social media, and Nielsen Buzzmetrics, which offers a dashboard application for clients to interact with their data. Both Umbria and Buzzmetrics (also) offer trend analysis consultation in addition to reputation management, an attractive and valuable service for business-to-consumer product brands. Either company would be a robust and dependable solution, but neither is going to be cheap. In fact, both specifically target Fortune 1000 companies, so if that is not you or your client, there are a couple of other options available.

One of the most interesting tools I've noticed is Trackur, a web-based application that allows you to set up and save keyword searches and retrieve results from web content including blogs, news stories, video, and images. Using its clean and intuitive ajax interface, you can refine your search with additive or negative keyword filtering as well as format sorting, and even add individual results to your favorites or share them with others via email. The key feature of Trackur is that once you have set up your searches, you can save them and have them automatically updated on a schedule determined by your subscription level (Trackur offers an enterprise plan that would suit agencies needing to monitor data on behalf of all their clients) and provided via RSS or email alerts. Trackur offers a 14-day free trial, which I'd certainly recommend to anyone getting started with reputation management.

Trackur CEO Andy Beal is an expert in online reputation management, so as you're getting more familiar with this concept, it wouldn't hurt to subscribe to his blogs at marketingpilgrim.com and andybeal.com.