For a couple of months already I was planning to research reputation management tools. I wanted to do a better job tracking the mentions of my company across the Internet. I’m currently using Google Alerts, but those are at least a day late, and not always accurate. I want almost instant notifications, so I can actually engage in discussions, rather than jumping in days afterwards.
Lucky me. David Raab (of the Guide to Demand Generation Systems) linked to two articles by Dan Schawbel about free and paid reputation monitoring tools.
The article about free tools lists 10 useful tools, starting with – of course – Google Alerts. Not always accurate, and not always fast, but a good place to start.
My favorite tool is Backtype, which shows all comments made by a specific person, anywhere on the Internet. I often forget where I left comments, so this will be an indispensable tool to keep track of my own comments.
What I like about the paid tools is that they’re more integrated: from one dashboard you can track anything. Some include advanced features, such as analyzing social maps. So you really get added value for your money.
For me, the big question is: when should you spend time on money on this? Does this make sense if you are a niche vendor with a relatively small group of potential customers, and enterprise pricing? Or is it more useful if you have a fairly horizontal solution with an attractive price point?
I think the latter, so for now, I’m not very active with monitoring the blogosphere. I’ll stick to Google Alerts, a daily manual search on Twitter, and an occasional search on Technorati. Am I missing opportunities here, or do you feel this makes sense for a vendor of specialized software for Fortune 500 companies?
PS. I will add a resource page on Social Media Monitoring software shortly, similar to my pages on Demand Generation Systems and Webinar software
Hi Jep,
I think you are approaching reputation monitoring for your business in a sensible way. If you don’t get a significant amount of buzz, then taking advantage of free tools like Google Alerts makes perfect sense.
At Andiamo Systems, my social media analysis company, we recommend GA and other free tools as a good place to start monitoring brands, especially smaller ones. Where paid tools provide value is when there are several brands to analyze, or the amount of buzz gets just too much to keep a handle on – that’s when sentiment and influencer analysis, comparative reports and integrated dashboards are critical to have.
And that’s when it makes sense to consider using a paid tool to not just monitor your reputation but to gain competitive insights as well.