Online Reputation and Monitoring Management

Social media monitoring. Reputation monitoring. Buzz monitoring. Call it what you want, but it’s all the rage. All the cool kids are doing it! However, friends don’t let friends monitor social media without first teaching them a couple of critical steps that most companies overlook.

Your reputation is what you say about yourself and what others say about you. Managing your reputation is nothing new. Every business has been doing it for as long as businesses have existed. What’s new is how the internet and social applications have changed the way reputations spread.

Don’t start any kind of online monitoring effort until you’ve worked through the important steps outlined in this video. Ignore them, and you’ll be setting yourself up for failure.

Your company’s reputation is the cornerstone of your business, and a reputation that took decades to build can be threatened by just a single event. At Xcite we not only work with you to establish your online reputation, but we help you to monitor and build upon it as well. This process of working together means we:

Understand Your Goals

Just because you can monitor everything that’s being said about your brand online doesn’t mean you should just jump in without setting clear goals. Take the time now to write down what your goals are for your social media monitoring campaign. Are you trying to better understand how Twitter users talk about your products? Are you looking to measure the success of your new viral marketing campaign? Or perhaps you suspect a rogue employee is sharing too many company secrets. We talk a lot about “monitoring” social media, but you also need to “measure” the information you collect. You can’t do that without first defining your goals!

Know What to Monitor

Now that you know your goals, you need to determine what exactly you plan to monitor on the web. Your company name? That’s a given, right? Your CEO’s name? Check! Depending on your goals, you might also consider monitoring the following:

  • Your product brands – iPhone, Android, Windows, Fiesta, and Motrin are all buzz-worthy products.
  • Popular company employees – are they saying too much?
  • Your trademarks – watch for infringement.
  • Super secret products – the ones you worry might leak to the web.
  • TV and radio slogans – is that cute jingle resonating with your audience?
  • Marquee clients, your CEO, your company name, misspellings, critics, retired brands, unhappy clients, investors, industry trends, former employees, and competitors.