Why and how to build your online reputation monitoring?

Monitoring, a young phenomenon

Only 12% of companies are said to have set up online reputation monitoring more than 5 years ago, and 25% to have created a monitoring team less than a year ago, according to the latest Digimind barometer (1).

And only 20% of companies reportedly plan to set up online reputation monitoring. These figures don’t match the stakes and the image and online reputation risks that multiply day by day on the Internet and social media.

Monitoring: the 5 reasons to build it

There are many reasons to set up online reputation monitoring. According to American businessman Warren Buffett, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently”. Another reason: online reputation is today the number one risk for 40% of companies, compared to 26% in 2010. From the companies’ point of view, here are the 5 reasons most often cited(1) for building their online reputation monitoring:

Know everything being said about them and their products in search engines, and first and foremost Google.
Anticipate, track, and control buzz. It’s often when bad buzz or a crisis hits that a company creates its online reputation monitoring.
Track the competition in order to fill gaps in its services and gain a competitive advantage.
Know the image of its executives. Today, 15% of executives are concerned about their reputation on social media, while 58% consider the topic important. Isn’t it the number one risk for company executives?
Protect itself from influencers and opinion leaders across the blogosphere and social media.

Add to that the fact that monitoring is an essential tool within a digital strategy to understand consumers’ expectations and needs.

Monitoring: tools to build it

– Google is the search engine favored by 91% of internet users in France, so companies absolutely must monitor how they are talked about on Google. There are various offerings on the French market that let companies control their presence on Google

– Semji offers an analytics observatory tracking how a company’s online reputation evolves.

– Mention is an app available on iPad, mobile, or web that scans in real time everything being said about your company on the Internet and social media: web, Facebook, Twitter, news, blogs, videos, forums, images…

– Google Alerts is the best-known free monitoring tool on the web. The company chooses a keyword (its name, its business, its products, its competitors…) and enters its email address along with the number, type, and frequency of results, to receive in its inbox all the information related to the chosen keyword.

– Alerti scans the web, the online press, blogs, forums, microblogs, social media, photos, and videos based on the keywords chosen by the company. The free version lets you create 2 alerts going back up to 7 days.

– Talkwalker alerts lets you receive by email the latest web publications about the company, its brand, or its competitors.

– tineye.com and images.google.com give the source of an image or a logo.

– Image Raider identifies the sites that use the company’s images without crediting it.

– BrandsEye monitors the opinions of the company’s customers.

– Monitor Complaint Websites makes sure no one is talking about your company on sites that could harm your image.

– Rankur helps small and medium businesses discover what is being said about them on the web and social media.

Ensuring online reputation monitoring is essential. However, its value lies in the company’s willingness to draw the conclusions that will let it influence its online reputation. Managing your online reputation is work that must be approached over the long term and methodically, as this infographic shows.

online reputation monitoring infographic