I often hear marketeers asking ORM actions plans. They are facing online crisis/issues and need to take actions. BUT they don’t know who’s talking about them, they don’t know the credibility of the bloggers and they have no idea of what is Online Reputation Management. They just want us to act as a plaster on a wound without diagnosis & treatment.

Before starting ORM you should determine:

1. your objectives (buzz monitoring, crisis management, looking for communication opportunities, building company reputation, building your boss reputation,…)
2. your weaknesses in term of communication, products, process,…
3. what’s your internal resources (who’s is able to communicate on blogs, crisis committee, messages, etc.)
4. what’s your allied websites (corporate, products, partners, etc.)

Based on this 1st reflexion, we will be able to help you selecting your ORM solution (adapted to your real needs) to monitor your positive & negative buzz. We will then have to analyse the results and the sources as well. And finally we will take actions (if needed).

Good ORM needs expertize and professional process to be efficient!

P.S.: This all process doesn’t take very long. Don’t miss it!

During an IAB Netcafe (March 5, 2009), Antony Slabinck and Rik Lagey (from LBi) demonstrated how Barack Obama used social media in his race to White House.
The “Yes, we can” song became a symbol of this strategy. See LBi post here.

The LBi analysis show us the incredible power of social media as social media are a tremendous communication channel to build communities.

Barak Obama success is the result of people involvment/participation in his campaign. Thousands of actions were organised by anonymous people.

No doubt! Companies will have to build ASAP a “business model” including social media if they want to boost their image and manage their online reputation.

One of the most popular questions I got from prospects is “How do you – as ORM professional – compete with Search Engine Marketing (SEM) agencies offering Online Reputation Management?”

Before answering that question, I’d like to add that most of ORM specialists come from eMarketing or PR worlds. As you know I’m a PR.

As PR my answer is: “When I’m doing ORM services, I’m not PR anymore. I don’t want to limit our actions portfolio to SEO-friendly press release, online press room, PR campaign,… When I’m offering ORM services, I’m ready to give you advice on how to react to online rumor/attacks with ads, marketing, PR, SEM, legal,… tools. Of course I won’t be able to take all the actions on my own. BUT that’s not my job as consultant!”

“When you are looking at most of the SEM e-Reputation Management services you rapidly understand that their only focus is ranking/positioning in search engines. They just miss the global idea of Online Reputation Management such as communication opportunities, brand protection, buzz analysis, etc.”

All right! SEM is a great tool to manage your online reputation. BUT ORM goes beyond SEM!!!

Let’s imagine you are monitoring a rumor on a blog. You take action and contact the post author/blogger to ask him with arguments to modify his post in order to avoid crisis communication. The blogger does agree and modifies his article. BUT the URL of the post does NOT change so that you don’t receive any alert via RSS.

How do you monitor any relevant change in copy of a webpage ?

There are quite a few desktop solutions to track these changes. BUT I’m looking for web based (ASP/SaaS) solutions. Up to now I’m testing ChangeDetection and WatchThatPage. The only problem with those 2 web solutions is that they alert you every time an element (widgets, tags,… not only copy content) of the monitored page changes.

If you know any of professional web based tool to track change in copy of a webpage ? Please tell me!

I finally managed it! Here is THE expected article that compares the leading ORM tools…

I know I previously said that Online Reputation Management was more than tool. But before starting service delivery you need to choose the right ORM tool in order to collect your buzz. Only than you can analyse the results and take action(s) if necessary.

I asked 6 ORM editors to fill in a comparative table divided in 3 main areas:

1. Monitoring
2. Analysis
3. Update

Those 6 solutions are (in alphabetical order):

• Attentio (www.attentio.com)
• BrandsEye (www.brandseye.com)
• BrandMonitor (www.buzzcapture.nl)
• Brandwatch (www.brandwatch.net)
• Distilled Reputation Monitor (http://reputation.distilled.co.uk)
• Trackur (www.trackur.com)

Beyond the solution cost, you should determined your needs first. Are you active in a sensitive sector (energy, politics, etc.)? If yes, you will mainly use ORM tool & services to avoid or manage crisis. Therefore you’ll have to monitor your buzz in real-time. Your 1st question should than be “what is the monitoring scope of the solution?” Is the tool only monitoring results among SERPS (that means that you will have to wait till the site will be indexed by the search engine and that can takes weeks!) or is it screening all webpages or…? For example: BrandsEye’s scope is SERPS (+RSS on demand) ;  BrandMonitor monitors and scrapes all the webpages ; Brandwatch has its own crawler technology that searches the internet for new content on a 24×7 basis ; Distilled Reputation Monitor is working with RSS feeds ; and Trackur aggregates from a wide range of sources.

Let’s take a look more deeply at the monitoring scope of those 6 tools! If they all monitor websites, blogs, forums, social media (Attentio is only monitoring YouTube results) and wikis, some of them are searching among other media such as Twitter (Attentio, Brandwatch and Trackur), RSS feeds (BrandsEye, Brandwatch and Distilled), etc.
What about the analysis functions of these tools?
Some of them are great support for your analysis service. For example:

• BrandsEye also analyses the external links, the pagerank, the credibility, etc.
• Brandwatch analyses the author, the credibility and the influence of the results too.
• Distilled may set up the analysis criteria you want.

Last but not least… You should ask how you will receive the new results and the update frequency.

Attentio is currently working on an e-mail system to deliver updates. Up to now you have to log on its online dashboard to look at you new buzz.
BrandsEye offers e-mail, RSS and SMS updates.
BrandMonitor has no push function. The only way to view new results is to log on the web platform. The system refreshes the results every hour.
Brandwatch delivers updates via e-mail and is developping an RSS option. The system updates the results every 12 hours.
Distilled only updates results via RSS. You may choose the frequency (up to hourly).
Trackur let you know about updates by e-mail or RSS every 1, 6 or 12 hours.

What should be my choice?

If I look at the matrixes and if I take into account the tools fee, I’ll be hesitating between BrandsEye and Brandwatch solutions. They are very efficient with a wide range of functionalities and their costs are affordable: 510,46 EUR for BrandsEye (5 keywords) and 124,62 EUR for Brandwatch (5 keywords).

Attentio and BrandMonitor are very performant but more expensive: 2000,00 EUR for Attentio (5 keywords) and 1500,00 EUR for BrandMonitor (5 keywords).
The BrandMonitor fee is a bid higher than others because BrandMonitor is originaly covering the Dutch market. They need a special setup to be able to monitor the Belgian web sphere.

Distilled Reputation Monitor and Trackur are typical entry solutions. They are easy to use and rather cheap: 24,92 EUR for Distilled (5 keywords) and 59,89 EUR for Trackur (5 keywords). They are good solutions to develop your ORM experience.
It is to be noted that BrandsEye has now a little sister, BrandsEye Blogger, a first entry solution for only 0,68 EUR (1 USD)!!!! More info in a next article…

I launched an ORM Group on LinkedIn a few days ago.

Please join us to expand your Online Reputation Management network and ideas.

This blog will be our main platform to share ideas and experience.

As I already told you in a previous post, Online Reputation Management (ORM) is all about reputation (not only about buzz).

If it’s important to measure your buzz and see if your (online/offline) marketing campaigns are generating reactions on the internet, it’s even more important to assess if this buzz is positive or negative.

Do you imagine the impact of negative rumors/conversations on your brand/name/company results? With ORM you’ll be alerted when negative buzz will be identified. You’ll then be able to react and (maybe) prevent the fast circultation of the bad news via blogs, forums,… You’ll be able to protect your brand or influence your consumers’ perception.

That’s all about reputation!

Brussels, 27 June 2008 — B2Win (www.b2win.be), an independent Press Relations (PR) agency, has just launched an Online Reputation Management service (ORM – http://onlinereputationmanagement.wordpress.com/). Centred on the online monitoring and protection of client companies’ reputations, the service’s originality lies in the firmly innovative approach it offers to marketeers in this field.

Regardless of which ORM solution best suits the specific needs of a business, B2Win can take charge of the 3 e-Reputation phases: the monitoring of the buzz; the analysis of the results; and the actions aimed at stimulating the client’s Web presence or influencing users’ perceptions.

Because you can no longer afford to overlook one key fact: while a large majority of consumers still buy offline, they nevertheless connect to the Internet to carry out research, read test results and consult the opinions of other users. And due to the growing number of web 2.0 applications (like blogs, wikis, RSS streams, forums, social networking sites, etc.) whereby information can be rapidly posted on the Net, indexed by search engines and picked up on by the traditional media, it is a phenomenon that’s rapidly gathering momentum. It’s essential therefore that company bosses listen actively to what’s circulating online.

“For over a decade now, I’ve been managing the reputation of companies in the media and, these days, there’s no denying that the world of the media and the Internet are becoming significantly intertwined,” explains Valérie Léonard, B2Win’s Managing Director and PR Consultant. “The creation of our ORM service is consequently a logical step for an agency such as B2Win, especially as we’ve historically specialised in the IT and Internet sector.”

Download the full version (in English, French or Dutch) here

If the ORM tools are able to gather all online conversations about your company/product/competitors/etc who is going to check all the results to assess if they are positive or negative, to detect communication opportunities…???

If some tools are able to read the conversations in order to alert when there are negative input, are they able to understand all languages? And what about the acronymes, irony or play on words???

When negative buzz is found who is going to analyze it (source, ranking, external links, positioning in Google results,…)? How do we determine what are the best action(s) to take?

Beyond the monitoring of your buzz, the Online Reputation Management is all about analyzis and actions. It means manual work and human consultancy.

A nice article about ORM is published in Business ICT magazine (June edition). For the first time of my life since the launch of my PR agency (B2Win) I’m in the article But that’s not the objective of this post. I read the article carefully and want to share 2 remarks…

First of all most of people talking about Online Reputation Management (ORM) is monitoring web 2.0 media such as blogs, forums, message boards, videos sites, social networks, etc. They just forget to look at the websites. What happens when one of your competitors is critisizing your new product? Are you listening to this negative input about your brand?
Tracking websites pages is a must to manage your e-Reputation!

My second remark is concerning the ORM tools. Whatever the performance of those tools might be they all need manual monitoring to be able to analyse the results. If some of those tools are able to identify keywords to alert marketeers when the buzz is negative. What about irony, play on words, abbreviations, etc?
Besides manual work is necessary to assess the relevancy of the source of the negative input. Based on this assessment you should know how urgent it is to react and what are the right way(s) to respond.