Brand Reputation Management: Part 1

We are seeing the trend of using Viral Marketing concepts such as Social Media take a dramatic turn upwards with the economic downturn. It’s virtually free, and is fairly easy to track- and best of all it is reaching more and more folks than traditional marketing media, such as advertising, and analyst reports.

Tracking social media is rather simple using an RSS reader, and a few subscriptions. Just take a look at the list of Social Media Trackers below:

Technorati, Digg, and Reddit

These three offer the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed of any search. By simply entering in your company name/product name, (or your competitor’s name) and subscribing to the search feed, you will be automatically notified every time an article appears which contains your search criteria.

Twitter Search

You can use this tool to search Tweets for those mentioning your brand or company- and then subscribe to the RSS feed for the search criteria.

Blog Pulse

Searches through the blogosphere for mentionings of your brand or company name, and allows you to subscribe to the RSS feed for the search criteria. BlogPulse also has a great portfolio of free tools such as BlogPulse Profiles (beta), which allows you to enter in the URL of a specific blog, and get information such as their recent blog posts, trackbacks, common keywords, blogging trends, and find similar blogs. BlogPulse Trend Search allows you to search for a specific criteria, and see the “buzz” surrounding that brand/item/company.

Google Trends

Allows you to compare multiple search terms’ recent trending. This works a lot like BlogPulse Trend.  I searched “Apple” and “Windows”, and found that the search term “Windows” has consistently higher volume of search than does “Apple”.

Google Blog Search

Google searches the blogosphere for blogs containing your search criteria. This is great even for those of us who arent social marketers, but who would like to stay up to speed on product releases ect. I am using it to track Adobe Thermo, which has been in Adobe labs existence now for over a year.

Google Alerts

Alerts you via email every time your search criteria is mentioned. This can help you to watch for copyright infringement, as well as monitor your brand’s reputation. I prefer the RSS feeds to daily/as-it-happens emails, but for some this is the way to go.

And rounding out this week’s list is:

Compete

This is one handy tool! It allows you to track the Stats of up to 3 sites at a time in one chart. Very handy for, well, spying on your competition!

Stay tuned for more… I will be releasing the other half of this list in the next week or so…