Kavin Paulson
The key to a successful online reputation management process is proactive monitoring because effectiveness of ORM process increases with timely responses and timely response is possible only when you have a proactive monitoring mechanism in place. Proactive monitoring also implies continuous monitoring which cannot be carried out manually all the time. That’s where tools help us largely. In the previous post titled ‘20 Practical Online Reputation Management Tips ‘, we discussed ORM best practices. In this post, we will discuss some of the best ORM tools available.
1. Radian6
Radian6 is a great tool for monitoring the social media space and also to engage with audiences across platforms. If you are a well known brand and a lot of social media conversations are going on around the world or a specific region about you and if you would like to measure market sentiments about your brand, then this is an ultimate tool that offers so many interesting features. It’s a paid tool, and considering the cost factor it wouldn’t be the perfect choice for a small business. But if you have a requirement for large scale monitoring and you also have the budget then surely go for it.
2. Tweetbeep
This is a tool exclusively for twitter monitoring. You can keep track of all the mentions about you, your product or company and also get regular updates about people who tweet or retweet your blog or website, all through email. Upgrading to premium doesn’t cost you much, it’s just $20/month, and you can opt for it depending upon the volume of conversations that happen about you. With Tweetbeep premium you can receive up to 200 alerts.
3. Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is a very good twitter management tool. You can manage and monitor multiple twitter accounts from a single dashboard. You can set keywords related your company or brand and keep tracking all the mentions. The prominent feature of this tool is simplicity; it has a great user-friendly interface. At the last but not the least it’s a free tool.
I don’t think there is a better tool available than Google alerts to monitor Google results. Create an account and set keywords; you’ll get timely email updates of recent Google results. Thanks to Google Caffeine, since the indexation process is so fast that you’ll get notifications shortly when new content gets published.
As described on the site it’s like Google alerts but for social media. You can monitor a variety of social platforms ranging from blogs to micro blogs, social networks to book marking sites, photo sharing, slide sharing sites, news sites, video sites and more. Social mention shows the overall sentiment based on tracked mentions categorized as positive, neutral and negative. A distinguishing feature is that you can monitor the whole social media space or opt to monitor specifically a few platforms. You can do manual search or create alerts to get regular email updates.
6. Topsy
You can call it a social engine or social search engine. It helps you monitor real time updates from social media space including tweets, links, photos, videos and more. Topsy enables to track mentions from the past days or even all time results. You can filter out the results language wise (certain languages). Interestingly topsy shares free analytics data from analytics.topsy.com which displays the aggregated number of mentions occurring every day. It also offers email alert option.
7. Scout labs
The very popular Scoutlabs.com is now lithium.com. Lithium offers different solutions and products. One of the products ‘social web’, is a tool with single streamlined interface which serves you aggregated messages from various social platforms including Facebook , blogs, twitter and other online communities. It also segregates and routes posts priority wise. You can respond to millions of messages from a single dashboard. It’s ideal for large scale ORM process and could be a power tool that can transform your customer service department in terms of efficiency. It’s a paid tool, same as radian6, and may not be suitable for a very small business.
Board Tracker is another fantastic tool that helps you monitor discussion boards and forum threads. Set keywords and start real time monitoring of more than 2 billion discussion posts from thousands of forums and discussion boards as described on the site. The tool offers advanced alerts and tracking options. It sends alerts through twitter, email, RSS and even SMS. They offer both free and premium options. Premium account comes with a 30 days free trial offer and costs $39/mo.
This is another great Google product that helps you specifically monitor blogosphere. Search your keywords and find all the positive and negative blogs written about you.
10. Naymz
Here is an odd but interesting one in the list. It’s a one of a kind network that helps you monitor your personal reputation. Naymz helps you assess your influence among peers by carrying out a questionnaire survey and also helps you measure your social influence on the basis of how other people listen and engage with you by calculating likes and comments. It also awards RepScores on the basis of your online social influence and reputation. Online Personal branding has also become very important these days even if you are not a celebrity because companies, recruiters, clients and colleagues look for information about you through social platforms and search engines. Apart from high visibility and positive mentions, having reputation scores, tags and badges on your profiles is an added advantage. What do you say?
Do you know any ORM tool that you think is better than these? Please do share it with us.
7 Steps To Building Your Personal Brand
20 Practical Online Reputation Management Tips
10 ORM Questions Answered by ORM Expert Brian Patterson