A post by Mashable on tools to track personal or corporate reputations got me thinking that 2009 could be the year when a growing number of people and companies start paying more attention to what’s being said about them online.
With the proliferation of social networks, micro-blogging, blogs and other social media tools, our digital fingerprints are being scattered far and wide. This makes it a challenge to determine who’s saying what about you or your company simply because there’s so many places to track and monitor.
For anyone interested in personal brand management, it’s important to know whether you and/or your ideas, posts, Tweets, etc. are part of digital conversations, and whether you want to get involved in some way.
For example, one of the my blogs was suspended by my Web host. Only after doing a Twitter search a few days later did I discover someone had posted on Twitter that the blog was down, and that someone should tell me. That’s valuable information that I probably wanted to know sooner rather than later.
For companies, reputation monitoring tools are going to be essential parts of their communications, marketing and sales operations. Given companies can no longer control messaging on the Web, they’ll need the right tools so they know about conversations that involve them. This will give them the ability to engage and participate when needed (a proactive approach) as opposed to being reactive.
Given what’s happening, do not be surprised if personal and corporate reputation management becomes a major trend this year. For anyone interested in what’s happening with their brands online, a monitoring tool could be a key part of everyone’s digital toolbox.
Technorati Tags: reputation management, buzzlogic, radian6
3 Comments
Hi Mark,
We a totally agree and share your observation – thank you!
Our reputation management tool(www.lookuppage.com) focuses on managing one’s online identity and reputation. Our users also get statistics reports so they can track when, where from and who is visiting their page. The best indication to the increasing awareness and need to manage one’s online identity and reputation is our exponential user base growth – over 50,000 users six month after launch, mostly from the UK and US.
Cheers,
Ehud Furman
http://www.lookuppage.com
Hi Mark,
As someone that’s provided reputation management services for 5+ years, I’ve seen a huge increase in client inquiries in the past 6-8 months–I expect that trend to continue.
As for monitoring, I launched Trackur in Feb 08, and expect huge growth in 2009.
I think the recession will force a lot of companies to embrace customer evangelism, which starts with taking an honest look at their reputation, then engaging customers.
I’ll have to check out lookuppage and trackur. Thanks for the comments.
Mark
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