Online Brand Monitoring

Why should you monitor your online reputation?

Word of mouth has always been one of the most important factors that can make or break a business. With blogs, online articles and social media, the word of mouth element just got more influential. It is a well-known fact that people trust more the opinion of those that already experienced your products or services rather than your advertisements.

Whereas before one could tell his or her story to friends a few at a time, today with social media one could give an immediate review and share it either with all friends, or else publicly. Although the online reality brought about some disadvantages, it is also an opportunity for businesses to monitor and measure their brand reputation. 

What should you monitor?

Online brand monitoring should be able to give you a clear picture of how your customers portray your business. To do this you should monitor local and international news that mention your business, blogs, and also social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

How to monitor online brand reputation?

Professional companies can monitor and also measure your online brand reputation with various tools. It is not that easy to monitor what customers are saying about your products or services. For example on Facebook, if someone shares his or her review privately, you can never get the chance to answer. This is why it is of vital importance to answer when you get the chance to; for example on your Facebook page or on publicly shared posts.

Monitor and Measure!

It is not enough to monitor your brand reputation. We should also measure it. While monitoring or “listening” is concerned with the discovery of conversations with the purpose of engaging and helping customers, measuring is concerned with metrics over a specified time period. Data collected from monitoring should be sorted according to date, relevance, sentiment and other dimensions to then help us interpret it. 

Monitoring lets you listen and respond in real-time to prevent your brand from negative word of mouth. Brand monitoring also gives businesses the chance to measure their marketing effectiveness and identify new market opportunities; for instance identify new audiences and new products or services. Another great advantage of monitoring brand reputation is that it helps you to benchmark your competition. Monitoring your competition is one way of staying ahead of the game. Measurement is critical to track your success over time. It is what helps you distil the conversations that are going on and change them into actionable strategies.

One of the most important things that one has to understand is that if you don’t have an online presence, such as no Facebook page or blog facility, this does not make your business immune to negative word of mouth that is going on online. The cruel reality is that today everyone is playing the game, whether you want to participate or not. Your business is playing and is being represented either by your industry, employees, or by your customers. Online Brand Monitoring and Measuring are important for those businesses that want to be successful. There are conversations about your industry, your competitors, and your business going on right NOW; it is up to you to listen to them. They will happen whether you are listening or not. 

Daniel Coleiro Kingswell is a Search Engine Marketing Specialist at Alert eBusiness (Internet Marketing Division) – www.alertemarketing.com