How is your brand doing? What can you do to boost its standing? Broadly speaking, we can answer the first question through reputation monitoring, and the second one through reputation management. What the two approaches share in common is media monitoring.
No brand can truly claim to be managing its reputation without recourse to media monitoring. The myriad online publications, blogs, and review sites all offer excellent opportunities for skewing brand reputations. The skewers in question might easily be promoting rival brands or be disgruntled former employees. Trolling is also an issue.
A full-scale media monitoring service, like the one Newsmeter offers, can track literally hundreds of thousands of news sources in real time. Monitoring tools allow companies to filter the collected information past pre-defined keywords, topics, or sources. This means that organizations get immediate alerts of any negative online review or comment.
A brand’s digital reputation matters more than even the one-time sacred cow of word-of-mouth. This applies even more to businesses that deliver primarily digital products or services. Traditional methods like publications and media releases are fine for managing long-term reputation, but media monitoring is vital for staying abreast of all reviews and comments about a brand and for responding immediately under the same heading.
A brand’s digital reputation matters more than even the one-time sacred cow of word-of-mouth.
This applies even more to businesses that deliver primarily digital products or services.
Traditional methods like publications and media releases are fine for managing long-term reputation,
but media monitoring is vital for staying abreast of all reviews and comments about a brand and for responding immediately under the same heading.
Happily established multinationals that can safely ignore the odd critical media mention can get by with watching their reputations more passively. They need to manage their reputations actively.
Media monitoring companies offer tools to track mainstream and more obscure news sources. A business user can proactively apply filters to track publications and comments on social media or use keywords to get information.
In time, media monitoring tools will show up which media attract most reviews and comments on relevant brands. This helps businesses focus more closely on them, opening up many opportunities.
Knowing the mood of the web may be half the game, but responding to it is the other half. Media monitoring and content tracking automate the process of collecting feedback about a brand. Yet, response is manual and this means the responders have to be well aware how to manage reputation based on strict rules. Response should be forthcoming regardless of whether comments and reviews are good or bad. And it should be timely and measured.
Positive comments can be acknowledged without much self-promotion. Negative ones can be disproved politely but firmly, rather as in old-fashioned newspaper right-of-reply slots. Timeliness is next to saintliness if your reputation management is to be effective. The simple fact that reaction is rapid shows a laudably proactive attitude to resolving issues and a commitment to a brand’s reputation.
Managing brand reputation calls for a canny analysis of signals from the web, resolutely responding every time, and doing so in timely and measured fashion.
Media monitoring is merely a tool in all this. But what a tool!
