July 11, 2011 in Blog, Knowledge, Press by ClydeStan

Free Tools To Monitor Your Online Reputation

Places that can damage your reputation are everywhere online. Below is a list of the most common areas that you might be concerned with when it comes to safeguarding you r online reputation.

Search Engine Results. By far the most destructive effect of negative postings is that they rank high in Google and other search engine results. They can materialize here either because they are posted on a high traffic site such as Yelp or RipOff Report, or any popular website that ranks high in the search engines. When someone types your name or company name in Google, they will then see this site with a description that mentions your company and possible “how bad of a company you are”.

Online Marketplaces. Sites like eBay, Amazon, and industry buy sell trade forums, that you might to sell goods all permit customers to post highly visible reviews. Even if you have all good reviews, one negative review can stand out and create a nightmare for your sales. If the evaluation was written by an irrational individual and is defamatory toward your company, this can in fact impair your business.

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Review Sites. It is progressively more common these days for people to use review sites to find goods and services. This includes people who don’t often use the internet and might be searching for a local business to try out. On review sites like these, if you have only one review and it is a harmful one, it will ruin your rating and may prevent people from choosing you. A good example of a review site is Yelp.com where anyone can post a review about your business.

Online Complaint Sites. These are sites where people can post a complaint about you and basically say whatever they want without verification and in most cases they can fie a complaint anonymously. The owners of these sites will often not remove negative comments even if the author asks them to. Sites such as these are protected and immune from legal action because they are shielded by a law called the CDA Sec. 230 which states that they are not responsible for comments or content posted by a user or third party. There are also sites such as the ComplaintsBoard.com and Scam.com that are widely read.

Social Media. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have millions of users. Facebook is one of the most-used websites online today. Harmful comments that are posted on these sites can appear on the first page of Google’s search results. Social media sites allow any user to make any comment un-moderated and usually will not mediate unless the comments violate the sites terms of service (Profanity or Hate Speech Against A Group, Religion, or Race).

Forums. In forums, there are numerous users “Venting” about things that displease them. In a forum related to your services, a person can effortlessly tell thousands of people to stay away from your company for unsubstantiated or spiteful reasons.

Blogs. Almost everyone has a blog these days, and they often rank well in the search engines. A blog gives someone a stage in which they can circulate anything they’d like to with no moderation from anyone else. Lots of blogs have thousands of readers and some even send their posts straight into their subscriber’s email inboxes. This can cause extensive damage to your company if something bad is being said about you.

The internet is jam-packed of places where any user can post offensive comments about your company, and these comments can effortlessly find their way to thousands if not millions of people. While it’s fantastic that every person has a right to be heard on the Web, few people apprehend the damage this can cause businesses.

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Below we outline some of the free tools available for monitoring your online reputation.

Blog Monitoring

1. BackType Blog Comments Monitoring – This tool indexes conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media. It also has an alert function that e-mails updates whenever a search term is mentioned in a comment.

2. BlogPulse – BlogPulse is a blog search engine with several complementary tools such as Trend Search and Conversion Tracker that analyzes the data it collects.

3. Google Blog Search – This is a Google beta search engine for blogs.

4. Technorati – Technorati is the leading blog search engine indexing millions of blog posts in real time. It also tracks the authority, influence and popularity of blogs.

Twitter Monitoring

5. Monitter – A real-time Twitter monitor for up to three keywords at a time.

6. TweetBeep – This tool provides hourly Twitter alerts sent via e-mail. You can specify keywords, people and links to track.

7. Tweet Later – TweetLater has a number of features for Twitter users, and it also monitors Twitter and e-mails you a digest of the tweets that contain your specified keywords. You can also use this to track your @replies.

8. Twitter Search – Twitter Search was formally Summize. It searches all Twitter activity for keywords, links or user activity in real time.

Link Monitoring

9. BackTweets – This is a service by BackType that provides an engine to search for specific links mentioned on Twitter.

10. WhoLinksToMe – A link search tool that tracks backlinks and makes them easily sortable by anchor text, origination, and by the target URL with enhanced reporting capability. You can also import links from Google Webmaster Tools for enhanced analysis.

Other Tools

11. Google Alerts – Your keyword search results are sent via e-mail for keyword mentions in news, web, blogs, video and groups categories.

12. BoardTracker – This tool searches discussion boards and forum threads for your specified keywords. You can also sign up for e-mail alerts.

13. MonitorThis – MonitorThis is a search aggregator for up to 26 search engine feeds.

14. Naymz – A social network focused on reputation, personal branding, and identity verification. Basic version is free.

15. Purewire Trust – An online portal that helps people verify reputation information about themselves and those with whom they interact online. You can search by e-mail address, URL or web application.

16. Yasni – This is a search engine dedicated to finding people on the web through publicly available information, including images, videos, social networking profiles and posts.

With the number of tools available, you will probably need to do some research to determine which services fulfill your needs. Usually a mix of a few of these free services will cover your bases, but you will need time to do the manual work necessary for the tools that are not automated.

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