Blog posts in ‘Reputation management’

2011-08-17: 19 (free) tools to manage online reputation

Any company or organization and even individual person, whether they use Internet or not, can suffer from bad online publicity. Publicity that likely lead to dire consequences.

As 87% (Svenskarna och Internet 2010, IIS) of all Internet users choose to search for information about specific products or services and even potential partners online, it is of utmost importance to monitor, analyse, and act on occurring problems in search results and social media. Negative criticism can be the beginning of a downward spiral if not treated on time.

To find negative comments on Facebook, angry blog posts or web sites misinformed about your brand and product is important for your future business and life.

But how is it possible to follow up on misleading information on the Internet? The Internet is huge and to manually monitor all the channels is not sustainable.

In this post, we are willing to inform you about 19 free tools (we will mention other expensed professional options in another post), which will help you when managing reputation and coverage online.

Tools to monitor Twitter

Twitter Search is Twitter’s own tool that allows you to search for specific keywords in their information flow.

Monitter gives you real time monitoring of up to three keywords for free. Perfect for a product launch.

TweetBeep sends hourly reports of what is being said about you, your company, website, products and other keywords, chosen by you.

Trendistic allows you to search for a specific keyword and provides you graphs which will tell you numbers of mention of keywords and also who has been talking about it.

Social Oomph is similar to TweetBeep since you can add keywords to screen as well as it will provide many other (expensed) features which will simplify many Twitter related activities.

Tools to monitor Facebook

Socialmention allows you to search Facebook and people who still have open sections.

Whostalkin also allows you to search Facebook and people who have open sections.

Tools to monitor blogs

Google Blog Search is a search service that allows you to search millions of blogs worldwide.

Bloggsök is a Swedish search engine that allows you to search all blogs affiliated to Bloggportalen. It is probably not all Swedish blogs as it is voluntary to join.

BlogPulse, has 166,885,314 million indexed blogs, including Swedish blogs. You can search blogs as well as receive information about popular blogs mentioned globally as per today. A lot of other relevant statistics in different graphs are also available.

Technorati is, next to Google Blog Search, one of the major search engines for blogs. Only English blogs are searchable, however.

Tools to monitor forums

BoardReader is a tool which allows you to search all major forums around the world, including Swedish forums.

BoardTracker is, just like the BoardReader, a tool that allows you to search forums all over the world.

Other Tools

SocialMention is mentioned once more, due to you can opt out and add many other sources, such as blogs, news, Twitter, and other channels, beyond Facebook.

Whostalkin is not only Facebook focused; it also searches through other sources, including Twitter, blogs and news channels.

Google Alerts is in my opinion probably the best tool on this list. You can add keywords you want to monitor and you can also choose type of media, including websites, news, videos and blogs that you want to cover. You receive an e-mail when new references appear.

Google Me on the Web is similar to Google Alerts, though it is based on the information you publish in your Google profile. So if for example name and e-mail are mentioned you will be notified.

Yahoo Alerts is Yahoo’s equivalent of Google Alerts.

Google Trends uses graphs to provide approximate picture of which terms are searched for. You can also compare your company against competitors, to understand who is most mentioned.

Google News allows you to look at many of the world’s news channels.

PSspy is a Swedish service through which you add keywords to a watcher. You will receive regular e-mails when these keywords are mentioned in news and blogs to some extent.

Do you use any of these tools? Have we missed any tools that you think should be mentioned? Do not hesitate to comment!

Vänliga hälsningar,
Mikael Uusitalo
Direct tel: +46 (0)31 - 788 02 50
Skype: bebetteronline
www.bebetteronline.se
Be Better Online Sweden AB
Stigbergsliden 7
414 63 Göteborg