Online Reputation Monitoring Is Just Good Business!

ORM, Online Repuation Management or Monitoring, whatever you want to call it makes no difference to the fact that everyone who is looking at effectively managing their PR needs to take great stock in this.

ORM is quite simply, the practice of tracking a group or set of pre-defined keywords about your company, your competitors or just about anything you want, across the entire internet from websites, to newsgroups and across the entire blogosphere… But good ORM is not just tracking everything, a good ORM strategy also needs some type of analysis and yes, some kind of strategy when dealing with unruly statements that you may happen to find.

Not too long ago, the world of ORM was started by the advent of Google Alerts, relevant phrases would be setup and carefully monitored… which I suppose is fine, but then it does not really help if you do nothing about a bad piece of press and if no-one actually monitors this online PR channel then its just another glorified web-type report that ends up in the “file” pile…

Thankfully, due to the natural evolution of the online marketing environment though, a number of well-established marketing companies have thrown a bit more “know-how” behind the aggregation of collecting alerts, and created some great tools for tracking and managing your reputation online. There are a number of tools available, notably Andy Beal’s Trackur and local offerings, Brandseye from Quirk and SaidWot from LongTail. They all have a similar offering and allow the added advantage of giving you more than just tracking, which is the strategy and action of dealing with unruly PR on various channels. This all comes with a small price (obviously) and is really well worth the cost too, especially when it comes to the interpretation and strategy behind the Reputation Management tool. As an online marketer myself, I would defintely advocate the usage of one of these professional offerings – you just can’t take a chance when it comes to your online reputation.

However, if budget is an issue, or if you would prefer to test the world of Online Reputation Management without spending any money, then there are other ways to manage your own reputation online.

As mentioned there are Google Alerts, which send daily, weekly, or “as it happens” news through – related to keywords and is farily comprehensive, covering everything from mainstream news sites, to entries across the blogosphere. These alerts arrive in your mailbox in the form of an email so the information is readily available.

Now, if Google Alerts are not enough, then you can also setup a simple Online Reputation Monitoring tool by using your WordPress blog. It’s actually a WordPress Widget plug-in and gives you an opportunity to monitor pretty much any source of content that is provided in RSS feeds called WP-O-Matic. This plug-in automatically creates posts from RSS/Atom feeds that you provide it and organises them into campaigns for you to use and easily interpret too. The plugin has an easy to manage user interface, which features imaging caching, word rewriting to name a few. It also allows you to import your own OPML files, so essentially you can create a tracking campaign across thousands of feeds quite instantly. When it comes to adding the actual feed content, WP-O-matic has both Unix cron and WordPress cron jobs to make the fetching process simple, or alternatively you can just hit the “fetch” button and manually import the latest posts from the feeds you have specified and collected. It is a very well thought out and well researched plugin, and one you really need to see in action to believe.

So there you have it, ORM in a nutshell, as well as some handy free tools and some very professional options to choose from too.