Online Brand Management – The Importance of Online Brand Monitoring
Monitoring your brand online is important. You need to be able to keep track of what is being said about your brand, where links are posted and what people think of your product in order to build up and/or maintain a good reputation both online and offline. The internet is so widely used for communication, personal and work related, that a business must be informed of their presence and maintain control of their persona and credibility online because it can easily transcend into the business world on the streets and affect their credibility thus decreasing sales and setting a chain of events into motion that only lead into a downward spiral.
Because the internet has made news and communication so easy you have to be especially aware of your brand monitoring online to be able to detect the rumblings of someone, like a competitor, trying to ruin your image or a descent in brand trust and loyalty. Monitoring is fairly easy and really only requires some basic research and tracking. These are some things to consider and places to look when monitoring your brand online.
One of the easiest, though not necessarily the most effective ways to monitor your brand is to create a Google alert account. How this works is you enter keywords and every time your brand name is mentioned or one of the other keywords you receive an email regarding this sending you a link to the destination online where the word was mentioned. This is all fine however it’s not the most effective way to really monitor your brand online because it doesn’t provide a full scope of what your brand is doing and the breakdown of where your brand is being discussed online in terms of percentages and so forth. For this you need to hire someone to track the figures or an advanced software that can do this for you. The best way is almost always through human work because they can determine the validity of a mention of your keywords or brand and analyze the context whereas a computer cannot or will make more errors in this regard.
So first you need to develop a list of keywords. This should of course include your brand name and trademarks or copyrights you have associated with that name as well as clients, competitors, the names of spokespersons, high ranking executives, stock symbols, products, abbreviations of your company name or products as well as common misspellings that a person might type in a search engine looking for your brand or products.
People talk to others about brands and products all over the internet from reviews to consumer news to blogs, forum posts and emails about things they like or dislike. So there is a lot of ground to cover in tracking and monitoring your brand online. Every day you need to look through blogs, Twitter, social networks, social media sites, Wikipedia, message board, forums, consumer news, article directories and the tags on video and photo sites. Track these mentions whether they are positive, negative or indifferent and the frequency of these mentions in order to monitor your brand.
Source by Roy Sencio
