Reputation Management Primer: Part 3 – Monitoring Sentiment
This week we’re going to go over how to monitor online sentiment, how to protect yourself from brand squatters, and what to do with your new data.
Claiming Your Brand
- Register your brand as a trade mark.
- Register the most common top level domains (.net, .org, .co, etc.) and common misspellings for your domain name and have them all 301 redirect to your main site.
- Register your brand name with all the social networks whether or not you’re going to be active on them. Knowem.com is an easy way to see if your name has been taken yet or not.
- If you run a local business claim your free Google Places listing and fix any errors. Do this for all instances of your listing i.e. TrueLocal, Yellow Pages, etc.
If anyone has taken your brand name, see what they’re doing with it before you react. Sometimes if you ask nicely they’ll give it up with no fuss, consider using them in the future if they’re already a fan.
If the user is inactive or using the account for evil then you can inform the social network, cite your trade mark, and request to have the account released to you.
Monitoring Sentiment
There are many reputation monitoring companies out there, but if you have the time you can do it yourself.
- Set up some Google Alerts for your brand and products. Google will email you when they find a new item containing the keyword(s) you want to track.
- Do the same thing on Social Mention or Topsy to track the major social networks
The majority of these reports will be full of stuff that doesn’t pertain to you, it will take a few tries before you’re able to filter out most of the noise.
For instance, my name is Jesse Palmer. If I wanted to monitor when my name is mentioned on the web I would put quotes around my name for the alert. This way I would only get results for the exact term “jesse palmer”.
It seems that I’m not the only Jesse Palmer in the world, there’s also Jesse Palmer the ex-football player, ESPN commentator, Canadian cooking show host, and TV’s The Bachelor Season 1 heartthrob. That’s a lot of unrelated junk I have to filter out for my name.
An easy way to make sure you don’t get irrelevant results is to put a minus sign or hyphen before the word you don’t want. So a search query that would exclude the majority of websites that mention this other Jesse Palmer would be:
“jesse palmer” -football -espn -canadian -bachelor
One of the nice things about having a good reputation monitoring company working for you is that they will only deliver the results that matter.
What’s Next?
Now that you’ve got some sentiment data coming in, do you see any trends? Are people constantly complaining about a certain product? Is your website hard to use? Is there something everyone just loves?
If people are complaining, don’t take it personally. If you can’t do that then you should stop reading right now and hire someone to take care of your reputation management or ignore your reputation completely. I repeat, DO NOT do your own reputation management if you take every complaint personally; you will only end up making your brand look worse than before.
Next Week
We’ll go over how to react to positive & negative sentiment. In the mean time, if you need any help with your digital, feel free to contact e-CBD.
We are a digital agency on the Gold Coast and can take care of all of your business’ digital needs. We are experts in creating custom websites and managing all aspects of internet marketing, including SEO, Facebook advertising and Google Ads management.
You can get in touch with us today by calling (07) 5531 3810. You can even connect with us on Facebook or Instagram.