Online Reputation Management Tools
Tools are very important. They are a faster, more efficient way of finding out what’s happening with your branding process and name out there. Although online reputation management is still in its infancy, new tools to help you with your reputation are being born every day. Some of them are worth the price, some of them aren’t. And some of them are free. Yeah!
I will go ahead and organize them into categories.
1. The first category belongs to the process of monitoring your online reputation. In order to do something about your reputation, you need to find out what people are saying about you. Whether you are a CEO of a big company or just one person trying to see what comes up when they type their name, there’s one free tool that is great and can help you monitor your name online. Google Alerts are actually e-mail updates based on specific query or topic. It’s very easy to set up, pretty reliable and free. What else can you wish for? Don’t forget to monitor your company name, your products, company’s CEOs, VPs etc.
2. Manage your reputation! Once you know how to check your online reputation, you need to find the best way to managing it. Here are some great tools to help you with that:
- Naymz.com is a great way to help you manage your reputation. You need to sign up, invite people and let them write reviews about you, your company, your products, services etc.
- RapLeaf is another great website, where you can write reviews about other people and their companies. They will be invited to write about you in return
- Trackur was built by one of the biggest gurus of online reputation management, Andy Beal. You can set it up in minutes, and choose between individual, company and agency package.
3. Your online profiles are very important. Whether you are a Digg member, Facebook fan, MySpace lover etc., you need to monitor and manage your online profiles. You probably know someone who got fired or was never really considered to be a good job candidate because of their online persona. We “Google” everyone and everything today. Whether you’re watching a documentary and want to know what “cumulus” really is, or whether you want to know something more about the company interviewing you the following day, chances are, you will go online and do some researching. What we read on the Internet might change our mind. Here are some very good tools to help you manage your online profiles:
- Comwat helps you “organize” your profiles, put them all together and in one place where you can find them easily. This way, the whole process of monitoring and managing your online profiles looks like a piece of cake!
- SocialURL is a another great way to organize your online profiles and connect them all with one simple URL.
As I already said, there are many more great online reputation management tools, but these are my personal favorites. I will definitely try new tools and write more about them. Comments are welcome! Please mention your favorites and let me know what you think.