Many brand owners are bombarded with offers to manage the reputation of their brands online. A recent attempt by Set Godin to enter this business backfired.
For some brands Seth’s company Squidoo had setup a webpage, where automatically collected user generated content mentioning the brand was displayed. Then, for US$400 a month brand owners were offered to edit a column of the webpage about their brand and publish their PR or advertising.
Of course, many brand owners were not amused. First Seth used their brand and then sort of blackmailed the owner into advertising their. So, Seth took the pages offline.
But in general, Seth’s idea is good.
Because you cannot control, what you are not monitoring.
So here are some – free – tools, for you to monitor the online reputation of your brand.
- Earlier we mentioned two services to check who is using your brand in subdomains, http://namechk.com and www.usernamecheck.com.
- An easy tool to monitor news and blogs are Google News Alerts. Be sure to set them up for all relevant languages.
- A tool to monitor the ever growing Twitter is http://tweetbeep.com. It works like Google Alerts for Twitter.
- And then there are search engines with a focus upon social media like http://collecta.com, http://boardreader.com and http://socialmention.com.