Before social media sites cames along, online reputation monitoring meant scouring through pages of search results, product review sites, and online forums. The tools available consisted of, well, Google.
Now, with the proliferation of social media sites has come a wide range of tools to help companies monitor reputation across those sites and rest of the web. Google is still one of the best tools at your disposal; but now only paints part of your company's online reputation picture.
I've put together this list of 17 free tools you can use to monitor your company's reputation across different areas of online media (news, forums, blogs, social sites, product reviews, and more).
General Reputation Monitoring Sites
- Vanno: Newly-launched Vanno calls itself "The Company Reputation Index". It's a social platform where the community submits news stories, blog posts, videos, and other bits they find around the web about companies. Through Vanno's voting system, a "reputation index" is quantified for each company.
- Serph: Search for any company, product, or name on Serph, and you'll be presented with the
latest buzz from around the web. And when I say latest - each result is labeled with the date it was posted.
News
- Google News Alerts: You probably already know about Google Alerts; but if you don't already use them to monitor mentions of your company, product, or name, then now is the time to start. You can set up alerts for mentions across all of the web, or for just Google News.
- Technorati: Like Serph, you can search Technorati for just about anything and receive results from around the web. Tabs organize results into posts, blogs, photos, and videos. The most important part about Technorati are the Authority ratings, so you can focus on stories from publishers that have more authority.
- Searchles: A social search engine of sorts, Searchles has a number of large communities formed
around content. And lots of it - all posted by and shared amongst the Searchles community.
Forums
- Omgili: Online forums aren't dead yet - they're hotbeds of information about companies and products. Omgili helps you search through the thousands of forums out there to find the information you're most concerned about.
- Board Reader: Like Omgili, Board Reader is a forum search engine; however, it also searches through videos posted in forums, Twitter conversations, and even IMDB.
Blogs
- Google Blog Alerts: As mentioned before, you can set up alerts for across the web, or (in this case) just blogs.
- co.mments: Set up a free account at co.mments, and you can bookmark and track comments
posted on blogs. You can track your bookmarked blog conversations on your co.mments tracking page, or subscribe to an RSS feed.
- BlogPulse Conversation Tracker: BlogPulse's tool allows you to track the full breadth of a conversation from one keyword or link. You'll see several levels of conversation, starting with original seed posts and digging deeper into posts that have sprouted from those.
- Trendpedia: Not only can you to search the blogosphere for company or product mentions; but also compare buzz trends with mentions of your competitor. You're presented with a graph, and you can click on any part of it to view posts from a certain date.
Social Sites
- Twist: New Twitter tools seem to pop up every day, including trending tools that harness tweet-versations so you can see buzz trends. Twist allows you to compare mentions of several different topics and view recent tweets about each one.
- Tweet Scan: At the outset, Tweet Scan looks just like the sort of results you would get by using
Twitter's own search platform; however, you can also sign up for Tweet Scan and set up email alerts, install Tweet Scan search on your browser, and even download an archive of your own tweets.
- monitter: View real-time (yes, constantly updated) conversations on Twitter for up to three different topics. You can even search within a specific geographic region that you set.
- Joongel: Joongel is an aggregated search platform...with a difference. Search any category of
online media for a company or product name, including social sites, photo sites, videos, Q&A sites, shopping sites, and more.
Product Review Sites
- Omgili Product Review Search: Omgili is more than just a forum search engine - they also have a product review search platform, which scours product review sites across the web for your product or company.
- Epinions: This product review site has been around for a long time and has thousands of reviews for a huge range of products.
What are some of the tools you've used to monitor your company's online reputation?
