Online Identity Management

One of the first steps in a reputation management project is data gathering. In order to be able to size up the amount of work that is ahead of you, you need to be able to relate to every piece of negative publication about your new client that exists on the net. While not being a big deal to perform, this part of the work can get incredibly annoying. Don’t get me wrong I love doing things that could be done by a computer but after manually combing through thousands of Google SERPS, it can start getting on your nerves a bit after a while. Thing is, as reputation management is relatively new, tools that are good enough for this inspiring task just haven’t been developed yet.

In comes Trackur, a new tracking tool is designed to track and originize the information that forms your online identity from across the web. Now a classical tool to do this would be Google Alerts - after all, the majority of the bad reputation articles you will have to deal with are problematic due to their existence in the Google SERPs, so what better way to review and organize those potential reputation mines, than using Google itself. Even though Google Alerts was not created with Reputation Management in mind, one of its most common uses was as an online reputation and identity management tools. So in order to check the new Trackur tool and to make sure that Google is doing this kind of job properly, we decided to take Trackur for a test drive and see how it performs in comparison to Google Alerts.

Information

One of the most important features you have to look at when comparing reputation tracking software is whether they are managing to reach and gather all of the relevant information. In this regard, Trackur and Google are very evenly matched. Trackur monitors blogs, news sites, social media platforms, videos and images. Google Alerts, monitors news, blogs and videos. Its “web” feature can be used to track practically everything else, although online reputation management is decidedly not its primary focus or function.

Presentation

An organized useful and manageable presentation of the gathered information is also key to useful reputation management, otherwise you could find yourself spending a great deal of your time sifting through information that - at best - has little bearing and at worst - irrelevant. (Personally I think boring is worst than irrelevant but whatever…)
The information collected on Trackur is presented in a very compact way which offers just the title or a snippet of the article and includes all the details, including the date it was found, date it was published, the source, etc.
Another important and powerful Trackur feature that helps “focus” the monitoring process is their “favorite results” feature. This enables you to find the articles you want to respond to or keep an eye on. There is also a “share option”, but it is a little disappointing because it only supports an email function and not an automatic submit function to the main social networks (I love social networks, great place for branding besides I can always benefit from a few additional links).
Getting updates is also very easy by email or by RSS, the frequency of the updates is a function of the type of account you have.
We all know Google likes it plain so we can’t expect any of these functions from Google Alerts. All we get is a link and a snippet taken directly from the Google SERP. However, Google does have better choices of updating frequency options (2 points for Google on that one).
Trackur’s most impressive function is its filter. It allows you to limit the results of the search to the precise focus you are interested in. If you are monitoring Jaguar you may want your results to be limited to cars, and not include an entry that might be appropriate to National Geographic. If the focus of your attention is Cat / Caterpillars shoes, you want it to filter out any reference to the animal kingdom. Since this kind of feature would need to use some kind of semantic deciding process, we decided to test it and play with it some more.

A Short Experiment…

We wanted to test Trackur’s filter and compare it to Google Alerts on a subject that will give us a small number of daily results (without being inundated with data). A co-worker suggested monitoring the reputation of U.S. Senator John Thune (no political allegiance or preference intended). So I set up Trackur and Google Alerts and waited for results. The first thing one notices about Trackur is a great visualization it offers - you can see the number of articles that it found on each day for the search terms (including the filters) presented in a neat bar chart. What is the advantage of this? Well, tracking viral effects of your content was never easier than now, with Trackur.

Then we turned off the filtering function and I was sure Google was going to run Trackur over without blinking, however there was the biggest surprise of them all
Trackur had many more results then Google Alerts!!!

For a period of 10 running days, Trackur found 297 articles and videos, while Google found only 105. Trackur did get some duplicate articles, published by more than one site (which can actually be very helpful if you want to know if something is going viral) which we did not get from Google, however, even after elimination of the duplicate results, Trackur exceeded Google by more than 200%.

Other useful function we discovered is that Trackur also gives you some retroactive results, not the same volume as current results, but that is something Google doesn’t offer.

Trackur describes itself as a tool which presents a graphic image of the amount of traffic generated by your key phrases (like the images above). This is very beneficial for small industries that Google Trends does not even look at, because they are too small.

Now that both Trackur and Google Alerts are keeping track of phrases related to Senator John Thune, this article is supposed to pop up in the alerts as well. We are looking forward to updating this article when we are detected by Google Alerts and Trackur, and thus provide information regarding the updating frequency of both services.

UPDATE

So both services seem to be pretty quick at updating new content. The article was cached in Google in an hour, while Trackur showed it after 45 minutes. This is not enough of a difference to decide which one is better. If we take into consideration the fact that Trackuer is probably based up to an extent on Google’s index, then this point is even harder to make. However it is good to know that Trackur will show you more results than Google, using a better and more user-friendly ways to visualize your results, without compromising on the updating frequency.