Monitoring Your Reputation on Twitter - All the tweets about you

Why is Twitter a good place to be monitoring your reputation?
(I’m not going to even give a short overview because in today’s online world, not knowing Twitter is like not knowing how to send an email). Simply put, Twitter is a micro-blogging system that has over 1 million “tweets” per day just on the public timeline, so you can assume that if there are people out there who don’t like (or hate) you, some of their grudges will get twittered.

So how do you start looking for and monitoring the conversations that can be beneficial or

detrimental to your brand? The first and obvious thing will be to do a regular search on Twitter.

If you don’t have time for sifting through search results, separating the positive from

the negative tweets, go right to the Sentiment Search to see if your name appears with negative words. They even go out of the way to present it in a graphical way, but they won’t show you the twittes.

For the real lazes, you can check out Twitrratr, another Twitter analyzing app that breaks up the tweets to negative, positive or neutral, according to the appearance of sentiment-defining words.

One more site for the real graph lovers is Twittermeter, which will show you a graph of the number of times your name or term you are looking for has appeared in tweets during the last week, thus gauging your “hotness” and measuring trends on Twitter.

After all these steps you’ll pretty much know what the Twitterati have got to say about you, but who wants to check all this every few days?!

Well you don’t have to worry and since we knew you’d ask, we prepared a list of automatic Twitter monitoring tools:

1. Tweetbeep will send you an email every time your name or URL appears on the Twitter network. This funky little tool will even notify you if your URL was posted using the tinyurl format, although the alerts are not immediate (can be sometimes delayed by a factor of several hours)

2. Tweettrak will forward you all the tweets that mention your name. It also allows for geotargeting so you can focus your interests on tweets coming from a specific area.

3. If you want to watch the twittersphere talk about you as it happens, we suggest you use Monitter. It lets you monitor 3 phrases simultaneously, with the optional geotargeting focus

If you discover that instead of tweeting your name, people are buzzing about your site or sending each other a link to your latest article, you can track it down at Twitterbuzz or Twitturly which present you the most popular URLs sent over Twitter during the last day in a convenient, Digg-like manner. If your popularity has been blessed by longevity and you want to see trends over longer periods of time, you can check out if mentions of your brand have made it in to the most popular tweets of the week or of the last month at http://popacular.com/Twitter/.

Even if you name or URL did not make the most popular lists, you can still find more info about a link to a negative article that went around with Tweet burner, which will track how many times a link on Twitter was clicked and were did those visitors go over the Twitter-sphere.

If you discover that your brand or name was a conversation topic among two or more people, it can be quite a challenging task to follow the whole convo over several Twitter accounts. The same task is much easier when using Tweet2Tweet, which upon entering user names brings up the entire conversation.

Another interesting app is Twitter friends network browser, which presents connections between users in a visual manner, very much like Touchgraph’s Google Browser does.

Twitter Friends Network Browser - Hi look Osama Bin Laden and Bill Clinton are not to far from Barack Obama

One last tool we present is useful if you want to track conversations that happen between users located around a limited area, like your address to see what your neighbors are saying about you, you can always go to http://twittermap.com/maps which shows geotargeted tweets only.

So just keep on twitting and don’t forget other people are watching!

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.

The Leeson Inn is a hotel in downtown Dublin. The hotel’s official name is somewhat of an enigma because it is variously referred to as “Leeson Inn”, “Leeson Inn Downtown” or “Leeson Inn Downtown Dublin” on the myriad of sites that refer to it. The confusion intensifies because on the hotel’s own site (http://www.leesoninndowntown.com/) the 3 names appear. This certainly adds to the intrigue of a site which has achieved such consistent search results on Google.The following is a sampling of search results for this hotel:
1. [hotel downtown Dublin] 10/10
2. [hotel in downtown Dublin] 8/10
3. [hotels in downtown Dublin] 8/10
4. [hotels downtown Dublin] 7/10
5. [downtown Dublin hotels] 8/10
6. [downtown Dublin hotel] 7/10

What is clear is that this hotel dominates the Google pages for extremely relevant key words. Not all of the results are of the hotel itself, many feature travel and hotel sites. But one fact is undisputed, if you are conducting an online search for a hotel in downtown Dublin, this is the one that you are going to find!

One obvious conclusion: they have a good SEO firm working for them. WRONG! My guess is that they probably don’t have anybody doing SEO, and if somebody is they are decidedly not doing a good job, judging from their web design, html code and the fact that the word “hotel” rarely appears in their back links. So you can’t ascribe this enviable SEO situation to SEO.

So how did the Lesson Inn do it?

Its not likely to be an Irishman and search for “downtown…”, its just not part of their vernacular. They use the term town center. The term “downtown …” is American. Clearly whoever is responsible for these results is targeting American tourists and travelers.

Conclusion: since the term down town is not an Irish phrase, none of the other hotels considered optimizing for it (downtown - doesn’t that sound weird to you?). So when the Lesson Inn used the term “downtown…”, they were playing in a field with no competition to speak of.

So, the next time you open a business and rely on online marketing strategies, try coming up with a name that not only sound good but searches well as well.

1. Death By Blogging

DON’T open 100 blogs on different social sites. No respectable business person has blogs on blogger and Wordpress and TypePad and hundreds of other available platforms. In case you are promoting a company, opening a multitude of blogs may be justified as a massive consumer reaction, but it will never look natural.

2. Face It - You’re Too Old

DON’T open a Myspace account. Myspace is targeting a young crowd. Having a corporate page there may backfire on you. It will be hard getting friends to your attorney profiled page on Myspace. Unless of course you are under the age of 25 love hip hop have 5238 friends on line and just happen to have an online reputation problem. and are convinced that some glitter on your company’s image is cool.

3. Face it - Your To Serious For Facebook

DON’T open your Facebook profile to search engines. For reasons, (see # 2) it’s nice for poking around, but does not provide value for reputation management. LinkedIn on the other hand is great for this purpose, but remember to add some friends. There is nothing sadder than an unpopular LinkedIn account. (Well except for a multibillion dollar company trying buy a search engine getting refused and then deciding to buy LinkedIn- pretty sad too…)

4. Neutral Is Fine - Just Ask The Swiss

DON’T assume that all of the top ten results need to be good, glittery and shinning. It is acceptable and even advisable to have some neutral content. If there is another person out there with the same name, maybe you should consider promoting them to the top 10. You want to present a natural set of results, not something that looks artificially altered.

5. Be Smart - Don’t Assume Anyone Else Is.

DON’T leave a negative article in SERPs, even if it is clear that the article is not about you. Not everyone is clever enough to discern that the negative posting is talking about the other Skyline Computer Co. (And if you are sniggering about the non-cleverness comment, just ask yourself how clever you are to be in this situation in the first place)

6. Don’t Go Godfather

DON’T try to pay off a blogger to remove a negative article, unless you are going to make an offer he can’t refuse. If your offer is too low, you have done nothing but to give a fame seeking blogger an idea about a brilliant post. Which will probably join the initial negative post in the SERPs. Only that the new post is going to be even juicier, since there is nothing more interesting than a company in trouble, except when that company tries to hide it. Remember what happened to Microsoft when they tried to pay a blogger to change the terms of “OpenDocument” and “OOXML” on Wikipedia.

7. Though Shalt Not Covert Another Mans Wife …

DON’T start a Wikipedia article for your name:

Google is married to Wikipedia, so the Wikipedia entry will probably rank rather high on the SERP and it is tempting. But here’s the thing, anybody can edit a Wikipedia page even an unhappy client! So even if the entry doesn’t get removed immediately it will probably not be a very good article for you after a while. And trust me, it will not be easy to get rid of.

8. You’re Just Not That Good…

DON’T try any black hat tricks to remove a result. If you don’t succeed it will be harder to get rid of. And with your luck this will be the only time the search engines didn’t catch your spam…

9. Location, Location, Location

DON’T expect to remove articles from SERPs. The most that can be done is pushing them down. Remember - after 20 it’s a desert anyway

10. Do It The Old Fashioned Way

And most import, run a clean ethical business. DON’T screw people over and chances are you won’t be in this pickle in the first place.

Americans continue to expect control over their personal information,
but have softened some of their views about privacy.The nature of personal information is changing in the age of Web 2.0

Searching for Self: “Curiouser and Curiouser”

47% of internet users have searched for information about themselves
online, up from just 22% five years ago.

11% of internet users have a job that requires them to self-promote or
market their name online.

Those motivated by work-related expectations are more active in
monitoring their presence online. Public personae are more likely to say that a wide range of personal content (both creative and mundane in nature) is available online. However, public personae have not widely embraced social networking tools for professional or personal uses.

One in five working adults in the U.S. say their employer has policies or
guidelines about self-presentation online. Few regularly repeat their personal name searches. Most who have the inclination to conduct a personal name search find relevant results. Those who search for their own name see a familiar footprint. Nearly nine in ten internet users who locate information about themselves say that most of what they find is accurate, up from 74% five years ago.

Measuring Our Online Footprint: The Trails of 2.0

One in three online adults say their home address and information about who they work for is available online. Many users are uncertain about the availability of their email address. Just one in ten internet users believe that information about their political party affiliation is available online. Users often share “second degree” personal information through content posted on social media sites.

One in three adult internet users has posted creative content online. Social Networking Profiles: With adults, transparency is the norm. Most internet users feel as though it would be “pretty easy” for someone to locate or contact them based on the information available about them online. Young adults, many of whom maintain a profile on a social networking site, are more likely than other internet users to believe it would be “very difficult” for someone to locate or contact them.

Searching for Others: Forget the Phone Book

More than half of all adult internet users have used a search engine to
find information about various people in their lives. Blast from the past: We’re most likely to search for those with whom we have lost touch.

Work-related searches: 19% of adult internet users have searched for
information about co-workers, professional colleagues or business
competitors.

11% of adult internet users say they have searched online for information about someone they are thinking about hiring or working with.

Dating-related searches: Women and young adults do their relationship
homework online.

Basic contact information tops the list of things people search for.

36% of online adults use search engines to look up information about
celebrities and public figures.

Managing Identity: Approaches and Attitudes

Most internet users are not concerned about the amount of information
available about them online, and most do not take steps to limit that
information. Even among those who do express concern about the availability of their online information, many do not take steps to limit access to personal data. Confident Creatives are active internet users whose comfort with online expression may influence their lack of concern about managing their personal data.

The Concerned and Careful partake in a wide range of online activities,
but some also have experience with the dark side of having their online
information available. The Worried by the Wayside group expresses a classic privacy conundrum: They say they worry about the amount of personal information available about them online, but then do little or nothing to control access to that data.
The Unfazed and Inactive group is the most detached from all aspects of their digital footprint.

Looking Ahead: Persistent Presence Online

The way we manage our digital footprints will evolve over time.

What’s in a name? When it comes to anonymity, unique names may or may not smell as sweet. Changes to the way we search and how we exert control over our personal data will continue to shape the way we understand identity and presence online.

To see full study check out http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Digital_Footprints.pd

Te see questionnaire http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIAL_Dec06_Tracking_FINAL_Topline.pdf

Indeed, most internet users are not concerned about the amount of information available about them online, and most do not take steps to limit that information. Fully 60% of internet users say they are not worried about how much information is available about them online. Similarly, the majority of online adults (61%) do not feel compelled to limit the amount of information that can be found about them online.

In addition to providing national telephone survey data, this report includes quotes from online survey respondents as well as experts in the fields of privacy, online identity management and search.

source:Digital Footprints

His concerns are well founded. It has become common practice for people to surf the web for news and information about people, places and companies. Researching new products and services is commonplace. It is expected that a prospective employer will conduct a thorough online search of any serious candidates for employment. Google has become the online manifestation of Orwell’s imagined “Big Brother”. If the algorithm has dealt you a bad hand, it is best you learn how to confront it rather than hoping it will disappear by itself.

As a service to the companies and individuals for whom a search yields negative results, or may suffer from this precarious condition in the future, we offer insights into the world of online reputation management.

You are Not Alone

With the advent of bloggers, RSS feeds and web sites, anyone can define a person’s or company’s identity and challenge a website’s reputation and integrity. The rise and expansion of consumer generated media offers the public an opportunity to express their views. And this is being done at an unprecedented rate. People are expressing their views unabashedly, often with no regard for the consequences of what they are writing, and with little for concern for the veracity of their comments.

The more a product, brand or company is exposed to public attention and scrutiny, the greater the likelihood that someone will want to challenge its reputation. This can include dissatisfied clients, customers and competitors, who may have legitimate complaints or rumor mongers and vindictive web site wizards, whose sole purpose is to challenge another website’s integrity. For example, 29 of the Fortune 100 Companies have at least one negative postings when “Googled”. These postings range from bad business practices and discrimination, to accusations that companies are connected to paramilitary death squads.

Negative postings are not only surfacing on large or even medium corporate search results. Stories, rumors and press accounts that date back a decade or more are also traumatizing ordinary people. Seemingly innocent pranks and mischievous adventures that college students may have engaged in, have appeared in top positions of search engine listings seriously damaging their reputations, careers and lives.

You Can Take Charge

Combating the tribulations of a negative Google listing means taking charge of the search results that come up for your name, company, etc. If left to the vagaries of the search engine’s algorithm, you can easily fall victim to the whims of arbitrary conjecture, opinions and rumors. When you decide to take charge, you need to confront the search engines in a proactive and forthright manner, rather than adopting a passive or defensive posture.

Online reputation and search engine optimization professionals will tell you that it is no longer an issue of “if” you should be managing your online reputation, the question is “how” you should be managing it. And don’t assume that just because you are happy with the results of your own personal search today, that situation will continue indefinitely. Being on guard means:

1. knowing that the situation can turn against you and
2. having the ammunition to combat the rumor mongers when they strike.

Like the proverbial lawyer who, when deciding to represent himself, discovers has a fool for a client, most people, even those who are comfortable in the world of the internet, are not competent to deal with the major league players when it comes to online reputation management. When you are up against a challenger that has Google on its team, you don’t want your teammates to be from the minor league, even if they can boast a relatively high batting score.

Working With a Pro

Successful ORM, focuses on having sufficient links to blogs, articles, press stories and allied web sites so that when a search is run for your name, all of the material you have positioned appears. The problem starts when a stubbornly entrenched negative press story or blog, appears on your page, and it overpowers all of the listings you have put in place, how do you dislodge it?

That’s when working with a pro makes a real difference. The team at Reputation Fixer has an aggregate of decades of hands-on experience in working in the Google environment, managing successful web site optimizing campaigns in fiercely competitive markets dealing with the complexity and unpredictability of Google’s algorithm. Reputation Fixer is the major leagues when it comes to ORM. They are the kind of teammates you want when your reputation is at stake.

Measuring Success

Regardless of who actually manages your ORM campaign, what is required is distribution of positive content and strategic participation in online discussions which results in the creation and posting of positive content on your site. A successful search engine reputation management program ensures that those looking for information about you or your company will see favorable content wherever your name or your company appears as search results.

“Until recently, this service was an integral component of our broad range of SEO services. But today, with the advent of bloggers, RSS feeds and web sites, anyone can define a person’s or company’s online identity and challenge their reputation and integrity. Reputation Fixer’s focused goal is to clean and protect anyone whose reputation is being threatened.”

Waldman highlighted the apparent need for this service by describing a call that came from someone whose online reputation was being threatened by an article written over 15 years ago. The caller was upset because this negative posting could ruin his chances for advancement at his job and might even serve as a basis for dismissal. Clearly the article which was both totally outdated and of questionable relevance when written a decade and a half ago should not have been given the credence it had earned. But its appearing # 3 in the search results for his name, could ruin his career!

What makes this service all the more essential is the ease with which anyone can ruin someone’s online reputation. The rise and phenomenal growth of consumer generated media offers the public unlimited and unprecedented opportunities to express their views.

What distinguishes the professionals at Reputation Fixer from many other companies working on the ORM field is their years of experience. They have dealt with assignments in the widest spectrum of the highly competitive SEO Field.