Your business’ reputation is important for sustaining financial success. The best way to find out what sort of reputation your brand has is by means of tracking conversations that people are having online.
Here are five apps, all of them free, that help you in your ongoing task of online reputation management.
Me On The Web/Google Dashboard
This is the easiest and most straightforward way of tracking what’s being said about you, and odds are you’ve seen the links for it if you happen to use Google at all, which considering its popularity, is very likely. Sign on to Google, go to the Dashboard, click “Me on the Web”, and look through the available options. First and foremost, you should set up e-mail alerts, which let you know when new information about you or your business appears online.
Streamified
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn … there’s a lot of social media out there for you to join. How do you keep track of them all? Streamified is an app that brings all of your social media sites together, letting you access them all from one centralized site. With Streamified you can set up alerts for when people are talking about you or interacting with your pages, as well as manage your blogs, newsfeeds, social networks, and brand pages. You can also create posts (with images and links) for multiple destinations, and even set them up to be released at future dates.
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Naymz
Sort of like Klout, Naymz is a professional network that manages and measures your online reputation, while giving you the chance to earn rewards in the form of free services and products. You get a reputation score (RepScore) that’s based on three factors: peer assessments, social influence, and transparency. The peer assessment is a questionnaire sent to your contacts when they connect. The more people who vouch for you (and the higher their own RepScores are), the better your own score becomes. Social influence is calculated by comments, likes, and reposts across your connected Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts.
Whos Talkin
If you want to focus solely on what your reputation is like within the vast world of social media, this app’s for you. Enter your name or that of your business into the search field and see where you come up in social media communication. The added niftiness of Whos Talkin comes in the browser search plug-in to be used on your search bar, as well as a gadget for iGoogle. With these extras, you don’t have to keep going back to the Whos Talkin website to use its functionality.
Boardreader
This app’s function is perfectly summed up in its name. There are countless message boards out there, and you want to know what each one is saying about your business. Since no one can track such a huge number, Boardreader lets you search across online discussion boards so that you can search out who’s saying what about you and your brand. You can search based on a business or company name, a website, or a topic.
Although it’s practically impossible to find every single reference to you and your brand that’s floating out there on the Internet, these apps, used consistently, will help you grab the lion’s share of the talk. Knowledge is power, and knowing what people think of you (based on what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong), is a powerful tool to a sterling online reputation, and consequently a healthier, more prosperous business.