Build a Blog-Monitoring Dashboard for Reputation Management and Competitive Intelligence

Everyone’s blogging. Some of them are talking about you, your company and your competition. What they say matters – it influences how others see your organization and it can provide deep insight into the strategies of your competitors. But it’s hard, with the number of blogs doubling every five months.

I strongly believe that the rise of social media is a good thing. And I mean good in the capital “G” sense. Companies doing good things will be rewarded by their customers – companies doing bad things will be punished. This is as it should be. And all the big brand advertising in the world won’t cancel out the effect of real people talking without an agenda.

This should terrify brand advertisers (and advertising agencies, but that’s another discussion). We help our clients keep track of what their customers are saying online – and what their competitors are doing – by leveraging freely available web 2.0 technologies. Here’s how - in five steps:

Step One – Identify your keyword list

The dashboard we create runs several types of blog-o-sphere searches. You need to figure out what you’re seeking. For NLC, I’ve configured searches for:

• our company names (with various misspellings)
• links to our web site
• mentions of our URL
• the names of high profile NLC team members
• the names of our competition

Step Two – Set up a netvibes account

If you haven’t tried Netvibes yet, you should (www.netvibes.com). I rely on it as my dashboard to the world – and include NLC reputation monitoring as part of that.

Step Three – Fine tune your searches on blog search engines

Use more than one blog search engine – we’ve found the overlap in the results they return is usually less than 30 percent. I’d recommend trying:

• Google blog search
• Bloglines
• Feedster
• Icerocket
• Technorati
• Wikio

Use the advanced search forms – you will need to experiment with date ranges and authority settings to get useful results. When you are happy with the search, click the RSS icon or subscribe link.

Step Four – Set up feeds in netvibes

Part of the beauty of netvibes is that it makes subscribing to an RSS feed trivial – click on the button in the top left hand side (helpfully labeled “add content”), click “add a feed”, and paste in the URL generated by the search engine. Click on this screen cap of one NLC dashboard for a sense of how this looks (and forgive us for blurring out our competitors’ info).

Step Five – Bonus Features – Google Index and Video Monitoring

If at a glance monitoring of your reputation in the blog-o-sphere isn’t enough, you can extend your dashboard:

• Subscribe to Googlealerts.com for an RSS feed that will tell you when a new result appears in a Google search for your company or competitor (or other keyword)
• Add the netvibes video search widget and populate it with your company name - have you been youtubed?

Next Steps

Of course, knowing what the world is saying about you and your competitors is only the first step. You have to decide what to do when they say nice things and when they say not so nice things. I recommend being rational and honest.

• Rational – if there is a misleading or mis-representative message on a blog to which no one subscribes, ignore it. You may be the only one that ever sees it.
• Honest - If it’s a blog with many subscribers and the comments are inaccurate, then post a comment. But do it as a representative of your company. Don’t pretend to be someone you’re not – the negative consequences of being discover outweigh any possible advantage it might provide.

In previous posts on content granularity I discussed the trade-offs in the level of content granularity and tips for RedDot, Sitecore and Ektron. To conclude this series on granularity I would like to share a scenario of two firms who are upgrading their web content management software.

Both organizations deployed a content management solution in the late 1990’s. The first selected a commercial product, while the second firm contracted programmers to custom build a content management application.

Come early 2007 and both firms are looking to upgrade their current platforms. A major driver is to improve the job board functionality that they provide to their customers. Having undertaken a serious evaluation of the available products, both firms selected (different) content management products. The job board functionality required by both organizations is to:

• allow their customers to post job opportunities
• allow potential candidates to apply for the job
• report on the job/application status
• port their existing job data from the current system to the new one.

Firm A, with the existing commercial product, had designed their job postings to have a low level of granularity. Firm A’s concept of a job was a description, company, opening and closing date – a low granularity. Firm B, who used a customized solution, implemented a highly granular view of the job posting with over 20 separate fields for each job posting.

Because of the highly granular information maintained by Firm B, a programmer was able to create scripts to automatically migrate the 5,000 existing jobs to the new system. The total time taken was 5 days. Firm A, with the unstructured job posting could not automate the process. Instead content authors had to manually examine each job posting and re-enter the information. Firm A’s database of 2500 jobs took 2 people almost 3 weeks to move to the new system.

The earlier decision by Firm A to implement a low granular job posting cost them 6 times the effort of Firm B, to migrate only ½ the number of job posts.

The lesson is that long term plans for your content should be considered. If the content is going to have a long shelf-life, the uses for the content and the systems using that content will change. Taking a longer term view will introduce some extra effort in the beginning, but it would have saved Firm A, the 6 man-weeks of repetitive copying and pasting of content.

Update: NLC has published an extensive whitepaper of Sitecore best practices.  Includes details on recommended template architecture, governance models and measures of success.

In a previous post, I discussed some of the decision points for content granularity. Today, I would like to add to this by focusing on some specific web content management products.

At NLC we work with three commercial web content management products: Ektron, RedDot and Sitecore. While the implementation details of each differ, we have found that there are a number of simple rules that apply to all when arriving at the level of content granularity for a WCMS project.

1. Meta data – for example, search engine keywords - should be treated separately from the actual content. Ektron includes this functionality out-of-the-box, RedDot and Sitecore require some configuration.
2. Many types of content require a teaser or short description of the full content. This teaser information should be stored separately from content. This allows the teaser information to be used when lists of links or tables of content are being generated.
3. Most sites require a page to have two titles, a short one for display in the navigation, the other to be displayed in the content as the actual page title. This is allows for descriptive titles, while keeping the real estate dedicate to navigation at a minimum.
4. All date and geographic information should be treated separately.
5. Content layouts that follow a tabular/grid pattern often pose difficulties for content authors – especially when the authors are required to create the layout from scratch. Special templates can greatly simplify this for the content authors.

In the next posting, I will conclude the discussion of content granularity with an examination of several system upgrade projects and how content granularity affected those projects.

At NLC we have had the opportunity to work with a range of Web Content Management (WCM) products. While each product has its own unique take on how to structure and store content, they all require a clear strategy and implementation plan to arrive at a level of structure or content granularity that is appropriate for the organization.

To explain the concept of content granularity, consider as an example, a news releases from the NLC website.

When one person views this news release they may describe this release as containing a title, short description and the full body of the news release. A more granular view would see this release containing a title, short description, location, date and the full text. When the WCMS is being configured this choice needs to be made. Does the WCMS store just three pieces of content for a news release, or does it store five?

So, why should I care about the level of granularity? When attempting to find that right level, consider the following cases where high granularity can be of benefit. Higher content granularity:

• Enforces consistency in content, resulting in a more professional feel to your website.
• Allows for greater reuse of content; both within the WCMS and with other (external) applications. For example; a new release with a clearly defined date field can be more easily shared a calendar of upcoming events.
• Simplifies complex presentation patterns and can enforce more consistent formatting. For example; the location and date of the news release are always and automatically bolded.
• Allows for better classification of content; which in turn can be used to provide additional information to search programs. For example; being able to search releases by date and location.

On the flip side, overly granular content can:

• Introduce extra complexity for content authors; they may be overwhelmed by the number of fields they have to fill in.
• Increase the effort required to migrate existing content to the WCMS. Existing content that is unstructured often needs to be reviewed and missing information filled in before it can be loaded into the WCMS.

In the next posting I’ll offer several best practices for content granularity.