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.