Top 10 Free Tools for Monitoring Your Brand’s Reputation

Brand monitoring has become an essential task for any individual or corporation. Years ago, when people talked about our brands, it was behind our backs and we almost never found out about it. Today, most of these dialogues are right in front of our own eyes and the number of locations where our brands may be cited is astronomical!

We must remember that conversations are being held on the web with or without our consent. That means we can choose whether to be observers, participants or outcasts. Before you select observer or outcast, remember that these conversations can have a negative impact on your brand. Also, when conversations start on the web, like a forest fire, they travel very fast and wreak havoc along the way; what might start out as a mere tweet, may turn into a blog post and then make national news.

Here’s a basic reputation management system that I’ve been using, as well as a list of the top 10 free tools you can start using today.

How to Begin

Depending on how popular and well-known your brand is, there may be few or many people talking about it. If you’re looking to start a blog, position yourself as an expert or start networking actively in your desired topic area, then listening is an important research routine. As you become more well-known, more conversations will be held around your brand name, so you’ll spend more time listening and possibly responding to blog posts, tweets, etc. If you’re a large and popular company, you may need to hire someone to manage these monitoring tools daily.

The first thing you need to do is acquire a feed reader. I personally use Google reader because it’s easy to sort feeds, bookmark/favorite them and share (give value) them with your network.

I would also register for a Delicious account, which can help you sort and organize blogs that mention your brand. Think of Delicious as your own research and development plant. Once you’ve set up these two accounts, the following tools will help you locate articles that mention your brand, feed them right into your central hub (Google reader) and allow you to manage them (Delicious).

Get the full story at: Mashable