The three tools below are free, easy to use, have rather basic functionality and deliver email alerts of your brand mentions. They take seconds to set up, so there is no excuse for not using them. I for one have been using the tools for ages, so here’s my insight into what you can expect:

Tracking Web Mentions: Google Alerts

Google Alerts is the most obvious choice when it comes to tracking web mentions of any word or phrase. Google has the largest on the web database of domains to crawl. Besides, it is the fastest to discover the new content that gets published on the web.

On the plus side:

• Fastest results and largest database;
• The ability to preview results before subscribing to the alerts;
• The ability to deliver results to email inbox or via RSS feed;
• Support of Google’s advanced operators
• Varied options.

Speaking of options:

• You can set filter results by media type (News, Blogs, Realtime, Video)
• You can set the updates to come daily, weekly or instantly;
• You can set to receive only “best” results or all results;

Limitation:

• Unlike what can be expected from a search giant like Google, the filtering and ranking algorithm of the tool often seems to be buggy: alerts tend to miss some important mentions, sometimes the will include a scraper instead of the original, etc.

For what it’s worth, despite some weirdness, Google Alerts is the best free tool to track web mentions of any phrase.

Tracking Social Media Mentions: SocialMention

SocialMention Alerts is another great free tool you should check out. Social mention claims to monitor 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.- so it does provide great results.

On the plus side:

• Large database of social media sites;
• The variety of options.

Alert options include:

• Filter alerts by media source (blogs, micro-blogs, networks, bookmarks, comments, images, news, vide, audio, Q&A, all sources);
• Filter alerts by language.

Limitations:

• Little or no context for web mentions: this also makes the email difficult for scanning and clicking through;
• No way to filter or group identical mentions (like Twitter RTs) which clutter the alert.

Tracking Comments: Backtype

Backtype Alerts is the tool run by one of the most popular comment indexing tool – Backtype.com.

On the plus side,

• This is a great tool to get alerted of readers’ mentions of your site (to be able to always participate in the related discussions).
• It delivers a lot of context for your keyword in your email inbox.

You have only one option: to set the alert to come daily, instantly, weekly or “never” (the latter will allow you to track results using the dashboard only).

Limitations:

• Smallest database of all three;
• Limited search options and unknown search operators.

Putting it All Together

Expanding the Possibilities

• The tools deliver email alerts including the search snippets for your main keyword (which is the context around it) – which makes it possible to find and monitor the natural neighbors of your tracked keyword. One free tool to do that is Gmail. See my post on using Gmail search for that purposes.
• With Gmail labels (or email filters in some email clients like Outlook), email alerts containing your brand mentions can be turned into tasks, archived or organized in multiple ways. Refer to this post of mine on de-cluttering your email inbox for some idea how labels and filters can be used.
• Any other tips? Please share them in the comments!

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Facebook Fan Pages are now thought of as the Brand Community or the Brand Hub.  Facebook users are accustomed to asking customer service questions and reaching out to the brand on these platforms.  If there is another fan behind the driver’s seat, how can the brand be sure they are being represented well?  Because these fans are not trained brand employees, the brand may not not be represented properly.  Why do some brands still allow this fraud to happen when there is a vast amount of knowledge about Facebook all over the internet?

There are many potential Brand Identity Disasters that can occur from misrepresentation on Facebook.  For example, 7Eleven is a very popular franchise, with their 24-7 Slurpees and delicious coffee drinks.  The Official 7Eleven Facebook page is really well done — it has over 185K fans that actively engage with the brand.  However, the brand name is commonly misspelled.  What about when the average consumer searches for “711″ on Facebook?

Here is what they will find:

Problems:

• Over 35 thousand fans have joined a fan page that never updates content and displays a poor image of the brand
• The fan page insults competitor brands with harsh language
• People who misspell the brand name have no option to find the official page

Sometimes the brands who are not participating within social media are subject to letting their fans take over completely.  For example; CVS is currently not participating in Facebook.  The CVS fan page is completely taken over by fans in a negative way.

Problems:

• Over 6 thousand people became fans of an imposter brand page
• The fan page has no brand information
• The fan page lacks any fan engagement on the Wall
• The photos that are uploaded by fans hurt the brand tremendously

Fan photos include an image of a letter from a CVS employee who is upset with the store and how it operates, images of a man who scams people outside of a CVS parking lot, and a faulty flu shot done at a CVS pharmacy.  These images have the potential to turn many customers away from CVS.  When choosing not to participate in social media, brands like CVS should look at competitors like Walgreens, who are extremely active and powerful on Facebook.

Facebook fan pages have the ability to serve as a Community hub where consumers can come and show their appreciation to other fans.  But fans can also actively show their complaints and aggravations with the brand.  Facebook users have become familiar with this practice.

When your customer comes to your Facebook fan page, asking questions about products, complaining, and looking for more information, who do you want behind the driver’s seat?  There are many resources out there to learn about implementing great Facebook fan pages.

Here are some tips on how to better control your brand on Facebook:

1. Search: Look for your brand terms and misspellings of your brand name on Facebook.  Make a list of how many impostor fan pages are out there and tally up the total number of fans that are engaging on these pages.  This is your audience!

2. Prepare: Are you ready to take over these fan pages?  Do you have the right content?  You will need photos, oodles of brand information, witty status updates, and a strategy to implement in order to engage and stimulate the fan base.

3. Create: You will need to create an official Facebook fan page and build it as if it is your website.  You should build tools and “Tabs” that are brand specific.  For example, if you are a movie theater, you’d want a unique way to show movie times.

4. Control: Taking control of the impostor pan pages is easy.  People at digital agencies have frequently dealt with this issue and work hand in hand with Facebook to take control.  It is extremely important to make sure that fans of the brand are getting the correct information.

The bio’s already not off to a great start by calling Enterprise customers “retarded.” While the account has less than 200 followers, people can still come across the profile via search or links and mistakenly assume that it’s the brand’s main account. The tweets make for a bit of a reputation management headache:

Complaining about your job and using profanity from a branded Twitter account doesn’t really ooze professionalism. Thankfully, the account doesn’t seem very active — its last update was from last April, so Enterprise should contact Twitter with a trademark claim to gain control of the account and turn it into a more appropriate company profile.

The main problem here is that Enterprise didn’t register its brand name in the first place. If I were them, I’d have snatched up @enterpriserent and variations of the brand name so nobody else could use them. They don’t even have to use the accounts, although they should probably have some sort of presence on Twitter, seeing as how they could reach a wide audience as well as deal with any reputation management/customer service issues like the one below:

Companies really need to be proactive and make sure that they’re in control of their brand whenever possible, and right now a big part of that is registering their brand names on major social media sites (KnowEm is a great service for helping out with that).

Another problem is that Enterprise wasn’t aware of what its employee was saying about them online. A few months ago I blogged about why companies shouldn’t block social media in the workplace, but I added this part:

Obviously, there are some downsides to letting employees have full reign of social media usage at work. I’ve seen people update their Facebook status complaining about a work task or saying negative things about customers/clients. This sort of behavior is clearly unprofessional and doesn’t reflect well on either the employee or the business. However, I think that a little bit of training and awareness can stifle these sorts of incidents. Clearly state your social media usage policy to new employees and say that while you encourage responsible and occasional usage of social media and networking, be courteous, professional and mindful of the company who’s employing them.

A good company policy upon hiring new employees is to provide a handbook that covers social media guidelines. At the very least, include a “public mentions” policy in their contract — after all, it’s reasonable to expect an employee of your company to refrain from publicly complaining about his employer or customers or painting them in a negative light. From there, keep tabs on your employees. I’m not saying you should spy on them; just be aware of their Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. accounts and see if they have a personal blog. Know what’s reasonable (e.g., “Frustrating day at work today”) and what’s over the line (“I hate my stupid boss so much! Dealt with stupid customers all day because he wasn’t around to help! XYZ Company is the absolute WORST!”), and put out any fires as soon as possible (have a chat with your employee and outline your company policy, issue a warning, escalate the repercussions from there).

What about if you don’t know that your employee registered an anonymous blog or Twitter account? Well, in that case brand mentions and monitoring play a key role. Keep track of brand mentions to see what people are saying about you. If you notice a Twitter account pop up that’s authored by an employee of your company, you can try and file a trademark claim or at least combat any negative content that comes from the account with public statements from your official account. Even if there’s not much you can do, you can at least be aware of the account so you can intercept people who may confuse it for the real deal.

In any case, Enterprise has a lot of opportunities here, and I hope they do something to address the account and are more aware moving forward. Other companies should take notice and realize that as social media grows more and more powerful, they’re going to have to expand their branding as well as adapt how they’re monitoring their brand and their employees.

Okay, maybe that last part wasn’t such a good idea. Someone took a screenshot of the tweets that filtered in, and they weren’t all sunshiney praises about the great new recipe:

Victor’s written before about porn account avatars showing up in our site’s Twitter stream. It’s the main problem with displaying your mentions in a widget on your site — you can’t control what comes in. The Domino’s Twitter stream showcases this beautifully — some tweets just may be negative. While some of the tweets are positive, others aren’t painting the new pizza recipe in the most favorable light. But hey, that’s the trade-off of social media, right? Once you open up the lines of communication and create a two-way dialog, you lose a bit of control over what’s being said about your brand.

How did Domino’s handle the feedback? Well, see for yourself:

Hmmm, there seems to be a suspiciously high amount of positive comments about the #newpizza. What happened to the negative remarks? Did the feedback turn good on its own? Are people just coming around on the new recipe?

Not really. It seems as if Domino’s is starting to hand-pick the good tweets and weed out the bad ones. Check out search results for the hashtag #newpizza:

If you compare the real-time search results to the Twitter stream displayed on Domino’s micro-site, you’ll notice that a couple tweets are missing. The first one is from a woman who said that her friends started “projectile vomiting” upon trying the new pizza, while the second one calls Domino’s out for their “twitter feed failure” — presumably this user has also noticed the missing negative tweets.

This isn’t the best way to handle negative feedback, especially on the Internet. You can’t just delete a comment, alter a post or remove some tweets and think they’re gone for good and that nobody will notice (especially when, in Domino’s case, you can easily compare their stream to Twitter’s search tool). Encouraging real feedback from your users and then editing out the feedback you don’t like is a pretty strong indication that you’re not taking the feedback seriously.* You can’t run your company on the basis that everyone must love and agree with your product 100% of the time — that’s a recipe for failure (even if the sauce is boss).

In Domino’s case, they tried to have their garlic crusty pizza and eat it too. If you decide to get into social media and market your business and products on social networks, you have to acknowledge and accept the fact that you won’t be able to control what people say about you. If you can’t take the heat, you need to step away from the wood-fired pizza brick oven, so to speak. If Domino’s didn’t want to showcase negative comments about their new recipe, they shouldn’t have displayed the Twitter stream in the first place. You can’t just dive into the next big marketing trend and refuse to play by the trend’s rules. That’s not how social media works, and Domino’s showcased this pretty handily.

Postscript: Upon reading Tamar’s comment below, I agree that it was presumptuous of me to think that Domino’s isn’t taking the negative remarks seriously or considering them as feedback just because they’re filtering them out — that’s a mistake on my part. I also didn’t consider the fact that some content may be removed if it’s profane or offensive to users. However, there are still some tweets which don’t fall into either category that are being removed, and I think that’s a tactic they should reconsider.

Yikes. 107.7 isn’t extremist talk radio, it’s an alternative rock station. Regardless of the opinions of the person handling the Twitter account, he or she shouldn’t mix this sort of content into the corporate presence. When you think of 107.7, they probably don’t want you to associate them with politics or racism; rather, I’m guessing they’d prefer that you envision alternative rock, good music, fun DJs, etc.

Kristy mentioned in her post that the station blamed the tweet on a hack, which she doesn’t buy and I don’t either. Regardless of the excuse, however, there’s definitely a lesson to be learned from this situation. When managing your brand’s presence online, you need to separate your personal opinion from your company’s and instead adopt a corporate view/mentality. I don’t tweet about who I voted for from the 10e20 Twitter account because 10e20 isn’t about me and my political preferences, it’s about Internet marketing and business. Maybe the dude running the Nickelodeon Twitter account watched a really good porno the night before; that doesn’t mean he should tweet “Watched some epic pr0n last night!!1″ from the NickelodeonTV account. Just because Bob the Intern (or Jennifer the DJ, or whoever operates the account) has an opinion on racial profiling doesn’t mean he or she should share it from the 107.7 Twitter account s/he’s in charge of running — that sort of content should be reserved for one’s personal account, or, better yet, in-person interaction with family and friends (remember that? I vaguely do…).

It can be hard to make a corporate brand “personable” without being too opinionated, but that’s exactly what most brands need to do. Provide humanizing commentary (“We are really excited for the new year!”) and interact with your followers and fans, but avoid extreme opinions on sensitive subjects. That’s not to say a fashion brand can’t say that they think gaucho pants are horribly dated and that pink is this spring’s hot color. Opinions are great and encourage discussion and interaction when they’re relevant, appropriate and pertain to your industry, but when you’re managing your brand’s online reputation you need to know what not to say and when to stay out of a conversation. It’s better to stay silent and have no opinion than to butt in with a viewpoint that your customers may find surprising or offensive.

Obviously, there are exceptions to this rule. If your brand is successful because it’s controversial, having an extreme opinion is probably more favorable than being quiet. However, for most brands it’s wiser to pick vanilla at the Controversial Flavors store, as it’ll save them from a painful reputation management headache in the future.

However, it is a concept few understand in full, and even fewer employ correctly.

It is a marketing concept that has its roots in both social media and search, and it is as much about salvaging brands as it is about creating brands.

When thinking about how I would discuss the topic in full, without leaving anything out, and keeping a bit of entertainment in the mix, I had to think of a metaphor that fit ORM (online reputation management).

I am a big guy.

I am a lover of candy.

So here are my M&Ms of Online Reputation Management.

Manage
Monitor
Measure
Mediate

Manage

Too many people think ORM is about defending reputation issues once they arise.

No.

ORM is about creating a management system that keeps reputation issues from ever arising.

The Customer is King

Before you even turn on your computer to setup and manage your online reputation you need to manage your customer service.

• Listen to your customers’ issues with your product or service and redesign based on those thoughts
• Add additional customer service outlets
• Telephone customer service
• Live site chat
• Q&A
• Customer forums
• Hire the right people to perform your customer service. Remember that if the phone call is going to upset your customer more it isn’t worth having a customer service phone line.
• Be proactive with your customer service. Send thank you notes, prefered customer discounts, or coupon codes. Let your customers know how much you value them.
• Never say no to a customer. Do whatever you can to say yes, realizing once you utter that “no” you likely lose that customer forever.

SERP Domination

Once your customer service system is fully established it is time to open up your laptop and put on your SEO hat.

The #1 reputation issue facing companies in terms of search, are complaint sites such as the controversial RipOffReport.com.

Sites such as RipOffReport.com rank well in the engines, and often times for the names of brands and companies. This can create an ORM headache as millions of Internet users utilize search engines as their gateway to purchasing decisions.

The best way to combat these sites is to create a branded SERP (searc engine results page) that will keep the complaint sites of the first page.

You can create a branded SERP by utilizing UGC and Social Media sites to create content rich pages based on your brand. Twitter.com, FriendFeed, Youtube, and Flickr.com all provide great platforms for creating pages with brand equity.

The first step in this step in this strategy is both an offensive and defensive one, snag up all of your company’s names (CEOs names, high visibility employee’s names) in the social networks.

Below find a SlideShare presentation with some of my tips on this strategy.

Creating a Network of Publishers

After you have solidified SERP dominance it is time to look towards managing your reputation in the publishing and social media communities.

Every niche on the Internet has hundreds of blogs dedicated to it.

All of those blogs have publishers looking for content.

Befriend the publishers in your niche and feed them content. This could become a symbotic relationship if you ever need to put out a fire in your market.

However, even if you fair well on the web, those publishers can help get your message out when you have new product or service launches.

Monitor

Even if you have a great plan in place to manage your online reputation hiccups can happen.

You cannot please all of the people all of the time.

It is important that once you have your ORM management in play you create a quality monitoring plan.

The Free

• Google Alerts
• Search.Twitter.com
• Technorati.com
• Snydey Web
• Backtype.com
• Boardtracker.com
• FriendFeed.com/search
• Blogpulse
• Yahoo Pipes
• Naymz.com
• Rapleaf.com
• RepVine
• TrustPl.us
• BoardReader.com
• ForumFind.com
• Big-Boards.com
• BoardTracker.com
• Keotag.com
• Comwat.com
• onXiam.com
• OtherEgo.com
• ProfileBuilder.com
• ProfileMat.com
• SimplifID.com
• SocialURL.com
• Venyo.org
• Zoolit.com
• Tweet Scan

The Inexpensive

• Trackur.com
• BrandsEye.com
• Reputatation Defender

The Expensive (Robust)

• Buzz Numbers

Measure

You should approach your online monitoring system like any analytics system, you should put more energy into deciphering and utilizing the data than simply gathering the data.

An expensive shiny tool is great, and everyone loves the big name toy, but if you aren’t doing anything with your ORM system, then the guy using Google Alerts and spending time figuring out what that information means in terms of their reputation and product/service development is beating you.

Take the time to look at the data you are retrieving from your tools and make important decisions that can effect your future online reputation.

Utterances

One of the main functions of the your online reputation strategy needs to be a measurement of negative and positive utterances of your key terms online.

There is a wealth of information in these simple data sets.

How are products being accepted by consumers?

How is your customer service being viewed?

All of these questions can be answered by viewing how the Internet community is discussing you in terms of approval and disapproval.

Aproach it Like Its 1999

Before we became such a “give to me now” industry, we used to do things called Focus Groups.

These groups were comprised of differing types of prospective customers, whom marketers could bounce ideas off of to help better products and marketing approaches.

Fast forward to the days of the Google Machine.

You can now use the data extracted from your monitoring system as a Focus Group of the new millenium.

Dig through the data.

Look at the language your customers are using to describe your product. Isn’t that the language you are going to use when selling your product?

Take negative sentiment and use it to reshape products and services. This could increase sales and have an effect on your profits and losses. Combining old school marketing mentality with new school tools isn’t outdated thinking its just smart.

Mediate

This is probably the most important section of the M & Ms.

Don’t approach your online reputation management form the perspective of a company drone, approach it as a mediator.

In order to get customers to buy into your effort to better your online reputation, you need become transparent, and look out for the best interest of your customer as much as your company.

This is a sound business ethics concept regardless.

However, in the world of the social web it becomes increasingly important.

Stone walling for a company, and keeping a corporate face, and add gas to a consumer flame ware. By taking down that wall, admiting wrong doing, and acting as a mediator between “the brand” and “the customer” you can solve most issues with ease. You may even be able to turn negative sentiment into positive sentiment with your willingness to put the customer first.

The companies that are not willing to make these strategic changes are the same companies that have ongoing online reputation issues.

Learn from their mistakes, and mediate.

And there you have them…

My M&Ms of online reputation management.
Manage
Monitor
Measure
Mediate

If you setup a comprehensive plan focusing on each of these factors within your company, you will be ready for online reputation issues both big and small.

You will also be prepared to utilize the wealth of information available on the web to restructure your product, service, or even business to meet the difficulties that face all companies as they grow and age.

Online reputation management isn’t just about saving revenue, its about generating it as well.