One of the  most important step that is essential for any social media program is to monitor  online reputation – brand or your’s. Before we go into HOW to monitor online reputation, I will try to address the WHY first.

Why to monitor online reputation? (your or brand’s)

We all learn by listening. In the Social Media context it becomes more important as the web is huge, we cannot be present in all conversations and we cannot stop conversations from happening in our absence. At the same time it is very important that we are aware of every discussion related to us on the web. Atleast we should be aware of all the discussion trends if not all the discussions itself.

Online Reputation Recovery by franko_44, on Flickr

These conversations can be good, bad or neutral to our reputation but they all have something for us to learn from. Listening and understanding these conversations help us to create market intelligence, identify opportunities and manage issues like customer dissatisfaction.

“Market intelligence dashboards have value across the company and can be a useful way to demonstrate the effectiveness of social media as a barometer of customer opinion, as well as an early warning of changes in the market or competitive activity. We recommend you always follow your competitors and your largest customers on Twitter. In both cases, you want to keep up with what’s on their minds.”

- Social Marketing to the Business Customer: Listen to Your B2B Market, Generate Major Account Leads, and Build Client Relationships by Paul Gillin (Author), Eric Schwartzman (Author)

How to monitor online reputation? (your or brand’s)

I don’t believe in re-inventing the wheel hence here is what I found was the best resource to describe How to monitor online reputation. I found a very interesting infographic on how to monitor your personal or your brand’s reputation online by Trackur.

Before you go further here are few key points to keep in mind:

1. I am not recommending Trackur as I have never used it, I am only using the infographic they created and which I believe it is the best representation of the process to monitor online reputation I have ever came across.
2. There are many tools available in the market whose services range from $100 to more than $10,000 a month, but in my opinion they all have one thing in common that none of them is perfect.
3. I recommend that you may start with only manual monitoring using Social Media Monitoring Dashboard with Google Reader using Google Alerts and Social Mentions like Twitter Search. Once your goals and needs are well captured at that time you may plan to go and try some solutions and hopefully you may find one that address most of your needs (a good list for reference).
4. You may like to check a very good info graphic with result of survey from the ones actually using these monitoring tools.

In this infographic on how to Monitor online reputation, the process has been broken into the following 7 steps:

1. Identify your reputations
2. Quantify your audience
3. Understand your goals
4. Specify your needs
5. How will you monitor?
6. Who will monitor the conversations?
7. How will you React?

online reputation monitoring Infographic

Read more about this infographic on how to monitor online reputation: http://www.trackur.com/ultimate-guide-monitoring-online-reputation-infographic