Social media monitoring is a prerequisite for online reputation management.

Managing an organization’s online reputation can be like herding unruly cats. The idea is to guide social media conversation about your organization or brand to a more positive light, intervene to limit negative comments and magnify the positive ones.

The most effective online reputation management programs use the following techniques and tactics to keep the online cats from soiling their organization’s good name.

Monitor mentions of your company. Companies proactively seeking mentions of their brand have the advantage in managing their reputation. Use a media monitoring service to track news sources and the wide range of social media, including message boards and forums for mentions of your organization.

Taking a head-in-the sand approach and failing to track mentions of your brand will not help the situation. People will talk about your organization whether or not you want them to, whether or not you’re actively participating in social media, and whether or not you’re monitoring mentions of your brand. You can never predict when a disgruntled customer or a deceitful competitor may spread negative information about your organization — or where, though critics usually favor the larger social media networks such as Facebook.

Although some businesses use free monitoring tools like Google Alerts, free monitoring tools are insufficient for all but the smallest enterprises. When you add keywords to your media monitoring program, include nicknames, common misspellings, and abbreviations of your brand using Boolean search techniques to improve search results eliminate extraneous results. For reputation management, it’s also wise to conduct a separate search of your organization or brand name in connection with negative words such as “suck.”

Analyze the sentiment. Automated sentiment analysis that categorizes social media posts as positive, neutral or negative is well-suited for wading through the vast amount of data on social media, although the software is not always extremely accurate. For increased accuracy, larger companies can combine automated sentiment analysis with reviews by trained human analysts. For smaller organizations with a limited amount of media exposure, human review alone is usually the more accurate and cost-effective approach.

Respond — quickly. Silence is not a viable option. If you don’t respond, your company may be perceived as aloof and uncaring. A lack of response may be seen as implicit agreement with the accusation. The gulf between saving and losing online reputation s can sometimes be measured in hours. Track mentions as frequently as possible and respond immediately. By responding quickly, customer service can diffuse the complaint before the problem continues to fester and resolve the issue offline.

Create automatic alerts. Crises can happen at any time, overnight or on weekends. Alerts can be created to automatically notify crisis managers or other executives when mentions spike or sentiment unexpectedly turns negative.

Find the influencers. Grade social media users by their Impact Score, a score that measures their social media influence. Someone with thousands of Facebook fans naturally holds more sway than some with a dozen followers on Twitter. Reach out to individuals and organizations with large followings.

Be positive. Continue to publish positive posts on your website and social media channels to drown out any negative views.

Keep deals private. If you offer restitution to an unsatisfied customer, keep the arrangement private or others may complain in order to obtain free goods or compensation.

Bottom Line: Online reputations can crumble quickly due to criticisms spreading on social media. It’s imperative for organizations to monitor mentions of their name and respond swiftly to counter attacks, resolve complaints and make amends when needed.

Glean.info grants permission to republish this article provided that the republished version contains a link to the original article on the Glean.info Blog.

William Comcowich

William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.