7 Tools to Help You Monitor Your Brand’s Reputation

With information about brands and individuals available at our fingertips, it’s more important now than ever before to manage your online reputation. But being aware of what others think about you is not only something individuals need to be concerned about – it’s also important for companies who want to gain a better understanding of their position in the market. Managing your brand’s reputation involves both social media monitoring as well as measurement. Maria Ogneva clarifies the difference between the two terms.

• Monitoring (or ‘listening’) is discovering conversations around your brand, and should be undertaken in an effort to learn, and to engage better with others; monitoring typically involves keyword tracking.
• Measurement seeks to uncover how your online presence has performed over time, how it compares to your competitors, and helps identify trends that you can take advantage of.

Both are important in order to understand how your brand is perceived, and to increase engagement. There’s a wide variety of tools that allow you to do exactly this, but with so many options, how do you choose the one that’s right for you or your business? I’ve reviewed 8 different services, and described the features and pricing of each below.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts will notify you via email or RSS feed whenever new results are found on Google for the search terms you specify. For a business, the search terms can be as simple as your brand’s name. This allows you to monitor how people are talking about your brand across multiple sources including web pages, newspaper articles, and blogs.

Google Alerts has many customization options. Emails can be sent you once a week, once a day, or if you want the most up-to-date information they can be sent “as-it-happens.” While there is an option to receive “All Results,” Google Alerts can also filter results so that you receive only the most relevant and highest quality. Another option is to filter by source, such as choosing to only receive results from Google Blogs instead of the news or web. You can have up to 1,000 alerts at a time, and can choose to receive alerts in different languages.

Price: Free!

Sprout Social

Sprout Social allows you to manage all of your business’s social media activity in one place, as well as monitor conversations happening about your brand. This service offers many more features than Google Alerts, and therefore requires more time to set up and properly understand. The features Sprout offers can be broken down into the following categories.

• Engagement. Using engagement metrics you can find out your average response rate and response time to consumers. Using Sprout’s “Smart Inbox” you can keep track of conversations across channels by viewing them all in one place, with options to filter by keywords, group, account, source, or message type. Efficiently handle questions or concerns from your customers by assigning messages to other online team members.
• Publishing. Through Sprout you can post messages on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn at the same time, all from one place. Schedule posts for future delivery and create a calendar for your team to stay up-to-date on future content to be posted. Use ViralPost to learn the optional times to deliver content to your specific audience.
• Analytics. Create customized reports about select profiles, groups, or all of your accounts. Receive engagement and influence scores, and compare them to your competition. Weekly activity emails will keep you on top of your social media activity across platforms.
• Monitoring. Receive real-time updates on the conversation surrounding your brand with brand keyword results sent straight to your Smart Inbox.
• Collaboration. Sprout is made for teams. It allows you to assign tasks and share content schedules, and ensures that efforts aren’t duplicated when responding to customers.
• CRM. View your history of conversations with individuals and create customer profiles that are viewable for all team members. Sprout also comes with search and prospecting tools allowing you to find your target audience and engage with them. Sprout can also be integrated with your existing technology.
• HelpDesk. Create HelpDesk support tickets straight from social media messages across platforms. You can also track and manage these issues without leaving your Sprout dashboard. Helpdesk integration is currently only available if you use Zendesk or UserVoice.
• Mobile. Through your smartphone you can manage your feeds, publish messages, collaborate with team members, and access your Smart Inbox.

Price: You can choose from the following 3 paid packages:

•  The “Standard” plan is recommended for small teams and comes with many of the standard features listed above. It allows you to manage up to 10 profiles and is $39 per user each month.
• If you’re looking for more features and want to manage up to 20 profiles, than you need the “Deluxe” plan. It costs $59 per user each month. Additional features include Helpdesk integration, a deluxe reporting package, complimentary training and support, along with Google Analytics integration.
• The “Premium” package comes with the most features, allows you to manage up to 50 profiles, and costs $99 per user each month. On top of Deluxe features, you will also have ViralPost send time optimization, the premium reporting package, a custom branded interface and Social Care suite.

Mention

Mention can be used by businesses to monitor their brand, industry, and / or company online. Using Mention you can create alerts that notify you in real-time when your keywords are used on the web and social media sites, including news sites, forums, blogs and web pages. Notifications are delivered through email or push notifications, and Mention learns from your usage to remove noise from homonyms and spam. While similar to the monitoring service provided by Google Alerts, Mention provides even more services. You can engage with your consumers by reacting to mentions through Twitter and Facebook. Flagged mentions let you know which ones are most important, based on criteria such as influence of the source and the most recent interactions you’ve had with them. You can also export data or generate reports using Mention to better understand how your business is engaging with consumers.

Mention can be used by an individual or a team. The “Team Plan” allows you to share alerts with other users and assign tasks.

Price: Mention offers 3 levels of plans:

• The “Free Plan” is free to use, providing you with 3 alerts, 500 mentions / month, and a 1 month history.
• The “Pro Plan” comes with a 1 month free trial, and costs $19.99 per month after that. With this plan you get unlimited alerts, 50,000 mentions / month, unlimited history, access to your statistics, and data export tools.
• The “Team Plan” price depends on the number of users. It’s $99.95 a month with 5 users, $199.90 per month with 10 users, $299.85 per month with 15 users, and $399.80 per month with 20 users (the maximum). This plan has all the same features as the “Pro Plan,” while additionally allowing you to activate multiple users.

Social Mention

Social Mention can be used to track and measure what consumers are saying online about the keywords you care about, such as your brand, your company, or your competitors. Social Mention will send you daily email alerts with results for your specified keywords, searching through content on over 100 social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Digg, and even Google. However, you can customize your results to selected social media sources, or specific types of content (such as blogs, videos, images, and so on). This tool is very similar to Google Alerts, but takes results from specifically social content.

The services available through Social Mention are social media search and analysis for a single point in time, daily social media alerts, as well as Social Mention API which provides a “single stream of real-time search data” from multiple social media sources. It can be used by programmers to integrate social media data into other applications.

Price: Social Mention is free to use, and the API is available for free for non-commercial use.

Viralheat

Viralheat is a suite of social media marketing and monitoring tools. You can monitor conversations about your brand, and receive alerts when Viralheat detects “key updates.” You can also track your Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube presence, as well as discover which blogs and websites are shaping the conversation about business or brand. Viralheat helps to identify online advocates of your brand, and identify leads.

Viralheat also lets you manage multiple Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn accounts, as well as publish content. You can also use analysis tools to determine the ROI of your social media efforts, understand consumer sentiment towards yours brand, and generate reports.

Price: While a “Personal” account is free, businesses must select from two paid packages.

•  The “Pro” account is $9.99 / month and provides users with complete social media management and advanced publishing and analytics abilities.
• The “Premier” account is $99.99 / month and provides users with a unified social marketing suite, with marketing, management, publishing, and analytics capabilities

Trackur

Trackur allows you to monitor the online reputation of your brand, measure social media trends, and analyze social media mentions for an individual or company. They differentiate themselves from other social media monitoring tools by guaranteeing that your account “will be up and running in less than 60-seconds.” Tracker Insights quickly allows you to see what is being said about your brand, and their Influence and Sentiment analysis allows you to go even deeper into who is talking about your business. Trackur monitors conversations across “hundreds of millions” of sources such as news, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and forums. The “Premium” and “Ultimate” plans also come with a unique offering called CrisisShield, which promises that if your brand’s reputation “comes under attack,” their experts will work with you to help repair your image.

Price: The following plans are available for Trackur:

• “Trackur Free” is limited to just one active search and lacks some of the features of the paid plans, but is a great introduction to how Trackur works for individuals or companies who want to test out the service
• The “Basic” plan is $27 / month and comes with 5 saved searches, and like the other paid packages includes full media monitoring along with  influence and sentiment analysis
• The “Plus” plan is $97 / month and comes with 50 saved searches
• The “Premium” plan is $197 / month and comes with 250 saved searched, CrisisChield Insurance, as well as the ability to add customer feeds and group by profiles
• The “Ultimate” plan is $447 / month and comes with everything included in the “Premium” plan as well as unlimited client logins, full white labeling, and enhanced support

SalesForce Marketing Cloud (Formerly Radian 6)

Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers social listening tools allowing you to monitor the conversation about your brand from over 400 million sources including historical archives going back to 2008. You can understand consumers better by layering in sentiment and enhanced geographic and demographic information. Using Marketing Cloud you can schedule and share content across multiple social media accounts, as well as measure the impact of your social media marketing using measurement and analytics tools. You can also track the performance of your various accounts, create automatic weekly email reports, or export your data to CSV. Their “Social Ads” services set them apart from other tools, by offering live campaign monitoring campaign performance and set controls on how ad spend is allocated over the course of a campaign.

Marketing Cloud allows you to her what your consumers are saying in 19 different languages, and is also available as mobile app.

Price: Marketing Cloud packages start at $5,000 / month and are available in “Basic,” “Professional,” “Corporate,” and “Enterprise” packages. However, Salesforce can also work with your business to create a more customized solution.

So Which of These Tools is Best for Your Business?

If you’re a small company with little experience in social media monitoring, Mention’s free plan is an excellent place to start. However, Viralheat’s Pro account, requires only a minimal investment ($9.99/ month) and allows you to not only monitor the conversation around your brand, but also take advantage of having a social media dashboard where you can publish content to multiple accounts. The more accounts a small business uses, the easier is to lose track of what is being said where. Discovering the sentiment surrounding your brand and listening in on consumer’s conversations is important, but don’t forget that you have the power to influence these conversations by taking part yourself. The ability to track your online efforts and analyze the success of each of your posts (whether it’s through Twitter, Facebook, a website, blog, or video) will allow you to refine and enhance your social media strategy.

While Viralheat’s “Pro” package is my recommendation for a smaller business or one that has a very limited budget, their “Premier” version priced at $99.99 makes it a much more significant investment. If your company is able to acquire a service in this price range, Sprout Social’s “Premium” package (similarly priced at $99) is a much more complete solution.  What sets them apart from Viralheat is their CRM, collaboration, and HelpDesk options. These tools are especially important to businesses that want to integrate customer service and social media, or to business that have multiple social media managers. The complementary training and support they offer can also be quite valuable to cutting down the time it takes employees to learn how to effectively use their newly acquired tools.

This being said, the majority of the services outlined above offer short-term free trials of their products that can help businesses to make the decision that’s best for them. Part of this decision will be based on the size of the company, the number of brands they need to monitor, and the number of marketers who need access to the account. In addition, preferences in relation to layout and design of each service may also significantly sway a business towards one service over the other.

Whichever option is chosen, it’s important to ensure that it’s an informed decision since your employees will be investing their time in learning how to use the service. Although many of these services claim to take little time to set up, the initial creation of keyword searches and linking of social media accounts is merely a drop in the bucket compared to how much time social media managers will be spending using these tools every day. The idea is certainly not to ‘set it and forget it,’ but instead the whole purpose of brand monitoring is to see what is being said about your brand right now, and respond to it quickly. There’s no sense is paying for a package with numerous features unless you want your employees to take full advantage of them, which of course, requires more of their time. However, with the measurement and analytics tools provided by many of the services, the trade-off is that you will now have a greater understanding of the effect of your digital strategy, leading to even better results in the future.

Content Marketing: Let Customers Come to You

I’ve been learning a lot more about inbound marketing lately, and it’s really captured my interest. We’re all familiar with traditional marketing strategies that push messages out to consumers, often interrupting them in the middle of something else (such as watching TV or reading a magazine), and therefore only gaining their attention for a short time. If outbound marketing is a push, than inbound can be thought of as a pull. Alex Rascanu highlights this difference as he describes how inbound marketing “earns the attention of customers rather than buying it, makes the company/ product/ idea easy to be found, and draws customers to the website by producing relevant and interesting content.”

Inbound marketing is used to attract visitors to your site, where they can be converted into leads, customers, and eventually brand advocates. The key to attracting these consumers in the first place is content marketing. This means providing consumers with free content in exchange for their time and attention. This content can be blog posts, podcasts, videos, webinars, whitepapers, eBooks, infographics or guides. No matter which option(s) you choose, promoting your brand should always appear secondary to providing real value for consumers either through entertainment or education. For instance, a blog filled with useful tips and advice can make your business stand out as a resource within your industry, and is far more valuable to consumers than a series of posts plugging your products. The Home Depot has recently created a series of how-to gardening videos for spring, and while they feature products available through the retailer, the focus is really on helping viewers make the most of their outdoor space.

While consumers continue to find new ways to tune out traditional marketing, producing great content will make them want to listen to what you have to say. Identifying your target audience and learning their wants and needs are crucial to determining what type of content you will create. Targeting increases the likeness that the people consuming your content will be interested in your product or service. The KISSmetrics guides that I’ve consulted for this post are great examples of content that speaks to a specific target audience of marketers, and has drawn me back their site again and again. Not everyone who accesses your content will become a customer, but every time someone visits your blog, watches a video, or downloads a whitepaper it’s another chance for them to deepen their relationship with your brand and potentially become a buyer.

A great way to expand the reach of your content is through guest blogging. Writing content for another blog helps you to position yourself – and your company – as an authority within your industry. It can also gain exposure and build backlinks for your website (I discussed the importance of link building for SEO in a previous post). Just like the content you produce for your own blog, the guest post should be useful and relevant to the audience, not purely self-promotion. However, your author bio should  mention your business and provide links to other pages, such as your website or blog. You can also invite other people to be guests on your own company blog to ensure a steady stream of fresh content.

So what benefits can you expect to get out of a content marketing strategy?

• Increase the conversations happening about your brand online. People are more inclined to share content rather than websites, and while someone might share a link to your site once, a single customer can share multiple links to different pieces of your content over time.
• Consumers won’t purchase a product if they don’t understand its value, or the need it will fulfill. Through your content you can educate consumers about the benefit of your product or show them how to use it, helping to move them forward through the buying process.
• Search engine optimization: engines will index your new blog content, and the more posts you have the more pages there are to potentially reach a consumer through search. SEO can help your business gain more search engine traffic.
• You can also increase the number of visitors to your website as YouTube, podcasts, and blogs can all become potential traffic sources.
• Advertisements come and go, but your content can stay on your website as long as you want it to. Organizing and archiving your content into categories such as “Most Popular” or “How-To” will make it easy for consumers to look through older posts and find what they need. Your content will become an asset that can provide value to customers over a long period of time.

As trust in traditional advertising continues to fall and brands look for new ways to reach and engage consumers, content marketing is certainly worth some consideration.

Sources:

Social Media Marketing with Reddit and Tumblr

If you’re a marketer, chances are you’ve read an article on how Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, or Twitter can be used to reach consumers with advertising messages and build communities of loyal followers. But if you’re interested in getting your brand more involved in social media, first get to know some of the alternative options out there that could be a better fit for your business.

Reddit

Reddit is an online community where users share news, photos, interesting and obscure pieces of information, along with their own personal stories and opinions. Redittors can post links in various “sub-reddits” (categories such as /r/pics or /r/music), and if their post receives enough up-votes from other users it may make it onto the “front page” (the constantly updating list of hottest posts, found on Reddit’s homepage). The default ranking for all sub-reddits is by popularity, so posts with more up-votes and comments have a greater chance of being seen. Be warned that users can also down-vote posts into obscurity if they find them uninteresting, or identify them as obvious marketing ploys.

This social media platform isn’t about how many friends you have – it’s about posting content that other users find unique, interesting, funny, and relevant to their interests. Reddit won’t be the best match for every brand, and risks include posts being flagged as spam, getting abused in the comments, or down-voted to never be heard from again. Don’t let this scare you off! There are certain topics that excel on Reddit, such as gaming, technology, science, music, educational stories, food, fitness, and more. It’s also a great opportunity to reach a large audience; Reddit had 43 million monthly active users in 2012, and got more than 3 billion page views in August of that year.

Reddit users are highly engaged on the site, and can spend hours at a time clicking through links and images. The reward of being able to determine what it is your Reddit audience wants and then delivering it to them will be a huge surge in traffic.

As with any marketing tactic, the most important thing is to consider who your target market is and whether or not they’re likely to be on the site (user demographics can be found here). Sub-reddits allow you to target niche audiences, so it’s important to post in ones that are relevant to your business, product or industry. Picking a sub-reddit with higher traffic will help your post to be seen, so choose ones that are consistently being updated with new content. Customize how your front page looks by subscribing to relevant sub-reddits, and then monitor what types of content is most popular within your target area.

To have the best experience, invest time on the site finding out what users are interested in, posting great content such as photos, videos, as well as up-voting and commenting on other users’ posts. There are general sub-reddits that have a high traffic volume and can span many different topics, such as /r/todayilearned (interesting facts or tidbits of info), /r/askreddit (ask Reddit users for their ideas, opinions, or stories), or /r/askmeanything (a single user is ‘interviewed’ by replying to comments on a specific AMA post). Numerous high profile business leaders and celebrities have done AMAs to spread awareness for causes or projects they’re involved in. The example of Woody Harrelson’s disastrous AMA compared to Gerard Butler’s success – both done to promote upcoming films – shows the difference between truly engaging with users versus blatantly marketing to them.

If you’re interested in reaching Reddit’s audience, but don’t have the time to commit to maintaining an account, there’s also an option for more traditional on-page advertising that can be targeted to specific sub-reddits.

Tumblr

Although Tumblr and Reddit are both focused around sharing great content, Tumblr is much more like a traditional blog. But don’t make the mistake of dismissing Tumblr right away just because you already have a company blog. The posts that do well on this platform are short, sharable, and visual. Although publishing a longer post every few weeks can make you stand out on Tumblr and give your follows more to talk about in the comments, it’s better to save text-heavy posts for your blog.

Tumblr is not a space for you to constantly push out advertising and marketing messages – no one wants to follow a brand that fills their dashboard up with spam. It’s also not just about posting content, but also curating it by sharing other users’ posts. Just like with Reddit, the key is to determine what your audience is interested in, and then give them that type of content. You can’t be all things to all people, so keep your focus on Tumblr narrow.

Sephora is a great brand to look to as an example. Their blog is filled with highly relevant content, and they always have a visual element accompanying a text post. They reward customers for visiting their page with plenty of style tips and how-to tutorials (featuring Sephora products of course). Not only are they engaging consumers, but they can drive traffic back to their website with the message “Shop Sephora.com” at the top of the page.

Beyond the content itself, there are a number of other best practices for marketing with Tumblr. Use tags to make your posts discoverable through Tumblr’s search, and post during peak hours to increase the chance of your content being found. Make your blog accessible to non-users by allowing consumers to subscribe to you via RSS or email, and install Disqus so that anyone can post comments. You can also create categories (as Sephora has done) to keep people exploring your blog for longer. Don’t forget about SEO – optimize page titles and meta descriptions, create custom post URLS, name image files and fill out alt attribute keywords.

Before you jump on the Tumblr bandwagon, make sure this platform is right for your business by answering the following questions:

• What do you want to achieve with your Tumblr blog (e.g. increase awareness, revenues, customer education)?
• Who will be responsible for running the blog?
• Who is your audience, and what will be the focus of your blog?
• Are you able to commit to this new social media platform in the long term?

I hope this post has started you thinking outside the social media box!

Sources:

Jacob, Sherice. “The Marketer’s Guide to Reddit.” KISSmetrics.

Patel, Neil. “The Marketer’s Guide to Tumblr.” KISSmetrics.

Getting Started with SEO

According to the 2012 Digital Influence Index, Canadian consumers believe the Internet is more influential than their friends and family in helping to make purchase decisions. This same study found that when consumers head online to find information about brands and products, 93% use a search engine. Despite this growing trend, search engine optimization (the practice of improving and promoting your website in an effort to increase the number of search engine referred visitors) is still unfamiliar territory for many marketers – myself included!

Fortunately, this summer I have the opportunity to learn more about SEO and internet marketing as an intern with Powered by Search. To start things off, I’ve gone through The Beginner’s Guide to SEO, created by SEOmoz. Without a background in web design I wondered if the guide would be too technical to follow. However, since it was designed for beginners, it starts off with the absolute basics and explains potentially unfamiliar terms as you go along. This free resource is a great introduction to search engine optimization, and I’d definitely recommend giving it a read if you’re new to SEO or need a quick refresher.

Still not convinced? Below are some of my thoughts and key takeaways from the guide.

The SEO Beginner’s Guide provides you with a lot of new information all at once, but the casual tone and use of fun graphics throughout keeps it from feeling like a chore to get through. It’s filled  with links to outside resources, studies, and tools that help to round out the guide, as well as some practical, hands-on activities you can try to further your learning.

One of the things I liked the most about the guide is exemplified by this quote:

“ Search Engine Optimization isn’t just about ‘engines.’ It’s about making your site better for people too. At SEOmoz we believe these principles go hand in hand.  ”

These words are some of the first that you read, and this philosophy is repeated throughout the guide. There’s a great balance between technical and practical advice. Marketers should think of SEO as more than just getting consumers to visit your website, since the site needs to satisfy these consumers’ needs once they arrive – a high search ranking won’t stop consumers from leaving your site straight away if they can’t easily find what they want!

SEO can be used by any organization to better reach consumers who are already interested in a specific product or service, and is becoming increasingly important as search has the power to drive both online and offline purchasing. SEO influences how search engines perceive both the relevance and importance (popularity) of your website; this determines whether or not your site appears in the results for a specific search, as well as what rank it’s given. Appearing higher in the search rankings is critical not only to increasing click-through traffic, but can also make your site appear more important and trustworthy to consumers. (Just think of your own online search habits – how often do you look past the first page of results?)

Despite huge advances over the years, search engines cannot understand and interpret content on a webpage the same way that people can. That’s why a key outcome of SEO is making your site visible and understandable to engines so it can be properly indexed. The most important content on a site should be in HTML text format, since search engines spiders may ignore images, Flash files, and other non-text elements. A “crawlable link structure” is also necessary if you want search engines to be able to navigate through your site and index your various pages.

Once engines can read and access your site, they’ll analyze your keywords to determine which search terms your website is a relevant match for. SEOmoz recommends using keywords naturally and strategically, ensuring that they appear in titles, text, and meta data. By researching keyword demand within your market you can learn which words or phrases to optimize your site for. Although it may be tempting to try and improve your site’s ranking for a popular search term, consider the “long tail” of search, which makes up the majority of all searches. Long tail keywords are generally more specific, increasing your opportunity to get a high ranking due to less competition, and tend to convert better as searchers are further along in the buying process. This is illustrated with the great example of comparing someone searching for “shoes” to someone searching for “Air Jordans size 12.”

Going back to the idea that search engine optimization is about both the engines and the people using them, creating high quality and useful content is another critical part of SEO.  People search to satisfy an intent (e.g. learn, fix, buy). If you craft great content that addresses the searcher’s needs, they’ll reward you by being more engaged (staying on your site for longer) and sharing the link with others. The popularity of a site is taken as a sign of higher quality to search engines, which can help boost your ranking. Since engines analyze popularity through links, building the link profile of a website or page is an important task. Creative, quality content will naturally lead people to link to your site, but SEOmoz also suggests using manual link building by reaching out to bloggers for links or submitting your site to a directory. Be wary of self-created link acquisition, such as posting a link to your site in blog comments, as they can be considered spam. The guide has a great discussion of specific spam tactics not to endorse them, but to warn SEOs that these actions could lead to search engine penalties.

I was happy to find a chapter near the end of the guide that disproved a number of common SEO myths, such as using keyword density to improve your relevancy, and buying search engine ads to improve your organic search ranking. With so much information on SEO available online, it’s great to have a resource like The Beginner’s Guide to make sure you’re following the best advice.

Finally, no SEO guide would be complete if it didn’t discuss measurement. While SEOmoz provides links to a number of different paid and unpaid alternatives for analytics software, they ultimately recommend using Google Analytics. The guide also suggests a number of metrics to track for SEO, accompanied by the sound advice that data isn’t valuable unless you have a plan for what you want to do with it. All professional SEOs will track data about rankings, referrals, links, conversion rates and more in order to analyze their SEO strategy, and apply changes where necessary.

The last thing I’ll say about this guide is that I’m even more interested in SEO now than I was before I started reading it, and I look forward to learning a lot more this summer!

What’s Your Online Reputation Saying About You?

Before graduation, most students will receive some form of advice on searching for a job. Whether it’s from a career counsellor, a professor, or a parent, students are usually told about the importance of things such as networking, writing personalized cover letters, and dressing for success. However, with over 90% of hiring professionals using social media sites to screen prospective employees, relying solely on your application to make a good first impression is no longer enough. Students must be aware of their online reputation, and the message that it’s sending to prospective employers.

Don’t let the news that employers may be looking you up online scare you. Instead, use it as an opportunity to make yourself stand out from the crowd.

“Hiding” Online Isn’t the Answer

Effectively managing your reputation means more than maximizing all of your security settings. While you should certainly start by visiting your Facebook profile to see what type of content is visible to others, hiding behind a fake name can have consequences. Kashmir Hill warns that it is increasingly “expected that everyone is on Facebook in some capacity,” and that it can look quite suspicious if someone isn’t using the site. Similarly, a locked Twitter account where tweets aren’t visible to the public may make employers wonder what exactly you have to hide.

Take Control of Your Reputation

Make your online reputation work for you. 68% of hiring professionals surveyed in a Reppler study responded that they have hired a candidate because of what they saw about them on a social networking site. Get a sense of what others find when they search for you by Googling your own name. Managing your reputation involves not only what you’re sharing, but also what others are sharing about you, so keep on top of your personal brand by setting up a Google Alert that will email you when new search results appear for your name. Students can also sign up for the free service provided by Reppler, which monitors your social media presence across Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to identify potential issues and risks. Reppler can also show you how you are likely perceived across your social networks, such as whether you use a positive or negative tone, and the words you use most often.

Building a positive online reputation requires an investment of your time, so don’t expect it can be done overnight. Show prospective employers that you are interested in your chosen field of work by using Twitter to share relevant articles and information with your followers. Take advantage of the “Recommendations” feature on LinkedIn, which allows past employers, co-workers, and peers to write brief recommendations about your work. If you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, my advice is to sign up for one right away! The professional social network is free to join with a basic account, and is a great platform for prospective employers to check out your education and work or volunteer history. (If you want to enjoy LinkedIn’s advanced features a Job Seeker account starts at US $15.95 / month, but from my experience the basic account is more than enough for the average student.) I have also created a Flavors.me page (a service similar to About.me) that acts like digital business card: it features a brief introduction to who I am and directs people to my Twitter and LinkedIn pages.

Online = Forever

Remember that the things you post online shape how other people perceive you. What might seem like a fun or harmless post today could resurface in the future with damaging results. Reputation management shouldn’t end as soon as you find your first job. Not only will a positive online reputation help you the next time you need to search for a position, but it’s also important to ensuring you keep the job you do have. An employee is a representative of the company they work for, and any inappropriate photos or comments you post not only reflect poorly on you, but also on the company.

Sources:

“Compare Accounts.” LinkedIn.

Hill, Kashmir. “Beware, Tech Abandoners. People Without Facebook Accounts are ‘Suspicious.’” Forbes. June 8 2012.

“Learn More.” Reppler.

Swallow, Erica. “How Recruiters Use Social Networks to Screen Candidates [Infographic].” Mashable. Oct. 23 2011.

“Use Google Alerts to Keep Tabs on Your Brand, Your Competitors and Pamela Anderson.” Ethnicomm – The Blog. June 23 2008.

Soial Influence: Do Brands Have Your Number?

If you’ve ever wondered how much influence you have online, Klout, Kred, and PeerIndex are here to provide you with answer in the form of a numerical score. All three websites similarly define influence as the ability to drive or inspire action, and use information from your social media accounts to determine exactly how much social media influence you wield. Although each site uses different algorithms to calculate your score, all three take the approach of quality over quantity both in terms of your number of friends or followers, as well as the amount of content you post. Interactions and audience engagement are the keys to having high amount of online influence. To better compare these sites, it’s important to have a solid understanding of what each has to offer.

Klout

Klout provides users with an overall online influence score ranging from 1 to 100 (with 100 being the most influential). To determine your score you’re only required to connect one of your accounts, but have the option of connecting any (or all) of the following: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, foursquare, and Wikipedia. Klout measures engagement in the form of mentions, likes, retweets, +1s, comments, and so on, as well as examines who is engaging with your content and who they’re sharing it with. Key features of your Klout profile beyond your score include a display of your most influential moments, and a list of topics which you or anyone else can add to your profile to better reflect what types of content you share.

Kred

By connecting your Twitter and / or Facebook account, Kred will provide you with two different scores. Your influence score is out of a possible 1,000 points, and is based on online interactions such as retweets, replied, mentions, likes, shares, and even event invitations. Your cumulative outreach score represents how generous you are online, and takes your retweets, replies, mentions, and likes of others into account. Similar to Klout topics, your Kred activity page features the communities you are a part of (such as “Fashion,” or “Marketing”) and gives you influence and outreach scores for each. Your activity page additionally displays recent users you mention, users who mention you, most used hashtags, and both you and your friends most retweeted posts. Out of all three options, Kred has made their scoring process the most transparent, helping users understand how their influence and outreach points are being generated.

PeerIndex

Like Klout, PeerIndex provides users with an influence score ranging from 1 to 100, based on interactions from Twitter, Facebook, Quora, LinkedIn and / or your personal website. PeerIndex measures your knowledge and authority in various subjects by analyzing how you share content on any given topic. This authority is then affirmed when others retweet, share or Facebook, or otherwise engage with your content. This provides users with a list of “Top topics” accompanied by a topical PeerIndex score. Unlike Klout and Kred, other people cannot impact which topics are associated with your profile directly through the PeerIndex website. Currently, PeerIndex does not have a feature similar to the way users can give other people +Kred in a specific community or give +K on a particular topic through Klout.

Which One Should You Use?

While all three options use Twitter and Facebook to calculate influence scores, Klout has the most options for connecting additional accounts; depending on how many other social media websites you’re active on and connect, this could mean higher scores on Klout and PeerIndex than on Kred. However, since all three options offer their measurement services for free I recommend signing up for all of them to maximize the amount of data you have on your online activity. Your Kred activity page is updated in real time, while you Klout and PeerIndex scores are updated daily; however, PeerIndex warns that certain analyses happen weekly, so it may take up to a week for changes to be reflected in your score. No matter which site you use, fairly constant and continuous involvement is required to keep your score from dropping.

Need another incentive to join beyond analyzing your social media interactions? All three options offer rewards for high influencers ranging from exclusive discounts to entirely free items. Klout Perks are rewarded based on your score, topics, and location. Kred rewards are similarly given out based on your communities and location. PeerPerks are available to users based on influence scores, and are featured on your homepage as soon as you sign in.

How Legitimate are these Tools for Measuring Social Influence?

Although the algorithms aren’t perfect yet, I think that these tools are a strong starting point for understanding how engaged a social media user’s audience is. However, in their present state, I don’t think they can be relied on to always provide an accurate picture of a user’s ability to influence others. The possibility of “gaming the system” (discussed below), combined with points raised by Sean Carlos and Erik Kain have left me unable to completely trust in social influence scores.

Sean points out that both Kred and Klout allow users to endorse others, thus raising their overall influence score. Not everyone believes in measuring online influence yet, meaning that those who choose to participate on these sites and associate with others users can be rewarded with higher scores. Similarly, the more accounts you connect to your profile on each website the more your total score can be raised, again rewarding users of these tools with higher scores. Although Sean points to PeerIndex as the exception to the +K and +Kred effect, I noticed that this site assigns everyone in your network a PeerIndex score whether they have signed up or not. If you have not registered with the site they do not have access to all of your data, and therefore your score can’t possibly be an accurate reflection of your influence.

One of the most compelling arguments against the accuracy of influence measurement sites was made by Erik when he compared his own Klout score to Warren Buffet’s. At the time, Erik explained, Buffett’s score was “a measly 35, which means he has absolutely no influence at all… at least compared to me.” In this case, a Klout influence score failed to accurately compare the ability of one person to drive action online versus the other.

Right now I believe sites such as Klout, Kred, and PeerIndex are best used for quickly gathering a sense of who is active on social media, and whether they’re sending out meaningful content that others like and share (versus simply using these platforms to broadcast what they had for lunch).

Increasing Your Klout Score

Currently I have a Klout Score of 54 – not bad considering the average score is 40, but I’d certainly like to see it climb higher. There are a number of strategies you can use to boost your score, and I’ve outlined my 5 favorites below.

1. Connect multiple accounts

Klout promises that adding additional accounts can only ever improve your score. Although you may have one favorite social media site, spend time developing your presence elsewhere to give people more of an opportunity to connect with you.

2. Have one-to-one conversations

It may seem obvious, but sometimes we can get so focused on producing our own content we forget to engage with what other people are sending out. Share your opinion by replying or commenting on posts, or start a conversation by tweeting a well thought-out question at someone. You’ll see your number of mentions and replies increase in response.

3. Share information relevant to your niche

If you’re a marketer, share industry news and tips or how-to’s that are relevant to other marketers. Klout tells you what your most influential moments were from the past 90s days, which you can use as an indication of what type of content most interests your audience.

4. Get strategic

Social media management systems, such as HootSuite, not only let you track what content your audience has engaged with the most, but also allows you to write tweets in advance and schedule when they will be posted. Why is this important? Studies show that there are key times to post on Twitter and Facebook in order to maximize visibility.

5. Stick with it

Don’t get discouraged if your Klout score doesn’t jump 8 points overnight. Building up your online influence takes time, but if your attention wanes and you find yourself only posting sporadically this can bring your score back down.

The possibility of people “gaming the system” in order to raise their scores has the validity of Klout, along with other social influence measurement sites, still in question. I believe that the tips I’ve highlighted are legitimate ways to influence the level of engagement you have with your friends and followers, which should in turn rightly lead to higher scores. Interacting with others and providing them with relevant content isn’t cheating – it’s precisely what social media is all about. Lavall Chichester and Samantha Murphy have both written about the issue of gaming the system, and feel that what constitutes bad behaviour is being “sneaky,” and insincere in an effort to raise your Klout. For example, since Klout takes the score of people who engage with your content into consideration, one way to try and increase your score quickly is to target conversations with high Klout influencers. While reaching out and interacting with others is a huge part of using social media, ignoring a large majority of people in favor of influencers coupled with the sole intention of boosting your score (versus engaging in a meaningful dialogue) is not going to get you far in the long run. Although Klout continues to improve their algorithm to identify things such as bots, it is still possible for people to create multiple Twitter accounts and interact with themselves (replying to or retweeting their main account content), as well as use these handles to sign up for Klout and give themselves +K. Comparing these types of strategies to the methods I listed above, it’s clear that gaming the system involves a level of deceit quite separate from taking a genuine interest in increasing your audience’s engagement with your content.

Using Social Influence for Business

Tools that measure online influence provide businesses with the opportunity to connect not only with consumers who have an engaged online audience, but they can also use topic and community features to identify which subjects consumers are most influential on. Having a celebrity or thought leader in particular space, such as fashion, endorse your brand is an expensive endeavor, plus it puts all of your eggs in one basket; you are relying on the ability of one person (albeit a high profile one) to influence the actions of others. PeerIndex CEO Azeem Azhar identified a group he calls the “magic middle;” while brands are able to easily identify top bloggers and celebrities, finding this middle group of people who have strong reputations and a higher than average reach has always been a more challenging. Now companies like PeerIndex will work with businesses, for a fee of course, to put them in contact with people whose opinion matters on particular subjects. Using Klout for example, your brand could find a list of users who have a minimum score of 60, are influential on the topic of “fashion,” and live in Ontario. You could then send these consumers perks such as a gift card and an invitation to the opening of your newest store. People who receive perks are not obligated to share anything about your brand with their followers, but the hope is that they enjoy the discount or free sample so much that they genuinely want others to know about it. Alternatively, you may choose to provide rewards and perks to anyone above a certain threshold score, again in an effort to get influential people talking about your brand online. Consumers are increasingly more likely to trust the recommendations and opinions of their friends and network than brands.

Sources:

Be More than Just a Name and a Profile Picture

You’ve decided to stake out your online identity and build your personal brand. You might start with a LinkedIn account to let potential employers check out your skills and work experience. You may join one (or a number of) the sites your friends are using, like Twitter or Pinterest. While every social media site offers you an opportunity to shape your brand, it can be hard to give the world a good sense of who you are in only 140 characters.

This is why you turn to Tumblr.

Tumblr is a platform used by both brands and individuals to create, curate, and share content. Through Tumblr you can easily post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos, allowing your Tumblr to act as a hub for everything you’re sharing online. While posting original content is key for developing your personal brand, you can also showcase other people’s content using the “reblog” and “like” functions.

How does it work?

Tumblr is made up of two components: your dashboard, and your blog. Once you create an account you can begin to follow other people. Find users with similar interests by searching for specific tags, such as #photography. Soon your dashboard will be filled with a steady stream of content from the blogs you follow. When you really like a certain post you can reblog it and it will appear on your own Tumblr.

Your personal blog can be viewed by both Tumblr users and non-users alike. Keep in mind that because Tumblr doesn’t use algorithms, everything you post will appear in your followers’ dashboards; while you want to provide enough content to engage them, avoid flooding their dashboards with endless posts and reblogs.

Not only can you let your personality shine through on Tumblr through the content you share, but also through the design you select. The site is highly customizable, allowing you to choose your own URL, layout, and colour scheme. While Tumblr is free to use, premium designs are only available for a price. However, with so many free themes to choose from and the ability to develop your own, you can quickly create a unique personal site without investing much time or money.

Just because your Tumblr doesn’t take long to set up, don’t underestimate the amount of time you’ll need to devote to it. Before you get started, Neil Patel suggests you ask yourself whether or not you’ll be able to keep up your Tumblr in the long run. Sporadic posts won’t help you to build and maintain followers; keep them engaged by regularly sharing interesting content. Tumblr is very visual in nature, so think about how you can express your brand through images as well as words.

Ultimately, Tumblr is your opportunity to tell your story, using whatever mediums you like best. Show off your personality through your design, or tell people what’s important to you with the content you post and reblog. You’re more than just a name and a profile picture, so use Tumblr to highlight content that represents who you are, and watch as your personal brand takes shape.

Sources:

Levine, Ari. “How the Best Brands Tell Stories Using Tumblr.” HootSuite University. 2013.

Patel, Neil. “The Markets Guide to Tumblr.” KISSmetrics.  2012. <http://blog.kissmetrics.com/the-marketers-guide-to-tumblr/>.