Reputation Management: Your Next Social App?
March 29th, 2008 (8:00am) Mike Gunderloy 4 Comments
Reputation Management has been getting more and more press lately – the idea that it’s not enough to track what’s being said about your company on the web, but that you have to proactively get involved in the conversations to turn them to your advantage. Now ReputationHQ has launched a product that’s designed to run as a private social network to help you deal with these issues. It tracks mentions of your company via searches, lets you set up tasks to deal with them, tag them, and discuss them on an internal wiki. The idea is to bring everyone in the company to bear on the issues.
Unfortunately, though the idea is promising, the execution is a bit rocky: there’s no free trial, their marketing site is slow, and they need to clean up the grammar and spelling in their copy. While a tool like this could certainly help organizations that aren’t savvy enough to be managing their reputations already, the first look at this one suggests it needs a bit more maturity.
4 Comments Post your own comment
Jeromy says: March 29th, 2008 9:20am
Hey Mike – thanks for covering this. We went with a soft launch last week and it’s great to get this kind of feedback. Apologies if the site was slow, looks like everything on that end is back to normal. One note: because of the nature of reputation management, it’s difficult to offer free trials. We take a hands on approach to each client, working with them for a few days to select the right keywords and to understand their needs, hence the lack of free trials. Buuut, we’re launching a 30 day money back guarantee this week (thanks for solidifying that) and we’ve tried to keep the price tag in the Basecamp ballpark to make if affordable for individuals or large companies. We really appreciate your thoughts either way!
Colin says: March 29th, 2008 11:14am
^^^ Reputation management in action! lol
Looks like a great idea, tried to join a “mailing list” for updates but didnt see one. Will check back later.
Andy Beal says: March 29th, 2008 4:27pm
Hi Mike, if you get a chance, I’d love to have you try reputation monitoring tool Trackur.com. We have a free trial and I’d be happy to answer any questions.
addrokk says: March 31st, 2008 2:33pm
Good to see some launches in this area. I’m quite often involved in rebuilding larger corporate websites and this kind of tool is something that often needs to be a part of the CMS or the internal info-management-system at larger corporations.
The media-strategy of large corporations is slowly turning into putting the info/content on external websites (delivering the message to the buyer) instead of spending large amounts of money on traditional info-traffic (driving visitors from external siten to the corporate site/message). And when that change happens there is really no good tool to monitor the results of the external activities, no way of viewing the overall picture and distribute tasks to co-workers that can resopnd or take action, no way of “weighting”/prioritizing where to focus your efforts.
So I’m really happy to see the development of reputation management and hope that it will grow into something bigger than just stand-alone services/apps.