6 Free or Low-Cost Ways to Track and Protect Your Valuable Online Reputation

Whether it’s in search, social or product reviews, how people perceive you will be based on the information they find there. Don’t let your reputation go undefended.

I’m sure by now you’ve heard of at least one horror story of a major brand catching flack in social media…oftentimes over some misguided use by the brand in social media. The negative sentiment could also have been triggered by poor user or customer service experiences that wind up in product reviews or discussion boards. Or, the wrong kind of buzz: your brand got hacked. Regardless of the reason, in order to manage the potential harm to your brand’s reputation, you need to know about the critical content in the first place.

When it comes to tracking your online reputation (or that of your competitors), many people default to thinking that you need a social media monitoring tool. And while these tools are certainly handy - and several make my list below - they aren’t the only means. Let me begin with the most simple and take it from there.

1. Simple Searches. How often do you conduct simple searches for your company or product brand names? Are you happy with what you found? Don’t just limit your search to the Web aspect of the search engine. Check the News portion as well. Make a point of conducting these searches routinely.

2. Google Alerts. A simple but effective free tool, with Google Alerts you can be notified by email as Google crawls and the Web and finds matches to your chosen query (like your brand name). You can control the frequency of these alerts as well.

3. Glassdoor. A jobs opportunity website, Glassdoor differs from similar sites with its “employee generated content”…among which include anonymous reviews and ratings of a company and its CEO by the people who work there.

As an employer, you should also routinely monitor your Glassdoor entry. If your company doesn’t exist in its database, it only means that no one has yet submitted a review. Anyone, including the CEO, can submit a company review so long as they have a verified company email address, and now Glassdoor has launched new free analytics tools – an Employer Account - specifically designed to give companies more insight into who’s viewing their profile and how those stats compare to its top competitors.

4. Social Mention. Enter your brand or product name into SocialMention and it will pull in results from across the web (Blogs, Twitter, Bookmarks, Comments, Events, Images, News, Video, etc.) and breaks them down by various analysis points. You can also sign up for email alerts, an RSS feed or download any query into a CSV file.

5. Rankur. Rankur claims to process more than 100M blog posts, 1M online reviews, 100K mainstream news posts and analyzes public content from more than 1M Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Google+ users. It churns out interesting charts, graphs and analyses from this data, and how much of what you get depends on if you go with its free or paid plans.

6. Viralheat. With a 14-day free trial and a Pro account for as low as $9.99 per month, Viralheat is a popular social media monitoring tool for many SMBs.

In case this selection isn’t enough for you or you’re looking for more robust solutions, here’s a list of more than 17 tools I previously compiled.

With all these options, there’s no excuse not to monitor and defend your business’s reputation online or off.

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