Do you know if people are talking about your company, or even you personally, on the Internet? And what they are saying? If you don’t, then you could be missing out on a wealth of valuable feedback on the perception of your company’s or your own personal brand. In particular, if people are out there writing negative things about your brand, you should hear about it in a timely fashion so you can react to ameliorate those perceptions.

There is a range of tools available to find and analyze the online conversations people are having about you. The best fit is likely based on the size of your organization or general public presence. Although you may not know the latter until you have experimented with some of the tools I discuss in this article. I highlight three offerings, from entry up to enterprise level. You may actually want to go ahead and start using the most basic, expanding from there to determine what features pay off for you versus the cost.

Google Alerts
Cost: Free
Google Alerts is basically an automated Google search based on a set of saved keywords. You have likely already manually searched for keywords associated with your brand. And you may not have actually gotten back anything interesting. But unless you set a schedule for yourself to do those searches, you may miss an important news article or blog post of interest. Google Alerts does this for you, and emails you the results on a weekly, daily, or “as it happens” basis. That last option has searches running continuously, and you get updated whenever something new pops up.

Google Alerts is basically the minimum you should be doing to monitor online conversations. And it’s free and fairly easy to use, so you don’t have much of an excuse not to give it a try. However, you have to do any analysis on the results it sends you manually. Also, it does not specifically target any social media besides blogs as a general category. So you may have to sift through a lot to find anything of interest, or you may not even find the results you are looking for.

Filtrbox
Cost: Free basic plan, $10/month unlimited plan, with a free trial of unspecified length
Like Google Alerts, with Filtrbox you basically just define keywords, or “filtrs” to search for. And if you already have Google Alerts, you can import your keywords from there. The big difference between Google Alerts and Filtrbox is that Filtrbox searches a much more targeted set of sources for those keywords. Instead of basically the entire web, Filtrbox, according to them, “continuously monitors thousands of mainstream news sources, millions of blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed, blog comments and conversations, and any custom sources you add to your account via RSS.” Filtrbox also allows you to rank and flag sources that return hits for your keyword, so that you can refine your interactions with it more and more as you use it. Like Google Analytics it provides you with email updates of results, but also provides various charts and graphs to analyze and trend those results.

By all means give the free basic plan a try. But you will only be able to create five filters, and can only look back 15 days in the history of results you generate. But at $10 per month, the paid version seems like quite a value and completely removes those restrictions.

Scout Labs
Cost: ranging from $100/mo to $749+/mo, with a 30 day free trial at any subscription level
This product allows you define multiple searches, with a more sophisticated way to create search exceptions and merge different searches together than the previous two tools. This capability sets it apart in the way that you can tune out a lot of unwanted noise right from the start. It also includes lots of charting and analysis tools, including a report of the “share” of online buzz about particular topics which result from your searches. This can demonstrate how big your online presence is in relation to competitors. The biggest selling point for Scout Labs seems to be its sentiment tracking tool. You use their own engine for determining whether results returned by your searches are positive, negative, or neutral. You can then override the linking of keywords with those sentiments, to train their system to align more with your brand’s domain.

The Scout Labs product is by no means cheap, and the $100 level only allows for five different searches. However, it seems like an extremely powerful tool, especially for the sentiment tracking ability that would give you an easy and automatic dashboard view of how your brand is perceived online.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web