Managing business and personal reputation, once the province of public relations, has increasingly moved online, and this has led a number of firms to specialize in managing reputation in the online universe. In the early days of online reputation management, companies focused on monitoring search results and trying to move positive results up in search rankings. As the social web has grown, firms have begun to pay more attention to blogs, review sites and services like MySpace and Facebook.
Reputation Observer offers services designed to track and manage online business and personal reputations. But not only that. The highly complex way of sentiment analysis is managed in a different way than most other tools (which heavily rely on 2-3 different Sentiment API vendors).
FEATURES
Reputation Observer, despite the somewhat passive implication of its name, positions itself as “a revolutionary way of tracking, measuring and repairing your brand or name online.” It breaks its services down into a variety of features, including:
• Monitoring. Reputation Observer promises to provide constant monitoring of search, social media and other online media outlets.
• Protection. With what it terms “intelligent online media protection,” Reputation Observer offers to analyze, control and protect your brand or your personal reputation.
• Reputation building. This feature promises to enhance your reputation and to counteract negative information online.
• Social web integration. Earlier tools that were applied to reputation were often specialized variants of the strategies used for search engine optimization. As a result, they focused on enhancing the content of search results. Reputation Observer covers this as well, but it also monitors blogs, review sites and forums, and adds tracking of specific sites that it considers critical to online reputation, including Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and Orkut.
• Social Media Worflow management. Social Media Analytics enterprise workflow-management for small and large organizations.
• Alerts. Customers are notified by email, text or phone of events considered critical.
COSTS
Reputation Observer does not disclose the cost of its services on its web site. Links on both the US and international sites seem to point to sources of additional information point instead either to blog posts about online reputation tracking and management, or to a contact form whereby a prospective client may request further information.
The services are offered in a tiered system that segments online media into those considered more or less difficult to manage. A similar hierarchy separates those media according to the identity of the client, assigning different levels of importance to different media for businesses and individuals.
EFFECTIVENESS
Reputation Observer lays out a reasonably complete menu of services and it’s effectiveness is well-known in the web industry. Especially for corporations operating in international markets Reputationobserver’s unique approach of high-end technology paired with an objective human social-media rating system is highly effective.
