Are you monitoring your company’s online reputation? If someone says something negative (or positive) about your company online, how do you find out?

Local company, VibeMetrix, allows you to track what bloggers are saying about your company. According to their website, “VibeMetrix finds bloggers interested in your company and products, and helps you carry on conversations with them and their readers. The goal of this conversational marketing is to develop an active community of bloggers who write about and link to your company and product pages on the Web. These links have the additional benefit of improving your search engine rankings for keywords related to your products. Over time a virtuous cycle develops, in which you gain a larger and more positive online profile. This results in greater traffic from more qualified customers.”

It’s great, but a little pricey for small businesses

We really like the service, but it is a little pricey for most small businesses. You can sign up for a free 14 day trial, but after 14 days a full account costs a whopping $199 per month. Here is what you get:

• Five campaigns
• Up to 100 keyword phrases in each campaign
• Up to 100,000 stored results
• Email and RSS alerts of new results
• Continuous, real-time updates
• Detailed reporting and metrics
• Free telephone technical support

VibeMetrix also allows you to track notes related to the conversations you are monitoring online and it allows you to create and track “follow up” actions. This is great if you are tracking a large number of online conversations.

VibeMetrix does not allow you to filter the results you receive. When we entered “Agency3″ as a keyword we received a lot of results that had nothing to do with our company and the system does not allow us to filter out the results that don’t apply to our company. You can delete the results once they appear, but you can’t filter the results so that the incorrect results don’t appear again in the future.

Another, more affordable, option

We really like Trackur. It is another reputation monitoring service. Basically, you input your company name, product names or the names of your key executives and Trackur scours blogs, news sites, images and videos for mentions of your company. Every time your company is mentioned you will get an alert. You can even subscribe to your alerts in your favorite news reader.

Trackur has three different account types.

• Trackur Standard - monitor one keyword for $18 per month
• Trackur Pro - monitor five keywords for $88 per month
• Trackur Enterprise - monitor 50 keywords for $197 per month

Trackur offers a number of filtering options to help you fine tune the search results that are reported to you. In our opinion, this is a very important feature and we were suprised it was not available in VibeMetrix.

A Free Tool For Basic Reputation Monitoring

Our favorite free service for basic reputation monitoring is Google Alerts. Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. You can create free alerts for any number of keywords and receive an email whenever Google finds a new keyword match. By default Google Alerts are delivered by email, but you can also opt to subscribe to a RSS feed for your alerts.

Google Alerts can’t be filtered to exclude certain sites. The only way to improve the accuracy of the results is to finely tune the keyword phrases you are monitoring. Unfortunately, if you filter your results too much you might miss relevant matches.

In Summary

If you are looking for a solution that allows you to track a large number of keywords, VibeMetrix is a great option. It also updates in real-time, which may be important to you. Trackur is more affordable, but you can not track as many keywords and all of the accounts do not offer real-time updating. Google Alerts is a great, free, service. In our experience Google Alerts reports keyword matches slower then the other two options discussed in this post.

We recommend starting with Google Alerts and moving up to Trackur when you are ready to pay for a reputation monitoring service. We can definitely see the value in a service like Vibemetrix, but don’t think it is appropriate for small(er) businesses.

Is you company tracking it’s online reputation? What tools do you suggest for small business owners?

Tags: reputation monitoring