7 Free Online Tools for Managing the Online Reputation of Your Brand

Be it an individual or a big corporation, everyone is considering brand management as one of the important tasks in the digital era. And why not – earlier people used to talk about different brands and those brands never actually used to know what they were talking about, but things have changed! Today, it is a different world where everything is said right across our faces and brands and individual owners know this bitter reality.

Don’t Ignore the Negative Feedback

Usually, the companies and brands have no control on most of the conversations taking place online and they can either just ignore those or observe and participate in them and try to resolve the concerns of existing customers, and attract many more potential customers. The latter is obviously the smarter option to build online reputation and we know it for a fact that strong positive online reputation helps in building trust, sales and confidence among the customers. Mentioned below are top 8 free online tools that can help you in managing the online reputation of your brand.

1. Google Alerts: Through RSS or email, subscribing to Google alerts about your brand name is the first thing that you should do. These alerts come in the forms of emails to you containing the latest search results on Google about the relevant keyword phrase, and they include news articles, groups, videos and stories. You can go ahead and set “comprehensive alert”, which will keep notifying you about stories about your brand, your company, and all the related stuff, making it a breeze for you to spot any new negative feedback.
2. Blog Comments: Earlier whenever anyone posted a comment on any blog using your name in their comment, you did not have any means to track that. But a tool like Back type can help you track and monitor all the comments about your brand name. This service can help you track, follow and then share the comments on the web.
3. Discussion Boards: Apart from news stories and commenting on blogs, people also talk about brands and products across the different discussion boards. Most of the people tend to disregard such boards until they see other websites commenting on the information that they viewed. A tool called boardtracker.com helps in tracking the threads on discussion boards where the name of your brand has been mentioned.
4. FriendFeed: This is considered as the ultimate social aggregator. You can easily take all the accounts you have on different social networks like Twitter, Delicious, Flickr, YouTube etc. and put them in a single account of FriendFeed to manage things effortlessly from one place.
5. Interactive Search: All other options in this list are quite simple but this one is rather complex. A tool called Filtrbox highlights only those sources that are credible enough to be noticed and doesn’t necessarily throw up hundreds and thousands of pages showing the name of your brand. This easily saves a lot of your time, and can help you in dealing with things that require urgent attention.
6. Social Comments: A tool called Yacktrack is extremely handy in tracking your social comments. It helps you in searching new comments on your contents in different sources like Digg, Stumbleupon, WordPress, and Blogger etc. This can help you in joining back a conversation that you started after seeing different people commenting on the same post, and ensuring that nobody has posted anything negative in due course of time.
7. Twitter: Tweets go viral at lightning speeds and you need to catch up on that speed or you will be left behind in no time. A tool calledTwitter search notifies every time someone tweets about you. Then you can make a decision whether you need to respond to it or ignore that Tweet.

So, make use of these tools to manage the online reputation of your brand, and grow its reach over the Internet.

The author is an experienced SEO professional and an online reputation management consultant who has helped hundreds of small businesses in growing their social media reach, and dealing with negative feedback to boost their online reputation.