We already know that we have a lot of Trackur fans in Australia and New Zealand, but it still brought a smile to our faces to see Trackur so positively endorsed by The Age – arguably Australia’s most respected daily publication.

Trackur - www.trackur.com

This is a free online tool which reveals the conversations that are happening in social media such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook. You may think that no one’s talking about but you would be surprised at the kind of conversations that go on about yourself or your brand, without you knowing about it.

I recently tracked the name of my business and my own name through www.trackur.com. It was fascinating to find people talking about my business by commenting on blogs that I didn’t even know existed. It’s like eavesdropping on a conversation about yourself.

G’day to all our mates from Oz!

Does your company have a Chief Listening Officer?

I would guess, not.

What exactly is a Chief Listening Officer, anyway? While, it’s not exactly a new concept, it’s a role that more and more companies are creating, including Dell:

“Our chief listener is critical to making sure the right people in the organization are aware of what the conversations on the web are saying about us, so that relevant people in the business can connect with customers,” said Richard Binhammer, communications executive at Dell.

Kodak is another company embracing the role of CLO.

So what exactly does a Chief Listening Office do? Simply, they make sure their company is doing 3 things:

1. Actively listening to the conversations online. Not just being “aware” of mentions, but taking time to understand what’s being said.

2. They’re making sure that “intelligence” is being shared with the most appropriate teams. For example, if users complain that a camera would be better if it used regular AA batteries–instead of proprietary lithium batteries–that would be valuable feedback for the R&D team.

3. They close the loop. Listening and reacting are all well and good, but you need to let your customers know what action has been–or will be–taken. Let them know that your company’s not just paying lip-service. That it actually cares.

But, don’t freak out that your company doesn’t have a Chief Listening Officer. Heck, you may not be large enough to have a Chief Financial Officer, let alone a CLO. Instead, look at creating the responsibilities of a CLO. Call it what you want. “Community Manager” perhaps. Wear the hat yourself or give it to your PR person. What matters is that you follow the three steps outlined above.

Social media monitoring is the hottest trend right now in online marketing and PR. Everyone seems to be talking about online reputation monitoring, even Inc. Magazine.

Trackur is given the thumbs-up in the September print issue, but even if you’re not a subscriber, you can read about Trackur–and how we help our clients–in the online edition.

Companies with several brands may require more sophisticated tools. “Eighty percent of companies do fine with Google Alerts,” says Andy Beal, founder of Trackur, an online monitoring software company. “But once you have 30 different keywords to monitor, you’ll outgrow it very quickly.”

Those features have allowed companies to maintain greater control of their brands. For instance, Case Design/Remodeling, a home remodeling franchiser based in Bethesda, Maryland, uses Trackur to search for discussions pertaining to each of its 22 franchises. If Joaquin Erazo, the company’s senior vice president of marketing, finds a complaint about a particular franchise, he will alert a representative at that location to contact that customer. “You can be created or destroyed by the click of a mouse,” says Erazo.

Have you set up your Trackur Free account yet?

If you thought we were excited about our last big update, wait til you see how dizzy were are about the launch of Trackur 2.0.

(Side note: We think calling things “2.0″ is actually lame. We started using it internally as a joke, but hey, it does capture the essence of the massive improvements we’ve made to Trackur)

So what are we announcing today?

Let’s start with the one feature you’ve all been asking for: Facebook monitoring!

Yes, Trackur now monitors all public status updates from Facebook–and in realtime too! While testing it internally, we found new items showing up just 35 seconds after they were posted to Facebook. That is fast!

The other big improvement we’ve made is to our analytics. You can now view Influence Rank scores for all web pages, right in the main dashboard. You no longer have to click through to see how influential a web site is on your reputation, Trackur shows you directly within the results!

Also, we’ve improved our Influence Rank measuring so that it now works with Twitter results! Yep, you can now get accurate rankings of the people tweeting your brand–all thanks to our new partnership with Klout.

OK, deep breath. There’s more!

We’re brought in more info about each web page and blog discovered. Traffic trends, contact info, and information about any news site discussing your brand.

Oh, and let’s not forget that we’ve revamped the entire user-interface. It’s faster, prettier, and just plain fun to work with!

There’s so much more but that’s the bulk of the improvements we’ve made to Trackur. Perhaps the one you won’t see, but will enjoy the most, is that Trackur is using HTML5 and CSS3 and a whole bunch of other cutting-edge technologies that make it faster and more stable.

Now, one small caveat. With a launch as HUGE as this one. You may find a bug or two. We’ve tried to find them all, but we have such a small team and there’s 25K+ of you! So, if you find one, please let us know on our new Help & Support site.

As always, thank you for using Trackur!

Andy

P.S. Yes, pricing will stay the same! Consider it Christmas in July August!

Imagine that you are going to a baseball game with your girlfriend (or wife or significant other or whatever you do) and you pull a boneheaded maneuver like this kid does in the video below. Watch it and you’ll see what I mean.

In the past, this is just something that, at worst, got on TV and was forgotten about by everyone except for the girlfriend (or ex-girlfriend?) and the people who were sitting around these two at the game when it happened.

Guess what folks? This is not the past. This is the hyper-information age and everything matters. Why? Well, rather than this being just an unfortunate display of a guy who is essentially a wuss he is being written about here and over at Mashable and there is already a Facebook page for him. In other words, this guy started before the game as just another goofy kid wearing a really bad hat and having the cool facial whatever you call it but now he is known as “Bo the Bailer” thanks to the social media world.

Do you think this will go away for him? I don’t. Why? Because now he is labeled and his friends can unmercifully torment him with this image (especially in front of his girlfriend). Why would they do this? Because they are his ‘friends’ and because it got a lot of attention that things like this just never used to get. If you want to know how these things can impact a person’s life look up Steve Bartman and the impact of his ill-fated sports moment caught on tape. Darn near ruined his life.

Here’s the lesson. Everything you do matters especially since everything today has the chance to be the viral video of tomorrow. The trouble is most people don’t get that until it’s too late. Paying attention has NEVER been more important than it is in today’s world. Unfortunately we are ill-equipped to pay attention to the level required by the constant monitoring of all actions at all times. We are just human after all.

So “Bo the Bailer” will have his 15 minutes of shame fame and then he thinks it will go away. It won’t though because the digital memory is long and unforgiving and this is the kind of thing that can come back to bite you at the worst times.

Over-reaction? Maybe. My question to you is, if you were to hire this person for a job and saw this video of how he reacted then covered up in a time of pressure would you wonder how he would perform for your company?

Think about it.

There’s some great advice in a recent MSN article for local business owners. If you need advice on managing and improving your reviews at sites such as Yelp or Trip Advisor, it’s a must read.

Trackur gets a whole-hearted endorsement too!

Monitor your accounts. To track reviews, Lisa Barone, co-founder and chief branding officer at Internet marketing company Outspoken Media, suggests using services like Trackur Premium or Trackur Ultimate to add the review site’s RSS feed to your dashboard. You should also set up search engine alerts, though this won’t catch everything. Barone believes monitoring reviews is so important that entrepreneurs should regularly “check the major review sites to be sure nothing negative has popped up.”

What are you waiting for?

I heard something very interesting on the radio today.

A local BP gas station owner had put together an ad which described the good work he did in his community. It also tried to shine some kind of positive light on the ‘parent company’ for his SMB (small and medium business) which is the now notorious British Petroleum. It seems like the area that I live in may be some kind of hotbed for BP ‘franchises’ which makes for an interesting quandary from a reputation perspective.

According to the radio ad I heard, this business owner has served his community and provided jobs to local residents. These are both good things which, in any other situation, would never be questioned. Now, one wonders whether we would have ever heard from this station owner had it not been for the BP fiasco. As a result, there will be those who are skeptical of the sincerity of the message even though my guess is that it was a genuine attempt to distance himself and his business from the BP mess (which he is completely helpless in) without sounding desperate.

Whether he is able to come through this storm with his business intact will be something for the next few months and years to hash out. The trouble is that with messages on Twitter and other places saying, “I can’t believe that people are still getting their gas at a BP station!” he may not be able to overcome it.

Here is the danger of this kind of closely-knit and intertwined reputation web that is being weaved online. We are likely to have wrong assumptions made regularly about just who is or is not responsible for company screw-ups.

I have experience with people who are gas station owners. I know more about them than the average person. As a result, I know that this poor guy who is trying to paint the correct picture of his business is working on thin margins and has profits squeezed by competitive factors all day long. Oh, and more importantly, he had NOTHING to do with the BP well issue in the Gulf.

Unfortunately, though, it could cost him his business because we have grown so quick to blame everyone rather than truly know the facts. The facts in this case will likely point to a small business guy who is a lot like you and me. He’s just trying to make a living but then is associated with something by default, which creates a ‘guilt by association’ scenario and the backlash associated with it.

Just like we didn’t have any first hand responsibility for the Gulf tragedy, neither did any independent franchise owners. They don’t deserve the wrath of the consumer. However, the ignorance of most people and their willingness to act on their ignorance is what we face now in this hyper-sensitive reputation cauldron of the Internet. It could actually be a good time to consider stepping back and taking a deep breath before we go around pointing our digital finger at everyone without knowing the facts.

All of this is to point to the idea there has never been a more critical time for companies both large and small to be listening to what is going on with online reputations. No matter the size of the business, there are factors happening online that can make or break a business whether it is deserved or not. If you are not aware of these things then you are to blame if they ultimately bite you.

Contact us today to learn how Trackur provides an easy to use, affordable, efficient and flexible way to monitor all of the online buzz happening around your business and industry. Who knows, the business you save could be your own.

For the past few posts I have been talking about various topics raised in a good article from the New York Times. Today will be my last look at the many different discussion points this article raises with regard to online and social media monitoring, the impact of these elements on individuals and companies and how society is changing because of the online world.

Here’s a quick question. Do you think that it is true that the younger an Internet user is the more likely he / she will be open online? If you said yes you are probably like most who make that assumption. Here is some info that might surprise you.

…two recent studies challenge the conventional wisdom that young people have no qualms about having their entire lives shared and preserved online forever. A University of California, Berkeley, study released in April found that large majorities of people between 18 and 22 said there should be laws that require Web sites to delete all stored information about individuals (88 percent) and that give people the right to know all the information Web sites know about them (62 percent) — percentages that mirrored the privacy views of older adults. A recent Pew study found that 18-to-29-year-olds are actually more concerned about their online profiles than older people are, vigilantly deleting unwanted posts, removing their names from tagged photos and censoring themselves as they share personal information, because they are coming to understand the dangers of oversharing.

To me this is good news because at least there appears to be some restraint in the age group where many feel that they don’t really care about what they put online.

So why this concern? Well, the ‘powers that be’ in the social media world like Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg claim that the societal move is toward greater sharing and more transparency. How could he see things so differently than the study quoted above? That’s easy. He NEEDS as much transparency as possible to make money off of Facebook users. The more open they are the more targeted they are for advertisers. Facebook thrives on that.

Here’s the trouble with this openness and transparency flag that everyone with a monetary stake in this game is waving. They are not the ones that get hurt by this move to being more ‘open’. Alessandro Acquisti, a scholar at Carnegie Mellon University, studies the behavioral economics of privacy and is looking into what he calls ‘decay time’. That is how long it takes for information positive and negative information to have impact on a person. Here are some of his findings

His research group’s preliminary results suggest that if rumors spread about something good you did 10 years ago, like winning a prize, they will be discounted; but if rumors spread about something bad that you did 10 years ago, like driving drunk, that information has staying power. Research in behavioral psychology confirms that people pay more attention to bad rather than good information, and Acquisti says he fears that “20 years from now, if all of us have a skeleton on Facebook, people may not discount it because it was an error in our youth.”

The bottom line here is that you really need to keep your nose clean online. If you don’t, then the impact down the line could be troubling at best and devastating at worst. Imagine losing that job opportunity for an indiscretion committed over 10 years ago (other than being in jail or something just as serious).

The article goes into some possible ways to keep people from screwing themselves in their online life like the idea of data expiration dates, mechanisms to help create a time buffer between the creation of bad content and hitting the ‘share it now!’ button even the idea of reputation bankruptcy. All interesting but also none are in place right now which is when people are making their great mistakes

There is a lot to consider because of the ‘new world order’ of data dissemination and storage. This is not the same world that I grew up in and if I decide to let the Internet put a ‘rating’ on my reputation (like credit bureaus do for credit ratings) I am rolling the reputation dice. I can’t afford to do that, can you?

Learn more about how Trackur helps you get your online reputation in order. It could be the best move you made online in a long time.

There has been considerable concern about online privacy for all of this year and that concern is not going away. The Wall Street Journal has run a series of articles pointing out the literally lack of privacy for visitors to virtually any site. It has also positioned those taking information from visitors as spies. A little harsh? Maybe but we have entered an age where this kind of assessment will be common.

To go the to the next level though, the New York Times has pointed out in their article on the online space and reputations that

Moreover, the narrow focus on privacy as a form of control misses what really worries people on the Internet today. What people seem to want is not simply control over their privacy settings; they want control over their online reputations. But the idea that any of us can control our reputations is, of course, an unrealistic fantasy. The truth is we can’t possibly control what others say or know or think about us in a world of Facebook and Google, nor can we realistically demand that others give us the deference and respect to which we think we’re entitled. On the Internet, it turns out, we’re not entitled to demand any particular respect at all, and if others don’t have the empathy necessary to forgive our missteps, or the attention spans necessary to judge us in context, there’s nothing we can do about it.

To a degree this is true but on other levels it is a bit over the top. There are things you can do to at least manage your online reputation. Having complete control is practically impossible but being able to control how your reputation is presented, especially in the search engines is achievable. How you ask?

1. Listen – You can’t do anything about anything that you simply are clueless about. If you find yourself a month or a year from now discovering something that has been on your ‘digital record’ for an extended period of time don’t cry foul. What’s foul is the fact that by not listening to the online buzz about whatever it is you want to protect (brand, person etc) YOU allowed something to sit in the engines and rot your online reputation. Nobody’s fault but yours at that point.
2. SEO – Once something appears in the SERP’s (search engine results pages) that is negative you need to give the engines something to feed on that they can put ahead of the undesired results in the rankings. Develop other properties like a Flickr account, YouTube channel, blog etc to generate interest from the engines. At this point, these properties can be seen as better options for ranking of results than the negative ones that you are less than happy with.
3. Create content – In the end it’s a war of attrition. If there is one or two negative results around certain keywords that are important to your online reputation you need to create content to fill the properties mentioned above. Don’t do this in a half-assed manner either. Have a plan and generate considerable content that will appease the search engines and help move the undesired results out of the SERP’s.
4. Behave – If you have done nothing wrong and you are just the victim of someone who is bitter, vindictive or just an outright liar, those things will eventually take care of themselves. All we can do is conduct ourselves in business and life in a way that would make any negative online ‘concern’ look so out of place that the person or entity that is creating the disturbance will be viewed as some kind of online miscreant which, in many cases, they are.

Here at Trackur we help you shorten the time between when something happens to the time that you are aware of it. The sooner you get on top of an ORM concern the better your chances are of managing the situation to your advantage.

Contact us today for more information about how trackur will help you get some semblance of control over something that spin out of control very quickly: your online reputation.

The United States is an interesting place.

While we promote the acquisition of money, prestige, power and all things material we are also a forgiving bunch. We like the underdog and we are very willing to give people and organizations a second chance even when all logic wouldn’t merit it. It’s a very cool thing that Americans keep alive but the Internet may be helping that ideal to fade into the past.

In my last post, I discussed how our inability to forget because of the Internet could lead to less of an ability to forgive. Thus, it stands to follow that our culture of ‘second chances’ could be grinding to a halt as well.

The New York Times article I am drawing inspiration from, takes this idea to the next level and, while I can see the logic, I hate the direction we are headed.

The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.

Now, many would ask that if you have a ‘checkered past’ then why would you deserve a second chance? Well, the basic premise of  second chances is that a person or organization has learned and, as a result, changed because of past wrongdoings. We don’t like to hand out second chances to people who are exhibiting a ‘checkered present’ that continues their ‘checkered past’. We may be forgiving but we’re not stupid.

But with the way everything is kept in the digital record these days the checkered past doesn’t get the chance to fade away like it used to and could actually keep people from showing just how much they have changed. The Times article explores this a little more.

In a recent book, “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,” the cyberscholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger cites Stacy Snyder’s case as a reminder of the importance of “societal forgetting.” By “erasing external memories,” he says in the book, “our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.” In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which everything is recorded “will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.” He concludes that “without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.”

OK, are you scared yet? The point here is that we need to be on top of our past just as much as out present. Why? Because we will need to exhibit that we have truly changed because that memory of our past misgivings will not be allowed to fade.

I agree this seems a little daunting but I think it could be a very good thing. For the good people who have made genuine mistakes in the past they will be able to exhibit their changed life. That is evidence of being worthy of a true ‘second chance’.

Those, however, who have relied on people’s short memories to give them a chance to “re-invent” themselves without actually changing (in other words, being the same wolf in a different sheep’s clothing) will be easier to spot and will be less likely to pull the same scam twice.

So this is scary isn’t it? I say only if you are still making the same mistakes and no one really wants to do that now, do they?

If you would like to learn more about how you can keep track of your online presence without breaking the bank, contact us today and we’ll be glad to assist you understand the ever changing world of online reputation and social media monitoring.