10 Critical Features of Reputation Management Platforms

Measurement Tools

Before you invest, consider the options.

by Alecia O'Brien, Director of Marketing, dna13

(Editor's Note: KDPaine & Partners, the company that publishes this newsletter, offers products similar to those discussed in this article. See below for more information.*)

The most important lesson we've learned about reputation management is that a company's brand is at the mercy of mass communication. Unless, that is, the company makes strategic investments:

• to proactively listen to what's being said by customers and influencers,
• to align the corporate team on a synchronized response, and
• to engage in conversations where they can add value.

More and more often, these investments are in the form of online reputation management platforms. These powerful new business tools bring teams together to more effectively monitor, interpret, analyze, and act upon traditional and online conversations. Reputation management platforms are improving and reshaping the way corporations manage their reputations.

If you are in the market for one of these tools, we advise you to plan carefully for your specific needs. For a successful implementation, don't waste your efforts by over-collecting and underutilizing the data you will generate. To insure that you derive actionable intelligence, start by defining your monitoring objectives and finding a solution that best delivers your required metrics. Then compare those metrics with the output from other measurement vendors.

dna13's experience in the marketplace has proven that, to be truly useful and effective, reputation management platforms must have the following ten characteristics:

1. A safe and secure online environment. Teams within corporations have access to and must share restricted information. When they are sharing and exchanging information online, they must be confident that they are doing so in a safe and secure setting. In this setting, roles, rights, and access must be assigned. This is essential to reputation management activities. Google Alerts is an excellent resource as a free listening tool, but don't rely on Google alone for document sharing.

2. A collaborative workspace for internal and external partners. Many large corporations require online "PR war rooms" not just for their internal teams, but with their external providers like advertising agencies and public relations firms. An enterprise platform, like those offered by Cision, Vocus, or dna13, allows multiple users to manage a campaign.

3. One platform and one window. Reputation management tools now have the ability to deliver information through a single dashboard. The conversations taking place in print, TV, radio, online media, social media, blogs, and discussion boards can all arrive in one place to be analyzed. PRNewswire, for example, offers numerous services from one platform and makes it easy to navigate from the latest press release sent over PRNewswire to Profnet.

4. Search and monitoring functions. Issues don't always emerge fully formed. Often they take weeks or even months to develop. A good reputation management tool allows its users to track emerging stories and conversations and their histories. Radian6 prides itself on monitoring social media and can help put together reports for the team. Cision is one of very few monitoring systems that have started monitoring Twitter, but even they are limited to Tweets from registered journalists. It is still a smart idea to search for your company's name or product on Twitter or Digg occasionally – by the time any monitoring system has mastered the nuances of a social media network, a new platform is probably emerging.

5. A cost-effective price point. With the potential for millions of conversations to take place about a company's brand all at once, traditional ways of monitoring those conversations would be cost-prohibitive, if not impossible. Reputation management platforms must make monitoring and analysis efforts cost-effective and practical. Vocus's enterprise edition of their platform is excellent for a large company, but offers many tools a PR firm would never need. Notice a platform's price tag, and don't assume that the more expensive product will be the better fit for your organization.

6. Open, extensible content architecture. Given how quickly technology changes and how rapidly new media channels are opening up (where was Twitter a year ago?), any technology adopted by a company must be flexible, with media monitoring feeds, databases, and metrics.

7. Real-time alerts. Brand protectors need warnings about what's being said about their company's most precious asset. Reputation management tools must be equipped to deliver alerts in real-time. Early warning systems are essential.

8. Expert packaging. Corporations are a microcosm of society. Just as consumers are bombarded with information every minute of the day, corporate employees must juggle many issues and ideas at once. Tools that support monitoring media must be able to transform results into professional quality, digestible summaries. If it can't be scanned, read, and absorbed quickly and easily, then it will not be an effective tool. Be sure to use clip books offered by enterprise platforms like Cision for meetings with management – they need to have a top-down view at the success of every PR campaign.

9. Reporting and analysis. Tools must have the ability to crunch numbers. They must have the capacity to report on and measure earned media and coverage across media channels, and relate it back to their inputs.

10. Easy and cost-effective to deploy. Companies have enough headaches. They don't need the hassle of having to integrate new technologies and applications with existing ones. They need solutions that are fast and easy to deploy, with no on-premise installation required. All of the platforms mentioned in this article are Software-as-a-Service – easy to access from any location, and no extra software required.

There are certainly many reputation management applications and media monitoring point solutions out there today, and competition has created a buyer's market. It's keeping all of us vendors, including us here at dna13, certainly on our toes.

Alecia O'Brien is the director of marketing at dna13, a leading media monitoring platform. To learn more about Alecia or dna13, follow her on Twitter (@aobrien) or visit the dna13 website.

* KDPaine & Partners offers public relations and reputation management research. Unique to the industry, KDP&Ps' research is totally customized, and can provide integration of survey metrics with media metrics. Also, KDP&Ps' services are, in general, less expensive than similar products from other vendors. Contact Katie Paine, or visit this page for more information.