Online Reputation Market worth £60 million

In their latest report 'The Online Reputation and Buzz Monitoring Buyer's Guide 2008', E-Consutlancy believe that the market for monitoring reputations online will be worth £60 million in 2008. This market, made up of companies such as Brandwatch and Cymphony, is therefore set to grow by 30% by the end of the year.

Companies are realising that monitoring and measuring their reputation across their delivery and customer interaction channels provides the opportunity to understand what users are actually saying. Furthermore, by feeding this information back through the organisation they can potentially improve products & services (and hopefully not just to prep the lawyers for another round of 'cease & decist' letter sending).

We've had clients of our company Ideal Interface take a look at these online monitoring solutions and start using them, so it comes as no suprise that the market is growing. But what's in-store for 2009 and beyond?

This was a question I asked Gile Palmer at Brandwatch recently. His reply was:

I think 2009 could be an interesting year for technologies like Brandwatch - for starters they will get better at the core job - alerting people when interesting/worrying things appear online as well as giving a more medium term / long term view.

There's no doubt that the Online reputation monitoring is heating up. WPP has recently moved to buy TNS, who have their Cymphony social media tracking service, for a reported £1.1 billion. This has led some industry observers (including myself) to assume that larger players are looking to enter this growing market.

Interesting times ahead then....

Corporate Blogs - The Discovery Age

Corporate Blogs are becomming just another way for companies to communicate with their audience / users / consumers / customers / etc. However they also come with some particular benefits and risks which I have covered in a recent training presentation / guide.

Its also clear that: being transparent, having clear objectives and keeping up the committment to blog is also something that some companies find harder than others. (e.g why is it that the Carphone Warehouse CEO no longer blogs, but the CEO of Waitrose does?)

In 2006 a Porter Novelli & Cymphony research paper found that 80% of those companies surveyed believed blogs will be more important in 5 years time.

So have we now reached the right time for corporate blogs to come of age?

The lack of social media

Where have all the social media gone?

David Bowen in one of his recent regular commentaries has pointed ot that a lot of companies have yet to fully engage in the use of social media on their main sites. He believes this is for two main reasons:

1. Structural:
   Most of from That the corporate site is not the right place and the real activity in social media happens elsewhere (e.g. micro-sites, partners, etc.)
2. Risk:
   Its not unusual for large companies to observe others making miskakes firs. But just watch them subsequently claim they've been doing it all along, just because they put a couple of social bookmarking links on a few hidden pages.

However, I'm also sure there are other factors Mr Bowen has missed:

A. Cultural differences and the evolution of the transparent company.
There are still a lot of organisations out there that still believe they own their customers opinions of them and even some that don't realise that customers can't hear what is being said as they are too busy listening to each other. They therefore don't realsie that facilitating these comments and participating in the conversation that they are potentially improving their market opportunity and brand perception.

B. As well as companies (senior managers and marketers) not understanding the value of social media, they can't just take the blame and obviously a lot of agencies still don't "get it". Jim Nail of Cymphony recently polled an Ad Age audience "Who's to blame for the slow page of development of marketing on social media?"

With the choice between client Marketers and Agencies... 59% picked both.

Online reputation management

A quick 'Hat Tip' to Andy Beal for his 'reputation management for dummies' column
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2006/03/online-reputation-monitoring-beginners.html

Do Reputation Management Services Work?
Well, BusinessWeek mentions that this new industry promises to help counter negative search results on the Web. Hiring one of these fixers may make nasty comments go away:
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/apr2008/sb20080430_356835.htm

I've already seen TNS's Cymphony product (previously mentioned here) and am due to see Magpie's Brandwatch tool (previously mentioned here), both of which are useful for monitoring the buzz about product and brand, which obviously feeds a company's reputation.

So... is there a way of integrating these online reputation tools into other graphing services to come up with a way of understanding and visualising the Corporate Social Graph?

The New Influencers - Part 2

I have tried to find out more about the background behind the diagram in Chapter 2 of Paul Gillin's book. This diagram by Cymphony (who's 'Orchestra' tool is apparently very useful for identifying and measuring modern influence) correllates the relationship between traditional media and the more recent digital channels of blogs, usenet & social media.

However, I can't find anything more about it on their website (but did stumble across Jim Nail's blog which I found most illuminating). This was a little annoying, as I was hoping to learn more about their model. It should have moved on since the book was written over a year ago and I am keen to read up more about it.

What this did lead me to though, was the website for the book and Paul Gillin's own blog. Now this man has quite an array of really useful articles (that I'm now going to try and read)