How do you Monitor Your Reputation Online?
One phrase I really hate is "Online Reputation Management". I believe you build and manage your reputation in the real world; in your stores and with your customer interactions. Now there are a good number of folks scrambling to come up with ways to charge dealers for "Online Reputation Management" tools. The SEO guys want to drive down bad results. Other companies will post lots of good reviews for you. All have the goal of obscuring a bad reputation that may well, let's face it, have been earned. There is a robust conversation going on here What does your PRICING have to do with your REVIEWS? about one way to actually earn a good reputation.
I'm not a Reputation Management Expert. I don't think there are many experts out there, it's a very new field. And as much as I'm a believer in building a great reputation offline, I still really want to monitor, not necessarily manage, what people are saying online. I want to know when they say good things so I can brag on that some. I want to know when they say bad things so I can do my best to fix their issues. That brings me to my question for the DealerRefresh community: Because I'm not an expert, what tools would you recommend? I'm looking for free (or at least cheap) tools and I'm hoping the community can help me crowd-source the best of the bunch.
I've been trying a few over the past couple of weeks. The best I've found so far seems to be MonitorThis. I set it up once, then directed an RSS feed of the results right into Outlook. I get very close to a real-time feed of mentions on the web and twitter. Best part is it's all in my inbox, not a separate app or dashboard. And it's free. Here's the RSS feed for vAuto, so you can get a feel for it.
Trakkur is another that really intrigues me. I'm using the free version and that has a few drawbacks, mainly not real-time, multiple alerts. I'm considering the $18 a month plan as it fixes those issues and adds Facebook mentions to the mix as well. I have Trakkur set up as an RSS feed as well.
Now there is an added dimension for dealers; Reviews. Something I don't have to worry about but every dealer should be monitoring. And there are a ton of review sites out there. How are you tracking them ALL?
So help me and the community out. What have you used and what do you like?
