Corporate Reputation Management – A new twist

November 2, 2009

In this age of social media proliferation, being actively engaged in social networks brings both rewards and risks. We have seen the rich bounty of a well executed social marketing campaign based on a well thought out content marketing strategy. However, I have also discussed the need for contingency plans when social media involvement backfires. Today, let’s take a look at a particular class of tools that let us have more control over this area.

Corporate Brand Management

Brand Management has been around as long as the first mass market advertising campaign was conceived and executed. However, in the last 5 years, brand management has started to transform into a more data driven, real-time monitoring activity. Brand managers have to be constantly on top of any mention that bubbles up in the blogosphere, watching over the ever flowing stream of tweets being sent from all around the world, and be ready to engage in any conversation at any of the thousands of consumers favorite online haunts.

This is where the “Brand management dashboard” comes into play and proves its value. The ideal brand management dashboard will ideally present a constantly updating view of the brand’s permeation of the Internet, the consumers’ sentiment trends and also highlight particularly interesting conversations (both good and bad) that should be capitalized upon by the brand marketer.

Used wisely and consistently, the brand management dashboard is a powerful tool that feeds into other marketing activities as well. For example, by correlating the mention of your brand versus the competitors’ brand, you will have a valuable data set for your competitive positioning. What can be better than using a customer’s own words to describe your superiority over the competitors?

Another area that will be benefit handsomely from the brand management dashboard is “influence marketing”. While the dashboard might not help generate a lot of buzz for the company itself (it might if the company actually sells dashboard tools), it helps with measuring the effect of the influence marketing effort. The dashboard is effectively a KPIs report on your integrated PR, buzz and viral marketing efforts.

So, how to build the all powerful brand management dashboards? Here are some useful examples for you:

Brand scorecard for marketers

AimClear’s How to build a reputation monitoring dashboard

Brand Marketing Enterprise Dashboard

In the next post, we shall discuss how to manage personal reputation online, with an equally powerful set of tools.

Chief Business Officer at UserTesting

Tien Anh joined UserTesting in 2015 after extensive financial and strategic experiences at OpenView, where he was an investor and advisor to a global portfolio of fast-growing enterprise SaaS companies. Until 2021, he led the Finance, IT, and Business Intelligence team as CFO of UserTesting. He currently leads initiatives for long term growth investments as Chief Business Officer at UserTesting.