All of a Twitter – Measuring Online Reputations

Despite coverage appearing in media outlets, ranging from The Daily Mail to CNN, the 23rd January will be regarded by many as the day that Twitter became mainstream. This was the day that Britain’s two most famous Twitterers, Stephen Fry and Jonathon Ross, set the micro-blogging service alight as they discussed their love of the online tool on Ross’s comeback programme. Combined with Stephen being subsequently trapped in an elevator, the media landscape is now abuzz with news about Twitter and its abundance of followers.

With Twitter now being accepted as mainstream, companies are now wondering how to measure and monitor their brand reputation in an increasingly digital landscape. It is now accepted that we have moved from a watch and listen to a search and share society, where people are having active discussions and forming opinions not via traditional outlets, but through social networks, forums, blogs, virals, RSS, UGC, link-building, wikis and of course Twitter.

Actively monitoring this array of digital outlets represents a new challenge to today’s brands looking to not only monitor their presence against competitors, but also to play an active role in these discussions.

For brand managers looking to provide a basic overview of how they are faring in the digital arena against their competitors, TweetVolume, a tool that scans and counts the number of times a word or phrase appears on Twitter, and Addictomatic, a tool that builds a one page summary of results from 18 sites ranging from YouTube to Flikr to Twitter, are great starting points.

With media now sourcing stories from a range of digital outlets, be it a Facebook group or Twitter thread, the ability to measure, monitor and engage with online resources is key to an effective PR strategy in today’s increasingly digital ecosystem.