A Guide to Monitoring Your Brand Online

A Little Bit About Koozai: ............................................................................................... 3

How to get in Touch: .................................................................................................... 3

About the Author: ......................................................................................................... 4

About This Whitepaper: ................................................................................................. 4

What is Brand Monitoring? ............................................................................................. 5

Positive Comments .................................................................................................... 5

Negative Comments ................................................................................................... 5

Competitors .............................................................................................................. 5

Trademark Infringement ............................................................................................ 5

Counterfeit Sites ........................................................................................................ 6

Content Drivers ......................................................................................................... 6

The Importance of Brand Monitoring .............................................................................. 6

What Phrases to Monitor ............................................................................................... 7

Which Sites to Monitor................................................................................................... 8

Dealing with Negative Mentions...................................................................................... 8

Dealing with Positive Mentions ....................................................................................... 9

Protecting your Brand .................................................................................................... 9

5 Paid Tools ................................................................................................................ 10

BrandsEye ................................................................................................................ 10

Brandwatch .............................................................................................................. 11

Trackur .................................................................................................................... 12

Sproutsocial ............................................................................................................. 13

Brand Listen ............................................................................................................. 13

5 Free Tools ................................................................................................................ 14

TweetDeck ............................................................................................................... 14

Google Alerts ............................................................................................................ 14

HootSuite ................................................................................................................. 15

Social Mention .......................................................................................................... 15

TOPSY ..................................................................................................................... 16

Summary .................................................................................................................... 16

A Little Bit About Koozai: Koozai are a multi-award winning digital marketing agency.

We’re one of the UK’s fastest growing technology companies having been ranked 23rd in the

Deloitte Technology Fast50.

We help businesses connect with their customers online – providing a range of industry

leading services from Organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC)

Management to Link Building, Social Media and Brand Management.

We thrive on building long lasting client relationships and delivering true value for money.

We’re passionate about what we do - and that shows in our work.

No lengthy contracts, just world class Digital Marketing. Koozai will help you build your

brand online and achieve ROI that can be clearly measured against your bottom line.

How To Get In Touch: If you would like to get in touch with us, please visit the website (www.koozai.com) or use

one of the methods below:

About The Author: Samantha Noble has worked within the marketing industry for nine years, five of which have

been in search marketing. Her marketing career started off in the offline marketing sector

working for a leading tour operator company, before moving into an online role managing

the PPC and SEO campaigns for a financial services company.

She joined the team at Koozai back in 2009 as a Digital Marketing Executive and now heads

up the Search Team as Digital Marketing Director. She is a regular contributor to the Koozai

blog and other industry blogs including State of Search. Sam can often be found at various

industry conferences and has recently spoken at OMN London on the subject of Page One

Domination.

About This Whitepaper: With the continuous rise in the number of forums, review sites, blogs and social networks it

is now more important than ever for you to protect and monitor your brand name online.

This whitepaper has been created to provide you with a detailed guide on how to effectively

monitor your brand online.

What Is Brand Monitoring? Brand Monitoring is a strategy that allows you to track all mentions of a company name,

product or service that has been added to any online resource. It allows you to track:

Positive Comments

When people think about monitoring a brand, the first thing that springs to mind is often the

negative comments that may be out there. Although it is important to identify and deal with

any such issues, positive comments are often just as important. You should be interacting

with your ‘Brand Angels’ to ensure they keep portraying your brand in a positive light.

Negative Comments

This is where brand monitoring becomes incredibly important. No company wants their

brand being mentioned online in a bad light so if you are monitoring these comments

frequently, you should be able to find them and deal with them before they get out of hand.

Competitors

Keeping an eye on how your competitors are performing can help you uncover ways in

which you can promote your own brand. If a competitor has written a blog post that went

viral quickly, you could look at piggybacking the idea and writing something similar of your

own.

Trademark Infringement

Brand monitoring will also uncover any trademark infringements. The last thing a company

wants after they have gone to so much effort securing a trademark for their brand is to

have another company out there pretending to be them.

BRAND

Positive Comments

Negative Comments

Competitors

Trademark Infingement

Counterfeit Sites

Content Drivers

Counterfeit Sites

Companies that sell high value products have the added problem when it comes to websites

selling counterfeit items. Brands like ghd Hair (http://www.ghdhair.com) and Links of

London (http://www.linksoflondon.com/) regularly suffer from counterfeiting, so both go to

great lengths to combat the problem. Brand monitoring is just one of the strategies they

have in place to assist with this.

Content Drivers

It is always good to know which blog posts or pieces of content that you have written have

been received well. If you are aware of the content that drove the most shares online, you

can work with this and ensure you keep creating content that other people want to share.

The Importance Of Brand Monitoring Brand monitoring is one of the most important everyday tasks all companies should be

doing. The internet is continuing to grow at an extremely fast rate and the number of sites

out there that allow people to share their thoughts on a company, product or service are

growing even faster. If you are not monitoring mentions of your brand currently, you are

very much in the dark and could be in for a nasty shock a little later down the line.

All companies need to be aware of what is being said about them online, who is saying it

and the nature of the comments to ensure they can act on any positive or negative

mentions in the correct way.

So all in all, brand monitoring is quickly becoming one of the most important strategies that

you or your clients need to have in place.

Your Brand

Site A

Site B

Site C Site D

Site E

Site F

Site G

What Phrases To Monitor Depending on the tool(s) that you choose, there will be different limits with the number of

phrases that you can monitor. It is important that you consider the various keywords that

people may be using if they are mentioning your brand online.

Some of the main phrases I would recommend you consider monitoring include: Your brand name Common misspellings of your brand name Any abbreviations of your brand name Trademarks and/or copyrights

Senior management team names Key products (if names are not generic) Competitors Once you start tracking your chosen keywords you will quickly be able to see which ones

have the most benefit for you.

If your brand name contains generic phrases, you will get a lot of mentions that will not be

relevant your business. Here are a few examples of some well-known companies that would

have to go to great lengths to monitor mentions of their brand as the name will be

mentioned all over the internet with a totally different context.

If you are thinking of starting up a new business, this is something that you will want to

take into consideration. Choosing a brand name that is unique will save you a lot of time

and investment when it comes to monitoring brand mentions at a later date.

Brands like the ones shown below, will find monitoring mentions of their brand less time

consuming as the majority of the mentions that any tools find will be to do with them.

Which Sites To Monitor

There are so many different sites that people can mention you on and it is important that

you have a strategy in place so that can monitor them all. Later on in this whitepaper, I will

be providing you with a list of tools (free and paid) that can help you to achieve this. Some

of the most popular types of sites that you will see mentions of your brand include:

Social media sites

Industry related blogs

Personal blogs

Forums

Review sites

Article sites

Video sites

Photo sites

Competitor websites

Consumer websites

Some of the social media sites that are locked behind closed doors (Facebook) will make it

impossible to monitor mentions of your brand, but those that are in the open forum

(Twitter) are easy to track.

Depending on your niche, you may get more mentions from one type of site than another.

As a digital marketing agency, we tend to find that we pick up a large majority of our

mentions on Twitter and less mentions on sites like Flickr.

Dealing With Negative Mentions

If you come across a negative comment about your brand or product, the most important

thing to remember is to deal with it as quickly as possible. Ignoring negative mentions will

only entice others to add their comments, which is when you will start seeing significant

trails of feedback about your company.

My recommendation with anything negative is to approach the person who left the comment

either on the particular site or via another contact method. You don’t want to get into a

conversation online, so if you can bring it offline and discuss the issue via the phone or

email that is the best action to take.

If a negative comment is left in a forum or on a review site, it is worthwhile posting a

response apologising for any problems caused to show that you are on top of things and

want to keep your customers happy.

Dealing With Positive Mentions In the same light as the negative mentions online, you want to keep on top of your positive

comments too. A lot of brands tend to find that they have a group of people that

continuously portray their brand in a positive light. These are what I would call your ‘Brand

Angels’.

Interacting with people that share your content or give your brand a bit of a push will go a

long way. This is especially easy if you are being mentioned on Twitter as you can easily

interact with your followers and thank them directly.

Protecting Your Brand

We have looked at the importance of monitoring brand mentions but there is also the need

to protect your brand online. There are over 300 social networks and as a brand you need

to ensure that you have secured a spot on all of them.

You may look at some of the social networks and think that it is not worth registering for

your brand, but there is nothing to stop a competitor, disgruntled customer or Joe Bloggs

doing it for you.

Five years ago who would have thought Twitter would become as big as it has today? If you

were a brand back then and didn’t secure your company Twitter handle, it is very likely that

if you went to register it today, it would be taken by someone else and once they are gone,

it is very hard to try and reclaim them.

My recommendation here would be to use a site like Knowem (http://knowem.com/). For

just $599 they will sign you up to 300 social media websites so you don’t even need to do all

the leg work. All you need to do is provide them with the top level information about your

company and they do the rest. A worthwhile investment!

5 Paid Tools

BrandsEye

The first on my list for the paid tools that you can use for brand monitoring is BrandsEye. This is a tool that we use at Koozai on a daily basis to really understand what is being said about us across the web. From within the platform you can actively manage all your online conversations with regular notifications and turn the data into accurate insights to really understand what the mentions you are receiving do for your online presence. It is also fantastic for creating custom reports and graphs that you can share amongst your teams. They demonstrate how everyone in the company working together helps to grow the brand.

There is a varying pricing structure that has an option to suit most businesses whether you are large or small.

Brandwatch

Brandwatch offers a full range of social media monitoring

tools to suit every need. If you are looking for in-depth

analyst reporting or API integration, they have a solution

to help.

The main tool that I would recommend for brand monitoring from their suite of tools is the

online tool that will measure how much buzz you and your competitors are generating. It

will also highlight the specific details of what is being said so that you can act on any

mentions accordingly.

As with BrandsEye, Brandwatch also has a good pricing structure. It is more for the mid to large size companies with pricing starting at £400 per month.

Trackur

This tool is designed to assist you in tracking what people

are saying about you across the internet. Using the tool

you can monitor your reputation, news mentions, PR

campaigns, employee names and your competitors all

from an easy to use dashboard.

One of the USPs that Trackur has is that they guarantee that you will be up and running in

less than 60 seconds.

They have a diverse pricing platform tailored to suit all types of businesses. There is also a

free version but I would recommend paying to get the full suite of powerful tools.

Sproutsocial

This isn’t a tool that I have used personally, but I have

heard good things said about its functionally so wanted to

include it within this list.

The pricing starts at just $9 per month but if you want to take brand monitoring seriously

you should really look at either their Small Biz or Deluxe packages.

Brand Listen

The final paid tool on my list is Brand Listen which is by

far the cheapest option out of the five.

The paid packages start from just £10 per month up to £25 per month so if you are just

starting out with brand monitoring this could be a good option for you.

5 Free Tools

TweetDeck

This is a tool that I personally use every day whilst in the office and on the go, using their

iPhone application. It is a real-time browser which connects you with your contacts across

Twitter and other platforms keeping them all in the same place.

For brand monitoring you can setup custom search columns to look for mentions of your

brand name and related terms. As I mentioned above, it updates in real time so you will be

able to keep track of all your brand comments and links on Twitter as and when they

happen.

Google Alerts

This is one of the most frequently used monitoring tools and you can get regular email

updates of the latest relevant Google results based on the search queries you enter.

HootSuite

This is another tool that I can recommend from personal use. It works in a similar way to

TweekDeck and it is down to personal preference as to which you would prefer to use. Half

my team use TweetDeck and the other half use HootSuite. There is a free and paid version

of the tool so if you decide to give it a try, I would test it using the free version first to see

how you get on before committing to the premium package.

Social Mention

This is another great free tool which should be used to quickly show you whether the

conversation surrounding your brand is positive, negative or neutral.

TOPSY

This is a simple and easy to use real-time search tool for the social web. It will aggregate all

the content that is related to your search from a large number of social platforms and pulls

them into a manageable stream.

Summary Thank you very much for reading this whitepaper. I do hope that you have taken some tips

from it that you can put into practice.

As I mentioned at the start, brand monitoring should be at the top of every company’s

priority list. Unless you know what people are saying about you online, you are very much in

the dark and could be in for a nasty surprise a few months down the line.

If you do need any further information or assistance, you can get in touch with us easily

using any of the options below.