Online Reputation Management - Bachelor

Candidate: 387. Media & Communication Bachelor thesis.

Bachelor thesis title:

Monitoring the buzz – Online Reputation Management

Rune Haugestad

+ 47 94 88 29 01

rune_haugestad@yahoo.no

My digital CV and recommendations:

http://no.linkedin.com/in/runehaugestad

Media & Communication 6th term

Oslo University College – 19.05.2010

Appendix A: Survey documentation & respondent answers

Appendix B: Screenshots from monitoring search tools.

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Contents
1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 4

2. Research objectives and purposes .................................................................................................. 4

2.1 Excluded topics ............................................................................................................................ 5

2.2 Purposes ....................................................................................................................................... 6

2.3 Theory and methodology .............................................................................................................. 6

2.4 Chosen methodology .................................................................................................................... 7

3. Theory ............................................................................................................................................ 8

3.1 A new era within Corporate Communication ............................................................................... 8

3.2 Stakeholders and Stakeholder Management ............................................................................... 10

3.3 Trust ........................................................................................................................................... 13

3.4 Identity versus Image ................................................................................................................. 13

3.5 Transparency .............................................................................................................................. 14

3.6 Branding versus Reputation........................................................................................................ 15

3.6.1 What is branding? ................................................................................................................ 15

3.6.2 What is reputation? .............................................................................................................. 15

3.6.3 Where‟s the difference between branding and reputation? .................................................. 15

3.7 Marketing versus Public Relations anno 2010 ............................................................................ 16

3.8 What is Reputation Management (RM)? .................................................................................... 17

3.9.1 What is Online Reputation Management (ORM)? ................................................................... 18

3.9.2 Why ORM? ......................................................................................................................... 19

3.9.3 What to track? ..................................................................................................................... 20

3.9.4 Sentiment/Tone text analysis search engines ....................................................................... 20

3.9.5 What kind of ORM monitoring tools is out there? ............................................................... 21

3.9.6 Quantitative based tool examples (See appendix B for screenshots): .................................. 21

3.9.7 Qualitative based tool examples (See appendix B3&B4 for screenshots): ........................... 22

3.9.8 Qualitative and Sentiment/Tone based tool examples (See appendix B5 for screenshots):.. 22

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4.1 Defining a ORM strategy ........................................................................................................... 23

4.2 Damage control planning............................................................................................................ 24

4.3 How to Recover from an Online Brand Attack ........................................................................... 24

4.4 ORM and ethics .......................................................................................................................... 26

4.5 When it`s time to wrap up your written strategy ......................................................................... 27

5.1 ORM & Social Media Monitoring Tools .................................................................................... 27

5.2 News site monitoring vendors .................................................................................................... 27

5.3 Web trends/analytic tools: .......................................................................................................... 28

5.4 Monitoring tasks and routines inside Alterian SM2 (See appendix B9 for screenshots): ............ 28

6. Discussion ........................................................................................................................................ 31

6.1 Analyzing my survey .................................................................................................................. 31

6.2 Patterns & themes ....................................................................................................................... 33

6.3 My interpretation ........................................................................................................................ 34

7. Summary & conclusion .................................................................................................................... 35

8. References ........................................................................................................................................ 36

Appendix A: Survey documentation & answers ................................................................................... 37

Appendix B: Screenshots from monitoring search tools. ...................................................................... 44

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1. Introduction
My choice of theme Online Reputation Management (Hereafter shortened to the acronym
ORM), and title; “Monitoring the buzz - Online Reputation Management” is based on my
interests in online user behavior, online brand perception, digital communication, business
strategy and Internet technology, in addition to rapidly new developments and challenges
within online corporate communication including reputation management. Through 11 years
of experience from the IT branch, I have worked with project management of ERP, CRM and
Web solutions, and consulting about strategic thinking within both business strategy and IT
strategy. I decided on ORM as theme for my Bachelor thesis last term when I was lucky
enough to start an ORM project at a big Norwegian software developer company (Hereafter
called company X) as part of my two weeks practice in the course Information and
Communication in practice. I got the opportunity to continue on the ORM project for new
eleven weeks this term as a (15 ECTS) practice module in the Bachelor program. Company X
has truly global market share and reach with several millions users of their different product
portfolios. To get both an historical and modern perspective on reputation management I
found the following two quotes: Before: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five
minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently”. Quote: Warren Buffett.
Source:http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/warren_buffett.html. Now; the new social
Web era: “In this new world of instant connection and networked customers, understanding
what people are saying about your company, your products, and your competitors is vital for
business success. Reputations, like trust, are built over time, but can be destroyed in an
instant!” Quote: David L. Sifry, founder and Chairman, Technorati, Inc. (Beal & Strauss
2008). So with online reputation, we`re talking about minutes or hours and just a mouse click
to ruin a reputation…..

2. Research objectives and purposes

Why is online reputation so important in addition to traditional offline reputation for
organizations? What kind of challenges will ORM create for an organization and its
communication/PR and marketing departments? Therefore to try and answer this question I
have decided to ask two top level executives, one Vice President of Corporate
Communication (Hereafter called Manager A) and the other is Director of Marketing,
department of Consumer Products (Hereafter called Manager B) as respondents. They both
work at the same software company where I have my practice and internship, anonymously
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hereafter called the alias; company X. I have created a questionnaire with twenty open ended
questions to gather my empirical data in this educational research. I have decided on the
following research objectives: How important is it to have a written plan or strategy for
ORM? Who should participant developing an ORM plan or strategy? Who should own ORM
in an organization? Should ORM strategy be a part of CRM/market strategy, corporate
communication strategy, digital strategy, social media strategy or stand for itself? How can
these strategies support and be coordinated towards already defined business goals? What
kind of goals, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), ROI (Return On Investment) (Haugestad
2009A, B) and success criteria‟s can be identified and defined within ORM? Is ORM
important today or is it a future feature? This is the strategic and tactical questions I want to
explore and research. Then will I look into the more practical part of ORM; monitoring tools,
services and internal organizational routines. What kind of monitoring has been done in the
past inside the software company, and what kind of new monitoring tools and services are
adapted or planned to be deployed? Who do they want to monitor? What kind of target web
sites, blogs and social media platforms are important to monitor? Do the marketing and
communication departments have any online outreach guidelines? And do they have any
internal online damage control guidelines? Does the view and approach regarding ORM differ
much from a communication/PR and a marketing manager‟s point of view? To find out this I
will also look closer to the differences and relationship between online branding and online
reputation.

2.1 Excluded topics
I will not explore online branding or Brand Management in details, just look into the
relationship branding has with reputation related to ORM. Ethics regarding social media, e-
marketing and online PR are discussed in my two earlier term paper exams; e-marketing
strategy (Haugestad 2009A), and Social Media Strategy (Haugestad 2009B). These topics
mentioned above are excluded because I want to do an in-depth analysis into the theory and
practice related to ORM listed in the theory and methodology section, and ORM ethics alone
could deserve twenty pages alone …

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2.2 Purposes

My purposes with my research are to sum it up; identify and discuss strategic and tactical
usage of ORM. Analyze the relationship between online branding and online reputation, and
the relationship between communication/PR and marketing. Then will I identify ORM tools
and services and I will try to categorize some of them. I will also create a step-by-step ORM
strategy/plan based on insights from my curriculum, respondents and my achieved knowledge
from my ORM internship practice. Because of this I decided on the following research
question: “How can ORM be a tool to sustain and grow an excellent reputation?”A
selection of a few ORM tools will also be presented with some practical insights with usage
of screen shots to support the theory and to visualize the practical “hands on” usage of
monitoring tools and services. The multi disciplinary of ORM topics and use of illustrations
and screenshots from monitoring tools will cause increased page numbers, and therefore have
I got permission after asking, from Robert Wallace Vaagan, my thesis supervisor to extend
this bachelor paper up to 30 pages (Our (Studieplan) course guidelines says 20-40 pages).

2.3 Theory and methodology
I decided to provide my bachelor curriculum literature based on the following topics;
corporate communication, public relations (PR), branding, marketing and ORM. I chose
literature based on these topics because ORM is multidisciplinary. Therefore I provided the
following literature as my bachelor thesis curriculum: Corporate Communication – A
strategic Approach to Building Reputation, by Brønn, Simic Peggy and Wiig Berg, Roberta
(2008), Public Relations, by L‟Etang, Jacquie(2008), and From Brand Vision to Brand
Evaluation – The strategic process of growing and strengthening brands (2006), by
Chernatony, de Leslie will I use to understand the theory behind reputation management
including defining related areas such as; identity versus image, trust, transparency, branding
versus reputation, reputation management, stakeholders and stakeholder management, public
relations/online PR. These literature insights facilitate a deeper understanding of reputation
management theory and background, so my thesis can be theoretically well grounded. To look
into different (culture) approaches and the relationship between PR and marketing will I use
chapter 14: Defining the Relationship Between Public Relations and Marketing by Hutton,
James G from the book Handbook of Public Relations (2001), by Heath, Robert L. &
Vasquez, Gabriel (2001). In addition will I use the following literature to understand and
learn the practical approach to ORM: Radically Transparent – Monitoring and Managing
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Reputations Online (2008), by Beal, Andy and Strauss, Judy and Understanding DIGITAL
Marketing – Marketing strategies for engaging the digital generation (2009), chapter 8;
Online PR and reputation management by Ryan, Damien & Jones, Calvin. These literature
insights point out the paradigm shift within online communication/PR and marketing related
to ORM. I will use “Educational Research – An introduction (2003), by Gall, Meredith D. &
Gall, Joyce P. & Borg, Walther R., as a framework to support my research methodology and
thesis document structure.

2.4 Chosen methodology
I‟ve chosen a multi research methodology approach to my bachelor thesis (Gall, Gall & Borg
2003); I will use text analysis to understand relevant theory from the curriculum mentioned in
the theory and methodology section above. To do my own research have I chosen qualitative
methodology, and more specifically, an open based e-mail based questionnaire to gather my
empirical data to this educational research. This is because I wanted to coordinate findings
and insights from the curriculum authors with my own survey. Norman Denzin and Yvonna
Lincoln define qualitative methodology like this: “Qualitative research is multi method in its
focus, involving an interpretive naturalistic approach to its subject matter. This means that
qualitative researches study things in their natural settings. Attempting to make sense of, or
interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them” (Gall, Gall & Borg
2003 p. 24). My questionnaire tries to explore status quo due to the topics and questions listed
in the Research objectives and purposes section. See appendix A for how exact the open
questions are written, and to find the original answers from my respondents as documentation
and verification. I have used electronic forms and e-mail as delivering tool after I had
explained all the questions to the participants face to face, so I didn‟t need to transcribe my
questions and their answers. Both my participants understand my questions when I explained
them, so I didn‟t need to re-phrase them.

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3. Theory

3.1 A new era within Corporate Communication
Corporate communication was much less complex before the Facebook era, the Google age or
the recommendation age arrived on everyone‟s doorstep. Web 2.0 technology and the
exploding force from all the people joining social media networks and the blogosphere, create
challenges for organizations who do not grasp the forces from the social sphere (Haugestad
2009B). The main differences are that one way mass communication was the standard before,
but with the social sphere exploding, one to one and two ways communication are forcing
organizations to listen and engage to multiple online channels (Beal & Strauss 2008, Ryan &
Jones 2009). Before the new social Web era, a company had to worry about something
negative when it appeared in the newspaper, at the TV news or at the radio news. But today
the situation is radically changed: “Online is where reputations are made now” says Dr.
Leslie Gaines-Ross, Chief Reputation Strategist at PR firm Weber Shandwich (Beal & Strauss
2008 p. 9). The social media sphere and Web 2.0 has already changed the playing field.
Everyone online has now been their own publishers. The social media sphere and Consumer
Generated Media (CGM) provides a megaphone for all the disgruntled; with no entry barrier,
few online global legal marketing/PR laws and therefore little legal accountability, instant
publishing and commentary and most important; Internet as a free distribution channel to
thousands and millions of people. All this people are instantly connected, communicating,
sharing, collaborating and recommend information and sharing their opinion including what
they think about organizations and their respective brands, products and services. And most
important to understand is that they trust each other and their word-of-mouth
recommendations several times more than traditional commercials and ads from TV, radio,
newspapers or e-marketing campaigns (ibid). “The old rules of Marketing and PR are
ineffective in an Online world” says David Meerman Scott (2009). Of course we find positive
online mentions about a certain brand, but it seems that the negative mentions and opinions
draw the huge and collective crowd. Securing that online brand and investing in and
cultivating an impeccable and influential reputation are critical to establishing and
maintaining a consistent, strategic, and complementary presence from stakeholder to
stakeholder, not just about what's popular today, but ultimately engaging where your
communities are congregating. Meerman Scott (2009) adapt Chris Andersons (2008) “Long
tail” concept and uses phrases such as “The Long tail of PR” and “The Long tail of

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Marketing” to explain changes described above. Today we are living in the recommendation
age, the Facebook age and the Google age to mention some popular phrases (Friedman 2006,
Anderson 2008, Shih 2009, Safko & Brake 2009). Everyone in the social sphere seems to
have an opinion, and they post it “everywhere” accessible for others to read. It is essential to
grasp what all this means for business. So related to reputation, it‟s important to focus on
building a strong organizational and brand identity, which transfer its online brand image to
be perceived in the social sphere. To monitor the results of online branding, e-marketing,
communication and online PR, you need online reputation management tools and services.
Web 2.0 technologies have transformed how reputation systems are designed and used by the
Web (Beal & Strauss 2008, Ryan
& Jones 2009). Today we can
choose between multiple ad hoc
search tools and trend data tools.
They can be categorized under
three main method categories;
quantitative, qualitative and
sentiment/tone based solutions.
Web 2.0 technology has created
today‟s ORM solutions as both
dynamic and interactive systems.
The last four to six exploding social Web years have created a need for monitoring the social
sphere and all the conversations and buzz out there. Some of the ORM tools are doing semi
automatically other more fully automatically text sentiment analyzes. These ORM systems
can track, find and monitor user defined search words and phrases across hundreds and some
of them are tracking millions of sources, including corporate web sites, blogs, news sites,
blogs and Social platforms such as Facebook open posts and twitter communication. How
many negative mentions are there out there compared to positive mentions around a specific
brand, product or service? And some ORM tools are tracking it in real time or close to it. The
web 2.0 technology and the social web ushered in an era of corporate transparency. Beal &
Strauss (2008) are talking about taking advantage of Web 2.0 and PR 2.0 to be radically
transparent. Both corporate communications, PR, marketing and branding have evolved from
a one-way monologue to a two-way conversation. These new developments move towards a
relatively trustworthy and reliable online reputation systems in the Web 2.0 era to identify and
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monitor all the stakeholders and their opinions. It‟s crucial for a modern organization to
understand the strategies and tactics needed to engage and join the conversation, and to be
able to build and sustain an excellent reputation. To understand the basics behind ORM will I
in the next few sections investigate the background theory for reputation management and the
theory behind the words, terms and phrases such as; stakeholders and Stakeholder
Management, trust, identity versus image, transparency, branding versus reputation and the
culture and differences within marketing versus public relations related to ORM (Beal &
Strauss 2008, Ryan & Jones 2009).

3.2 Stakeholders and Stakeholder Management
Stakeholders are a common word in my curriculum and across ORM monitoring vendors.
What is the definition of stakeholders? Brønn and Berg (2006 p. 122) have a broad oriented
definition: “Any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievements of an
organization‟s purpose”. Stakeholder Management is the discipline of identifying,
prioritizing, managing, communicating and monitoring stakeholders. The same authors define
Stakeholder Management this way: “As a concept refers to the necessity for an organization
to manage its relationship with specific stakeholder groups in an action-oriented way” (ibid).
Stakeholder Management is an important discipline within Reputation Management
(Hereafter used the acronym: RM) and ORM. So to say it simple: Stakeholders are those who
touch your business and have a stake, direct or indirect, in your success. The task within (RM)
ORM is to identify key prioritized stakeholders and monitor their (offline) online
conversations and buzz related to the organization and its leaders, brands, products and
services (Beal & Strauss 2008, Ryan & Jones 2009). We can categorize the stakeholders so it
will be easier to prioritize who should get closest attention from the organization both offline
and online (Brønn & Berg 2006 p. 122-144, Beal & Strauss p. 347-348):

 Responsibility: Those to whom the organization has/may have legal, financial or operational
responsibilities
 Influence: Those with influence or decision-making power and whose actions may make the
performance of the organization easier or more difficult.
 Proximity: Those stakeholders with whom the organization has more interaction, long-term
relationships or dependency in its day-to-day operations.
 Dependency: Those directly or indirectly dependent on the organization, in economic or financial
terms, in terms of regional or local infrastructure, or basic needs
 Representation: Those who represent others
 Policy and strategic intent: Those the organization addresses directly or indirectly through its policies
and value statements, including those who can give early warning on emerging issues and risks.

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There are two major elements to Stakeholder Management: Stakeholder Analysis and
Stakeholder Planning. Stakeholder Analysis is the technique used to identify the key people
who have to be won over. You then use Stakeholder Planning to build the support that helps
you succeed with your communication/PR, marketing and ORM efforts. The benefits of using
a stakeholder-based approach within RM and ORM are that (ibid):

 You can use the opinions of the most powerful stakeholders (influencers and advocates) to shape your
branding and reputation at an early stage. Not only does this make it more likely that they will support
you, their input can also improve the quality of your branding and reputation.
 Gaining support from powerful stakeholders can help you to win more resources – this makes it more
likely that your PR, branding and reputation will be successful.
 By communicating with stakeholders early and often, you can ensure that they know what you are
doing and fully understand the benefits of your organization; this means they can support you actively
when necessary.
 You can anticipate what people's reaction to your PR, online PR, communication, e-marketing and
marketing may be, and build into your plan the actions that will win people's support.

The people inside your key stakeholders can also be categorized for example in this way:

 High power, interested people: these are the people you must fully engage with, and make the greatest
efforts to satisfy.
 High power, less interested people: put enough work in with these people to keep them satisfied, but
not so much that they become bored with your message.
 Low power, interested people: keep these people adequately informed, and talk to them to ensure that
no major issues are arising.
 Low power, less interested people: again, monitor these people, but do not bore them with excessive
communication.

Simplified stakeholder overview map, with focus on two-way corporate communication.

The next step is to define them by the following categories; influencers, advocates, promoters
and detractors, and to plot this into your ORM plan or strategy and your monitoring system.
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Within ORM terms these people are categorized as (Beal & Strauss 2008, Ryan & Jones
2009):

 Influencers: People who recommend (or discourage) usage or purchase within your industry .They are
non partial.

 Advocates: People who already love your business, brands, products and services. They are partial.

 Promoters: The promoter is a loyal user/stakeholder who will frequent and enthusiastically recommend
your brands and products to his or her friends. These are the people that grow your business for you!

 Detractors: The detractor is the unhappy user/stakeholder who will spread the word of mouth about
why he or she is unhappy with your company, brands, products and services. These are the people who
damage your reputation and tarnish the value you have established in your market .

Detractors can be sorted and described as the; virgin detractor, platinum, determined,
undermining and the professional detractor (Beal & Strauss 2008).

Understanding your key stakeholders:

The final stage is to get an understanding of what motivates your stakeholders and how you
need to win them around today and in the future. Examples of key questions that can help you
understand your stakeholders are:

 What emotional or financial interest do they have in the outcome of your brand, product or service? Is it
positive or negative?
 What motivates these most of all?
 What information do they want from you?
 How do they want to receive information from you? What is the best way of communicating your
message to them?
 What is their current opinion of your work? Is it based on good information?
 Who influences their opinions generally, and who influences their opinion of you? Do some of these
influencers therefore become important stakeholders in their own right?
 If they are not likely to be positive, what will win them around to support your brand and reputation?
 If you don't think you will be able to win them around, how will you manage their opposition & critics?
 Who else might be influenced by their opinions (their reach)? Do these people become stakeholders in
their own right?

You can summarize the understanding you have gained with the stakeholder map, so that you
can easily see which stakeholders are expected to be detractors or critics, and which
stakeholders are likely to be influencers and advocates of your organization, brands, products
and services. What actions can you take to get more from your advocates or win over your
detractors?

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3.3 Trust
Let‟s look into some definitions of „trust‟: To quote Elise Bauer, partner of Pacifica Group
Consultancy: “Trust is built on reputation and reputation is generally NOT built on
advertising. It is built on what others say about you” (Beal & Strauss 2008 p. 144). We are
living in the recommendation era, and surveys from Forrester Research support this in their
findings: “90% of consumers Trust recommendations from others (their peers), while fewer
than 10 % trust ads” (Beal & Strauss 2008 p. 68). Trust must follow the two-ways
conversation model; organizations must trust their stakeholders, and stakeholders must trust
the organization. “Trust, reliability, sincerity and authenticity all contribute to a good
reputation” (L‟Etang 2008 p. 50). Most important; build trust in an authentic, consistent and
transparent way with your key communities and stakeholders.

3.4 Identity versus Image
What is the difference between identity and image? It is obvious that different authors and
scholars define these areas differently. The reason can be explained from their different
education and disciplines such as; communication, PR, marketing, sociology, psychology and
so on. Let‟s see what I can find among my curriculum. First out from a PR perspective:
“Organizational identity can be understood as the „essence‟ of the organization, comprising
the multiple aspects and core components which make it distinctively recognizable” (L‟Etang
2008 p. 53). L‟Etang (2008) refers to Moingeon and Soenen who usefully distinguished five
types of organizational identity (ibid):

1. The professed identity - what a group or organization professes about itself to define collective identity

2. The projected identity - the way the professed identity is communicated via different media (including,
but not limited to mass media)

3. The experienced identity - „the lived experience‟ referred to above and the beliefs members hold about
the organization‟s character.

4. The manifested identity - the core historical aspects referred to above „essence‟.

5. The attributed identity – attributes ascribed to the organization by the organization‟s audience and
stakeholders

Also referred to Balmer and Greyser they propose that organizations have different types of
identity similar to Moingeon and Soenen. They propose the following identities; actual,
communicated, conceived, ideal and desired (Brønn & Berg 2005 p. 28). The brand
perspective to identity and image are very similar; de Chernatony (2006) defines both brand

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identity as the internal perspective and brand image as the perceived external one. Then let‟s
look at the term „image‟ and the relationship with „identity‟. “The term „image‟ is derived
from „imitari‟, meaning imitation or reproduction” (L‟Etang 2008 p. 54). An organization
projects or transfers its identity and creates an external image being perceived among the
stakeholders. These projections are then consumed and interpreted by all the individuals
among the stakeholders, who construct various images in their heads of the organization. To
quote the dictum of advertiser Bernstein: “Image is a reality…It is the result of our actions. If
the image (Perception) is false and our performance is good, it‟s our fault for being bad
communicators. If the image (Perception) is true and reflects our bad performance, it‟s our
fault for being bad managers. Unless we know our image we can neither communicate nor
manage”(L‟Etang 2008 p. 57). This is the very essence of reputation management; to observe
and monitor the gap between wanted image and the external attributed image from the
stakeholders. How internal staff think external stakeholders see the organization may not be
identical to how external stakeholders actually see the organization. To sum it up with
statements from Bernstein (ibid):

 Images is a reality, not reality itself, even though receivers see the images they construct as reality

 There will always be multiple images, not just one

 There is a distinction to be made between the image that the managers would like others to have and
images that are constructed

 Images contribute to the development of an overall judgement about an organization‟s reputation

3.5 Transparency
“Transparency means that we can see through processes, decisions and communications, so
that there is no opaqueness or obscurity, no organizational veil or fig leaf” (L‟Etang 2008 p.
52). The link between image and trust are important factors related to corporate
communication and PR to manage building and nurture reputation. Transparency provides the
conditions that allow trust, accountability, cooperation, collaboration and true commitment to
prosper (ibid). Regarding the company Edelman‟s recognized annual global trust survey
called “trust barometer”, they have always interesting findings: “Transparency and honesty
(64%) a primary driver of reputation”. Source: Trust barometer 2010, Edelman UK. This is
even more true and important online than offline where it is more difficult to reverse or limit
negative buzz. To manage this, organizations need to be totally transparent in how they
interact and engage with their stakeholders (Beal & Strauss 2008).

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3.6 Branding versus Reputation

3.6.1 What is branding?
Let‟s look into some branding definitions: “Corporate branding helps
stakeholders/consumers to simplify choice and provide reassurance through emotional,
functional even spiritually consistency” (L‟Etang 2008 p. 52). A more detailed business
focused definition is promoted by de Chernatony (2006 p. 13); “A successfully brand is an
identifiable product, service, person or place, augmented in such a way that the buyer or user
perceives relevant, unique, sustainable added values which match their needs most closely”.
Closer to see the direct relation to reputation can be found within corporate branding:
“Corporate branding can be described as the symmetric influencing of the image formation of
the organization, in such a manner that the groups upon which the organization is dependent
get a positive impression of the „company behind the brand‟” (Brønn & Berg 2005 p. 31).

3.6.2 What is reputation?
Let‟s look into some reputation definitions: “A reputation is generally something an
organization has with strangers, but relationship is generally something an organization has
with its friends and associates. Brands represent the middle ground between relationship and
reputation.” Quote: Hatton (L‟Etang 2008). Brønn and Berg have assembled several
definitions but I choose to focus on the following from Fombrun because its simplicity:
“Corporate reputation is the sum of various stakeholders‟ images of the organization” (Brønn
& Berg 2005). Reputation is in essence no more and no less than a collection of positive and
negative impressions added from all the external stakeholders (ibid). According to Merriam-
Webster define reputation like this: “1) An overall quality or character as seen or judged by
people in general, and 2) a place in public esteem or regard: a good name” (Beal & Strauss
2006 p. 13). So reputation is dependent on both trust and transparency, and the relationship
between identity and image. Reputation is also pure perception that may or may not be based
on facts, and it changes together with changes in how the brand image perception is
recognized by the stakeholders.

3.6.3 Where’s the difference between branding and reputation?
Branding is about the organization, the brand, product or service. Reputation management is
about how you deliver on that promise, ORM is about monitoring that brand perception. One
element cannot work without the other, so when it comes to the online sphere, this challenge

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managers of marketing and communication/PR to coordinate their strategic goals, objectives,
KPIs, actions and efforts. “One of the problems with seeking to develop a brand through
minimizing the gap between brand identity and brand image, is that image refers to a
customer perception at a specific point in time, and thus leads to short-term fluctuations. By
contrast, reputation relates to perceptions about a brand over time, and as it is a customer
based (stakeholder) measure it is more stable” (de Chernatony 2006 p. 47).

3.7 Marketing versus Public Relations anno 2010
Regarding to James G. Hutton (Heath & Vasquez 2001 p. 205-214) he pinpoint some
traditional (and now historical) ways of organize marketing, communication and PR
departments and their respective and overlapping responsibilities. He describe five models
what he calls; the “separate but equal” model, the “overlapping” model, the “marketing-
dominant” model, the “public relations-dominant” model and the “marketing = public
relations”. What fitted best depends on the very nature of the organization and their products
and services, and depends often on if they are private or public sector. Hutton points out that it
is no one correct model or answer. He concludes that the relationship between public relations
and marketing was defined by the marketing side (ibid). Today we can say that it is the social
sphere forces that defines and set the agenda and challenge these departments (Beal & Strauss
2009, Ryan & Jones 2009). What should the relationship between PR and marketing
departments look like in a time when the very lines between the two disciplines are
increasingly blurry related to the online social sphere and ORM? Who among PR,
communication and marketing departments are best equipped to listen, monitor, learn, engage
and guide influencers, advocates and their direct word of mouth and viral power, and
represent a brand within all the social media networks and the blogosphere in the mix? Are
there still different; cultures, strategies, goals and objectives between communication/PR and
marketing departments affecting ORM? In the offline world, PR and marketing still have their
respective areas, culture, skills, disciplines and goals, but the online sphere forces they two
into convergence (Meerman Scott 2009 p. 26).

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3.8 What is Reputation Management (RM)?
RM is the concept of monitoring (historical offline) reputation outside the organization.
Corporate reputation depends on what others (external) think about it. (From Latin: reputare -
to think over). The RM task is to monitor the gap between the wanted reputation and the
actual reputation perception. Then the action plan should include methods trying to minimize
the gap. The Reputation/Brand Manager no longer controls the brand. They are critical to
managing perception and carefully weaving it to serve the business needs and decision
making, but they do not own it. Stakeholders, on the other hand, today fully control the brand
(Beal & Strauss 2008, Ryan & Jones 2009). Their interaction with it defines it both for
themselves and for others. So Stakeholder Management is an important part of RM. Brands
which acknowledge this prosper by providing caring steers on the community. Brands which
fight it risk undermining the brand itself. RM is historical a discipline within corporate
communication/PR theory and practice (L‟Etang 2008, Brønn & Berg 2006).

Reputation Institute has identified 5 principles within RM:

1. The Principle of Distinctiveness
Strong reputations result when companies own a distinctive position in the
minds of resource-holders.

2. The Principle of Focus
Strong reputations result when companies focus their actions and
communications around a single core theme.

3. The Principle of Consistency
Strong reputations result when companies are consistent in their actions and
communications to all resource-holders.

4. The Principle of Identity
Strong reputations result when companies act in ways that are consistent
with espoused principles of identity. Spin is anathema to reputation-building,
and in time all efforts to manipulate external images that rely purely on
advertising and public relations fail when they are disconnected from the
company’s identity.

5. The Principle of Transparency
Strong reputations result when companies are transparent in the way they
conduct their affairs. Transparency requires communication - a lot of it.

Source: http://www.reputationinstitute.com

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3.9.1 What is Online Reputation Management (ORM)?

There are many definitions of online reputation management as well. I choose to use Beal and
Strauss‟s (2008) definition of ORM: “Realizing that the perceived value of your brand is
defined by information found and discussed on the internet; therefore requiring your constant
monitoring and participation in these web conversations”. The definition is easy to
understand. Thinking of ORM as either communication/PR, marketing or branding activity is
wrong. It is all three and much more. Reputation cannot be considered the sole responsibility
of any of these three disciplines. Realistically, anything which one does impacts the other two
and in this online sphere it‟s critical that all three works together to ensure the desired goals,
objectives and outcomes are achieved. This does require that the natural friction between
these departments needs to be put aside of mutual gain. The upside of this is that ORM can be
distributed; meaning that a small amount of resource is required from each department
managed by a multi disciplinary Brand/Reputation Manager if possible. Brands are dynamic
in their nature. They have evolve to reflect the changing demands of stakeholders as they gain
more experience, as well as continually maintaining a position of strength against always
changing and evolving markets and competitors (de Chernatony 2006). ORM is a dynamic
and a continued learning process, and must be adaptive to technological changes in the online
web world and the social sphere. One objective with ORM is to monitor external changes of
reputation based on brand image perception. Depending on whether the ORM tool trend stats
results are favorable or unfavorable, this feedback should provide guidance about future
actions and be a tool for faster and smarter business management decisions, and as planning
tool for future (e-) marketing and (online) PR campaigns.

RM/Online Reputation Management life cycle.

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The prevalence of social media has made ORM not only relevant, but a necessity for many
organizations. To put it simple; ORM is the consistent and dynamic research, analysis, and
engagement toolkit regarding reputation represented online. The key to ORM is engagement,
which immediately creates concern for several managers and departments both since ORM is
multidisciplinary, a strategic and tactical tool and demands coordination‟s across the
organization. While engagement can be a daunting aspect for any company, it is important to
remember that conversations about an organization may already be occurring and influencing
online; with or without its own involvement. By not engaging, others have the opportunity to
create brand image and built reputation for you. At the same time is it crucial to understand
from the start of any ORM project that the company NOT can control the conversation and
buzz out there, but to recognize that ORM is the solution to help out with strategic business
decision making, engagement and damage limitation control and routines. The conversation
can‟t be controlled by the organization only balanced (Beal & Strauss 2008, Ryan & Jones
2009).

3.9.2 Why ORM?
Optimal deployment of ORM will give organization‟s better answers to the following
questions:

 How can an organization a boost its online image, brand and reputation?

 How can an organization find out where the right users, influencers, advocates (Key stakeholders) are
talking about their related industry topics?

 How can an organization faster and smarter take action to manage negative online articles and
conversations, to repair and balance negative reputation?

 How can an organization empower its actions due to usage of positive reputation?

 How can an organization use ORM tools to learn faster than its competitors and use this information in
its own strategic and tactical business decision making and planning process?

“If competition is the motor of the market economy, reputation is the fuel that makes it
run.” Quote: Professor Charles J. Fombrun and Christopher B. Foss. Source:
http://www.reputationinstitute.com

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3.9.3 What to track?
There are four main dimensions we want to track and measure within the defined key
stakeholders:

1. Visibility: How many online places is a company visible? At many or a few?

2. Reach: When an article/post mentions a company or brand, how many people does it reach? Is
it a popular website/blog or not?

3. Influence: Does this particular publication or journalist/blogger carry more credibility than
average so that what he or she writes have higher impact on the reader? Is it a key influencer or
advocate writing about your brand or competitors?

4. Sentiment: Is it positive, neutral or negative?

3.9.4 Sentiment/Tone text analysis search engines
Sentiment and tone analyzes are done by SaaS (Software as a Service) monitor vendors text
search engines and their respective algorithms. It is difficult to explain so I let Lexalytics , one
of many vendors explain it:

“The first step in determining the tone of a document is to break the document into its basic parts of speech
(POS tagging). POS tagging is a fairly mature technology that identifies all the structural elements of a
document or sentence, including:

• Verbs • Nouns • Adjectives • Proper • Nouns

To determine the sentiment of a document, you identify the parts of speech within a document that indicate
emotion. In most cases these are adjective-noun combinations like "horrible pitching" and "devastating loss".
Once the phrases are identified, the process of scoring the phrases for tone begins.”

Source: Lexalytics PDF document: http://www.lexalytics.com/solutions/

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Different vendors have different text analysis engines, and are their business secret like the
algorithms inside Google‟s search engine. They are different regarding search speed, amount
of data and historic data period storage, how close they are to real time analysis or not. Some
have two weeks of historic data stored others have from one to six months stored. See a
schematic ORM monitoring process cycle in appendix B (B1).

3.9.5 What kind of ORM monitoring tools is out there?
There are two main categories: Ad hoc analyzing tools and trend data analyzing tools. They
can both be quantitative (Only counting mentions), qualitative (Shows the content) and
sentiment/tone (Text analysis of the content) based tools. There are many tools in both
categories out there. Most of them are SaaS (Software as a Service) vendors. Some of them
are calling themselves either Brand monitoring, online Reputation monitoring, Social Media
monitoring, conversation tracker, buzz monitoring, online PR monitoring providers and so on.
For example can software called Brand monitoring or Reputation monitoring do the same
main thing. They all scan, track and monitor news sites, blogs, micro blogs and social
networks. So the output depends on how you are using the system and how you create and
manage your searches and what you monitor. Some tools are created for marketers; other for
communication/PR and other tools again does have a crossover strategy and usability. The
sooner you get a hold of what people are saying about your brand and plan how you will
respond and manage those stakeholder relationships, the more successful you will be in the
social sphere. This area is still relatively new (Many of the SaaS vendors are less than five
years old) and no Reputation, Brand or social media monitoring companies has gotten it 100%
right yet regarding sentiment/tone analyzes.

3.9.6 Quantitative based tool examples (See appendix B for screenshots):
To identify your status quo regarding visibility HowSociable (Appendix: B2) is a great tool. It
can be used to define your visibility KPIs and to monitor changes over time. Source:
http://www.howsociable.com/ . Web Trends analysis tools: Internal Website statistics: Google

Analytics (Appendix: B6), Omniture‟s SiteCatalyst. External Website statistics: Google
Trends and Insights, WebTrends Analytics for Facebook (Appendix: B7) Compare.com and
Alexa.com. (Appendix: B8).

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3.9.7 Qualitative based tool examples (See appendix B3&B4 for screenshots):
 Google Blogsearch (Free): http://blogsearch.google.com/

 The Nielsen Company (Free): http://www.blogpulse.com/

 IceRocket (Free): http://icerocket.com

 Twitter search tool: Klout (B3) (Free): http://klout.com/

 Twitter search tool: TwitterAnalyzer (B4) (Free): http://twitteranalyzer.com/ms.aspx?userId=ibm

3.9.8 Qualitative and Sentiment/Tone based tool examples (See appendix B5 for
screenshots):
 SocialMention (Free): http://socialmention.com

Subscription & Pay based SaaS vendors:

 Alterian SM2 (Medium and Enterprise solution): http://socialmedia.alterian.com/

 BrandsEye (Small, medium and enterprise solution): http://www.brandseye.com/

 Nielsen Buzzmetrics (Enterprise solution): http://en-us.nielsen.com/tab/product_families/nielsen_buzzmetrics

 Radian6 (Enterprise solution): http://www.radian6.com/

 Sentiment Metrics (Medium and Enterprise solution): http://www.sentimentmetrics.com/

 Sysomos: Map & Heartbeat (Medium and Enterprise solution): http://sysomos.com/products/overview

 Visible Technologies (Medium and Enterprise solution): http://www.visibletechnologies.com/

 Viralheat (Small, medium and enterprise solution): http://www.viralheat.com/

After testing several of the tools above, will I use Alterian SM2 as an example on how to use
an enterprise monitoring system. Almost all of these tools offer APIs (Application
Programming Interfaces) for automatically downloading search results into for example SQL
databases.

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4.1 Defining a ORM strategy
What is the first step implementing ORM in an organization? As with other online media
efforts, it is smart to start with a strategy. By having both a strategy and action plan in place,
you will be able to effectively handle the situation and limit, balance or repair any potentially
negative feedback. I have created the following eight main areas (A to H) to consider when
developing a written ORM strategy or plan document, based on insights from Beal & Strauss
(2008) and Ryan & Jones (2009):

Strategic content:

A: Identify and define your ORM goal(s), objectives and KPIs

B: Conduct a reputation (status quo) audit including your brand identity & image

C: Identify and define your key stakeholders, influencers, advocates and detractors

D: Define how to measure ORM success

E: Identify and define what and how to track and monitor

Tactical content:

F: Identify and define how and whom you want to interact and engage

G: Damage control planning, including crisis and outreach guidelines

H: Identify, evaluate, test and deploy monitoring tools

It is important to understand that ORM not only includes the strategy on how to manage
online buzz, sentiment and feedback, but the implementation of that strategy through two-
ways engagement (ibid). These efforts are really something that should not be outsourced to a
full service vendor, but done in-house through people who understand the “identity” of its
own company, brand, products and services not just the brand story or messaging. Objectives
should always be defined so they can be measured. One way to do this is to define: KPIs (Key
Performance Indicators). KPIs are quantifiable performance measurements used to define
success factors and measure progress toward the achievement of business goals and
objectives. The Web Analytics Association (WAA) defines the term KPI in the context of
web analytics:”While a KPI can be either a count or a ratio it is frequently a ratio. A KPI is
infused with business strategy - hence the term Key” (Ryan & Jones 2009 p. 119). What
metrics are important to your business? KPIs are always clearly aligned to strategic business
goals and objectives. To be able to measure success defining your business KPI`s is crucial
(Haugestad 2009B, p 17). Through monitoring, you will gather the necessary information that
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educates you on what is being said about your brand. Through analysis of the data provided
during monitoring, you will be able to properly implement your engagement strategy. In other
words, monitoring facilitates management. By utilizing the online conversation, you may be
able to improve customer satisfaction, gain insights on competitors and other key
stakeholders, engage with your current and potential customers more effectively, and ideally
reduce costs while increasing your ROI regarding your ORM costs.

4.2 Damage control planning

Trying to dig oneself out of an online reputation crisis is never easy. You, as a brand, are on
your back foot and everything which you do will be scrutinized and run the risk of blowing up
in your face. This makes for a very stressful and labor intensive way of managing reputation.
A better way to approach this situation is to plan ahead with crisis scenario planning (Beal &
Strauss 2008, Ryan & Jones, 2009). Prevention is always better and cheaper than cure. In any
event, planning and executing on a pre-emptive reputation move is always cheaper and better
for the brand. Monitoring and damage control planning (preparation) are part of the proactive
part of ORM, and damage limitation, balancing and repairing/recovery and crisis PR
communication are the reactive part of ORM (ibid). Create a crisis log document to keep track
of the incidents, tone of critics, the name of the author/blogger and their domains, and how
you engaged. In this way you learn and share knowledge with others in your team, then you
can engage faster and faster when similar incidents occur.

4.3 How to Recover from an Online Brand Attack
While effective ORM may be a relatively new concept to some brands that‟s still no excuse.
These suggestions to recovery are based on insights from Beal & Strauss (2008 p. 315-343)
and Ryan & Jones (2009 p. 193-201) should provide a practical approach for brands facing an
online reputation threat. Before you can recover from an online brand attack you have to be
aware that your brand can be attacked, no matter how big it is or how untouchable it may
seem. Whether the negative buzz is based on fact or fiction, the first thing you need to do,
once you‟ve decided to take your brand‟s online reputation seriously, is to swallow some
pride. You may think your brand is beyond reproach but clearly the customers don‟t and the
longer you avoid facing that reality the worse the situation will become. Once you have a
clear understanding of the scope of the possible effects of an online attack and are committed

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to maintaining your reputation online; you‟re half way there. Next you‟ve got to understand
how the process of consumer complaints has evolved.
Smart brands are watching consumer generated content, listening to what their customers are
saying and learns from this. The rest of the brands out there haven‟t yet woken up to the fact
that listening is vital and can be detrimental to a brands survival. Listen, monitor the Internet
for conversations about your brand, and learn from it, you can‟t react to something you have
no idea about. One of the easiest ways to solve the majority of brand attacks is to respond fast.
A brand that shows it is listening and does indeed care will go far when it comes to ensuring a
solid online reputation. The very same consumers who are complaining are actively keeping
an eye out for your reaction. Conscious reaction and acknowledging what has been said and
reacting accordingly is the only way forward. If the mention of your brand is factually
incorrect, in a friendly tone, send the blogger, journalist or analyst evidence that they are
wrong, ask for removal or retraction of the entry, offer to keep them informed of future news,
and only if no action is taken by the blog author then add a comment. If the mention is
negative but TRUE then send your side of the story, try as hard as you can to take it offline.
I‟ll repeat that for effect, take it offline, it‟s so much harder for people to listen. Will this
help? You‟d be surprised, if you are civil; in most cases the author will remove the piece or
add information that will help you. Keeping even more people from reading negative things
about your brand is imperative – once the negative musings are listed in the search engine
results pages chances are some people (read: a huge crowd) are going to find them.
What you can do, however, is knock them off the first page of the search engine results and in
doing so stop most of the people seeing them, with use of basic SEO initiatives. Start with
finding out what terms the page is getting good rankings for (these will generally be around
your brand name) then make sure that your website is ranking higher, in all fairness this
should be important to you regardless of an online threat, though. This should take 2 of the 10
first page places, now all you need to do is fill the other 8 spots with positive pages. It‟s not as
daunting as it sounds, the other eight spots could be filled by other sites that you don‟t own,
but with articles that you author and publish online, social media pages such as Facebook and
MySpace, your corporate blog and external blogs you write at, or forum posts to mention a
few. To boost your number of tweets will also help so your tweets ranking high at the SERP‟s
as well. So, you‟ve sorted out the issue, you can sit back and relax now, right? Wrong! Just
because you think you‟ve put out the fire, doesn‟t mean it can‟t flare up again. If you aren‟t an
active member of the social sphere or your stakeholder communities it tends to be a little
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harder to recover from an online attack. If your company doesn‟t have a corporate blog or
Facebook page start one. Participate in industry forums and blogs. Build genuine credibility as
a member of these conversations and you‟ll find that firstly, the likelihood of a brand attack
will decrease because people will have more respect from you (generally the more distanced a
brand gets from its customers, the more they start to despise it). Secondly if you are attacked
again, you will (hopefully if you‟ve done your job right) have a community of allies and
advocates who will support your brand and its efforts to clear its name. No brand is immune
from an online brand attack; no matter how much you think your customers love you. The
best brands in the world do have strategies in place to immediately identify a reputation crisis
and respond to it quickly enough to stop the negative word of mouth spreading (ibid). Do not
fall for the temptation to use black hat SEO tricks (Ryan & Jones 2009 p. 93-95), if the search
engine companies found out, they will remove all about you in their cached and stored servers
and you will be banished…!

4.4 ORM and ethics
ORM and ethics are important to perform closely together. General reputation management
ethical guidelines are essential also for ORM. But the online world is more “anarchistic” than
the offline world, and with less global or regional rules, laws and guidelines, so ORM need
some new practical ethical guidelines. It is none “de-facto” standards to be adapted yet, but
several for example PR companies have developed their own online outreach guidelines
which others have built and based their own versions of. One example is Ogilvy with their
“Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics from Ogilvy”. Source: http://blog.ogilvypr.com/2007/10/the-
ogilvy-pr-blogger-outreach-code-of-ethics/.

Online marketing associations like the Word Of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA)
has also created branch guidelines called: “10 Principles for Ethical Contact by Marketers”
(www.womma.org/ethics/). Forrester Research created their “Sample blogger Code of Ethics”
(Source: http://forrester.typepad.com/groundswell/2004/11/blogging_policy.html ) (Beal & Strauss 2008).

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4.5 When it`s time to wrap up your written strategy

Start small and build it up from there. Very often companies decide to get involved in the
“online thing” and throw themselves at it. They apply old-school thinking and then wonder
why their stakeholders are disillusioned and not responding in the ways they had hoped. A
better approach is to slowly build up a Web 2.0 online presence. Make sure that each part of
your Website, index and landing pages, sub domains, SEO, content management, e-marketing
and ads and so on, are running smoothly before moving onto the next step. The same applies
with the monitoring of the conversation online. Don‟t begin by trying to monitor, measure and
manage the entire conversation, rather focus on a number of key areas (your defined
objectives and KPIs) within the organization and correct those first. It‟s always easier to take
on more work than to try going back on a promise to your organization. While quantitative
data is certainly very useful for understanding trends and piecing together the full picture,
understanding individual‟s sentiments and views of a brand are equally critical. The brands
who are investing in their stakeholders relationships are really reaping the rewards.

5.1 ORM & Social Media Monitoring Tools

Always deploy tools which have the technology, structure and reporting possibilities to
monitor your ORM objectives and KPIs, whether they are subscription based paid or free
solutions or a mix of them. Ensure to use several tools and data trends related to ORM. Both
news, social media and external and internal web traffic tracking and trends can give multi
dimensional ORM analysis. Most of the free low end ad hoc search tools don‟t save and store
your searches. By choosing subscription based tools you will get tools that save all your
searches, search results and trend data including reports. The tools you decide to use will
impact the rest of the monitoring funnel, so choose carefully (Beal & Straus 2008 and Ryan &
Jones 2009). I will in the next sections give some examples on how to use these tools, with
screenshots in appendix B. I will present some entry level free tools and then an example with
an enterprise solution from Alterian SM2.

5.2 News site monitoring vendors

Some few global vendors: Meltwater News, Apollo, Nielsen Company and CyberWatcher.

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5.3 Web trends/analytic tools:

Website traffic and SEO are defined subjects within ORM (Beal & Strauss 2008 and Ryan &
Jones 2009). The goal is to gain visibility in web search results. Which Website data should
you analyze? There's no point in looking for a tool without a sense of what you want to track,
so to define KPIs also for Web trends is smart. How many people visit our Web site every
day? What are visitors doing when they get there? Which features are most popular? Web
analytics tools help you track your site's statistics, allowing you to see how many people are
looking at which page, which keywords are driving traffic to your website, which search
engines who drives referral traffic to your website, what sites your visitors are coming from,
who your users are, and more. Google is being called the biggest reputation machine online.
This information can in turn help you measure traffic, understand your visitors' needs and
behavior, and gauge click-through rates to new content or features. An organizational need
can vary from simple traffic monitoring to complex analyses on the behavior of specific user
groups, support for multivariate testing, and more. What important metrics and figures are
important when selecting a Web analytics package? Here is a list of the most important
measurements: Visits, Unique visitors, Top Entry and Exit Pages, Referral traffic from search
engines , Inbound links (OR Back links), Search Keywords, Visitor Information, Click Paths,
Conversion rate. There are many tools out there. Five tools with broad user adaption are;
Google Analytics (free), Omniture‟s SiteCatalyst, Webtrends Analytics, Alexa.com (Free
entry level) and Compare.com (Free entry level). These can be use as both day to day tools
and trend tools, and you can use scores and stats from these tools to define your KPIs.

5.4 Monitoring tasks and routines inside Alterian SM2 (See appendix B9 for
screenshots):

Custom Sources

The first thing to do when setting up a new tool is to decide which target stakeholders you
want to ensure are included in the searches. A system should give you the opportunity and
choice to add your own custom sources such as key; news sites, customers, partners,
competitors, personal names to executives, journalists and analysts, advocates and their
domain addresses (See appendix B2 for screenshot and details).

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Exclude words, phrases and domains

The next thing to do are to narrow your data sources. Examples: Wikis or own sub domains or
unwanted brand, product names etc. (See appendix B2 for screenshot and details).

Keyword Targeting

Implement specific keywords and phrases that allow you to monitor your brand, customers,
partners, suppliers and other defined key target stakeholders, and keep tabs on your
competitors. Use advanced setup parameters (Boolean parameters such as i.e.: AND, OR,
NOT) if possible to get accurate search results. This is also a point of entry in the funnel
where you should be doing ongoing optimizations to refine your keywords and phrases,
exclude words, filters and categories of data set. (See appendix B2 for screenshot and details).

Refined Mentions

Utilize your refined mention feed - watch the conversation. This is also an entry point of the
funnel where most of the day-to-day monitoring takes place. Read, analyze and engage when
necessary and appropriate.

Analysis

Apply sentiment analysis manually if your system is not doing it automatically, you need to
measure the overall health of your brand if there is enough conversation going on. Group your
mentions together in a holistic manner, for example; per category you assemble positive,
negative (and neutral if the tools also have the property tag) facilitating easy access data
sharing within your organization.

Take action – engage!

Take action when necessary; make sure the proper people inside your organization are acting
and engaging the social sphere where your conversation is happening. If you are not applying
manual analysis, then this part will be difficult. If you feel like your stream of search results is
not optimal enough, then go back through and tweak your keywords at this point. Once you
have constructed your plan, you will want to rinse and repeat. Read the refined search words
and phrases, analyze the trend results and act accordingly.

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Sharing and presenting trend data and statistics

When monitoring, crawlers, Web analytics tools and RSS feed systems are up and running, it
is important to establish procedures for checking them regularly and to distribute and share
the assembled statistics and trends across the relevant departments. The manually way to do
this is to create spreadsheets including Balanced ScoreCard functions. A more advanced way
is to download data with APIs from your monitoring tools, and to store all data into a database
and then use dedicated Balanced ScoreCard software to (Extract, Transform and Load: ETL)
present the reputation trends and scores. Both solutions can be set up to present the trend and
status data at for example; internal Wiki pages, Intranet or CRM systems or inside BI
(Business Intelligence) systems with Web standards such as XML. The Balanced Scorecard is
a management methodology that uses a range of KPIs to define business goals and monitor
performance drivers to achieve strategic objectives (Source:
http://www.bettermanagement.com). The main purpose with Balanced ScoreCard is to easy
visualize status quo compared to the wanted situation. Software tools often use a “Dashboard”
with color schemes such as green, yellow and red to visualize status scores.

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6. Discussion

6.1 Analyzing my survey
You will find all the original questions from my questionnaire in my survey and answers from
the respondents in Appendix A as documentation and verification. I will start with analyzing
the strategic questions, number 3 to 8. Then I will analyze the practical side of ORM and
question 9 to 20. Here is some information about Company X: They are traditional organized
with communication and PR (Manager A) as one department, and with both B2B (Business to
business) marketing and B2C (Business to Consumer) marketing where Manager B is
responsible. Communication/PR has twelve employees, and the B2C marketing departments
have fifteen employees. So the sizes of the departments are quite similar. Totally Company X
has approximately 760 employees all together around the globe. Company X have several
tenfold millions users across their different software portfolio products, and have all four
corners of the world as target markets. Now let‟s look at my respondents and their respective
answers to my questionnaire and start to analyze them. Both departments are part of a
strategic and tactical ORM document (Question 3). Regarding how they before were
monitoring online conversations, mentions and buzz, they both answers that it was done
manually and not coordinated across departments before (Question 4). Do they coordinate;
Market, and/or CRM, and/or Brand, and/or Social Media strategies or plans with ORM?
(Question 5, 6 and 7) Manager A, answer that brand strategy and Social Media strategy are
coordinated, but not marketing strategy and ORM. Manager B, answer that this is not clearly
defined or coordinated yet. What are their respective goals with ORM? (Question 8) Manager
A: “Work smarter, support our business decisions and to get faster and deeper insights about
our stakeholders, to use this to optimize our offline PR and online PR efforts and as a
supplement within online damage control. Monitoring and identifying our influence, reach
and to create more influencers and advocates for our business”. Manager B: “Understand the
effect of campaigns and track brand perceptions. The goal is to turn knowledge into learning
and improve out media outreach, marketing, community communication and brand
management”. Let‟s start analyzing the more practical approach to ORM with questions 9 to
20. Which free monitoring tools do they use before and today? (Question 9)
Communication/PR used before: Google free tools such as Google Reader and Trends, SEO
tools, twitter searches, Technorati, Digg and reddit. Now they use in addition: HowSociable,
SocialMention, Alexa and Google Insights. Marketing uses similar tools on individual basis.
Are they using any additional subscription & pay based monitoring SaaS solutions? (Question
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10) Manager A: “We decided to use Alterian SM2 from Meltwater Norway for a limited pilot
period”. Manager B says his department doesn‟t pay for any monitoring tools. (Relevant
searches are included in Alterian SM2 for both, B2B, B2C marketing and
communication/PR.) Do they use a mix of tools? (Question 11) Manager A: “Yes, both
quantitative (HowSociable) and qualitative and sentiment based tools such as: SocialMention
for ad-hoc searches and Alterian SM2 for trend analyzes over time together with external
Web traffic trends from Alexa and Google compared to converting stats of our downloading
numbers”. Manager B says they don‟t use it, probably because the ORM administrator tools
are run from communication/PR. Have they identified and defined their wanted ROI & KPIs
regarding ORM efforts? (Question 12). Manager A: “Yes, without defining these
measurements, we would be lost in huge amount of search results and data”. Manager B says
that not all measurements are implemented yet. Does Company X have a Brand or Reputation
Manager? (Question 13) Manager A: “Today tasks for such a position are divided across
multiple departments and employees”. Manager B: “No. We are currently evaluating how to
take this further. The (ORM) solution will most likely be that an existing team member gets
this as extra task”. What social media networks are they targeting? (Question 14) Manager A:
“All the biggest Social Media platforms across the globe are targets, our stakeholders are
everywhere. Our ORM tools are scanning, tracking and monitoring millions of news sites,
aggregators, corporate sites, blogs and micro blogs”. Manager B: “First priority is our own
social media platform; our corporate community blog. Our goal is to be represented on all
major local and global communities such as Facebook and Twitter. We also have profiles on
big local social networks”. What dimensions are most important for them to monitor and
measure? (Question 15) Manager A: ”Both visibility, reach, influence and sentiment are
defined as key areas within our strategic ORM document and search solutions”. Manager B:
“We normally look at visibility (number of web sites, blogs etc). It may be more interesting to
look at a combination of reach, influence and sentiment/tone”. Do they have any Social
Media/blog, and/or Online PR/Sales/marketing outreach guidelines? (Question 16) Manager
A: “Yes, as a corporation with global reach and markets, we must have this distributed within
our departments and regional offices”. Manager B: “We follow a mix of guidelines for media
outreach in combination with common sense”. Do they have any internal online damage
control guidelines? (Question 17) Manager A: “Yes, we have defined routines and dedicated
persons who are permitted to work with damage limitation”. Manager B: “PR team handles
damage control and manages communication when needed. All sensitive questions are
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forwarded to PR team”. When do they think is the right time for implementing ORM?
(Question 18) Manager A: “We have started and have learned a lot from our ORM project”.
Manager B: “We are currently in a process to complete guidelines, tools and implementation.
Timing is a question of having available resources, but we are getting closer to readiness”.
How important do you think ORM is for your business today? (Question 19) Manager A: “We
distribute our software only online, so to manage our stakeholders trust and to create more
users, ORM will be a key tool”. Manager B: “We concentrate most of our marketing through
social media, so proper tracking would help us to improve faster”. How important do you
think ORM is for your business in the future? (Question 20) Manager A: “When the social
sphere expands, the need for optimal ORM, online PR, e-marketing, Web content and
community increases as well”. Manager B: “It should become a daily tool for any marketing
person, just as Google Analytics and other web tracking tools have become natural part of
any online marketing organization today”.

6.2 Patterns & themes
Related to the strategic areas both managers share the view to work out communication/PR
and marketing strategies all together and not isolated. But none of their existing marketing,
CRM or communication/PR strategies are coordinated with ORM strategies yet. This is
pinpointed as essential by Beal & Strauss (2008) and Ryan & Jones (2009). The reason is
probably that ORM as a management tool are a new approach, pilot project still running and
they are still learning. Their answers tell that they understand the link between online
branding and ORM on a strategic level quite well. They have recognized ORM as a multi
disciplinary area as well (Meerman Scott 2009). ORM will most likely be adapted as part of
other business strategies in the close future. In practice their two departments are closest to an
“overlapping” model referred to Hutton (Heath & Vasquez 2001). The ORM project is
grounded in a strategic and tactical document, and there they have identified and defined their
reputation goal, objectives and KPIs. So they have started with the strategic process and
brainstorming, and then identified and tested tools to monitor and report on defined KPIs.
This is the recommended order and approach referred to Beal & Strauss (2008) and Ryan &
Jones (2009).

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6.3 My interpretation
I will now try to give some answers to my research objectives and questions: Why is online
reputation so important in addition to traditional offline reputation for organizations? The
main reason is that all the consumers and stakeholders have been their own publishers. Their
added social forces are bigger than traditional media (Beal & Strauss 2008, Ryan & Jones
2009, Meerman Scott 2009). What kind of challenges will ORM create for an organization
and its communication/PR and marketing departments? “Old” objectives and measurements
are not efficient in and online world (ibid). How important is it to have a written plan or
strategy for ORM? Without thinking through the; what‟s, how‟s, where‟s, when‟s and who‟s
it is difficult to adapt ORM. Who should participant developing an ORM plan or strategy?
Top level business management in addition to communication/PR and marketing. Who should
own ORM in an organization? Either communication/PR or marketing depending on the size
or nature of the organization. More important is that ORM being implemented across
departments than who owns it. Should ORM strategy be a part of CRM/market strategy,
corporate communication strategy, digital strategy, social media strategy or stand for itself?
ORM is multidisciplinary, and could be implemented both in an existing CRM/market
strategy or communication PR strategy or anchored on a higher level inside business
strategies. How can ORM strategies support and be coordinated towards already defined
business goals? Starting with analysis of existing business, CRM, marketing and
communication/PR objectives and KPIs, and then define ORM KPIs which support these
overall business goals and objectives (ibid). Then find tools that can monitor and report
related to your strategic defined objectives and KPIs. Depending on your work schedule,
available human resources, business needs, how popular your brand is and how much money
you want to invest in reputation management, any of these services may be of great
assistance. And using a fee-based reputation management service, in combination with a
number of free services, is often a wise decision. Both respondents have for a long time used
different monitoring tools, web traffic and SEO tools, mostly quantitative tools. With ORM
including qualitative and sentiment/tone based monitoring in addition they have extended
their methods and are now using advanced Web 2.0 tools to gather more relevancy out of their
key stakeholders. Is ORM important today or is it a future feature? Most likely are all your
stakeholders online today, so ORM will give in depth status quo analysis today, and for future
marketing campaigns, online PR and damage control planning and actions.

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7. Summary & conclusion

To sum it up: just listening is no longer enough. Before, listening to the online conversation
was more than often enough. If you were aware of what was happening, then you could run
marketing, PR and branding campaigns through traditional media and have them drive the
sort of impact you desired. People still trust businesses and the traditional media but inside the
social sphere people trust their peers more. Since the economic downturn, this has changed
significantly and businesses now need to gain far more from their ORM tools if they are to
survive. The monitoring and measurement of sentiment/tone content of the conversation are
now critical. Off the back of this, the use of both the real time and trend data to maximize the
business itself, so as to better meet the stakeholder‟s needs, is critical. Use ORM as a learning
tool inside your organization and be faster, smarter and better at what you do today. Use it
both strategically and tactical to your own advantage. Use ethical guidelines when you engage
the social sphere. Engagement and fast damage limitation are critical but so too is the use of
your ORM service as a communication, PR and market research tool. Finally, my conclusion
to my research question: “How can ORM be a tool to sustain and grow an excellent
reputation?” is: If you want your organization to achieve your goals and objectives within
ORM, you need to write an ORM strategy and learn how to:

LISTEN + MONITOR + LEARN + ENGAGE (with your key stakeholders)

Removing only one of these attributes and you will probably not have success with ORM.
Building trust, authenticity, credibility, honesty and radically transparency online, are success
factors you‟ll need when your reputation is under threat. And it will, from time to time!

Remember: Knowledge is power

“Know your purpose, vision, mission and the message you want to send and how you will
send it. Prior analysis brings victory; little or no analysis is foretelling defeat”
Quote: Sun-Tzu (The Art of War)

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8. References
Curriculum
Beal, Andy & Strauss, Judy (2008). Radically Transparent - Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online. US:
Wiley Publishing Inc.

Brønn, Peggy Simic & Berg, Roberta Wiig (2008). Corporate Communication. A strategic approach to Building
Reputation. Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk.

Chernatony, de Leslie (2006). From Brand Vision to Brand Evaluation – The strategic process of growing and
strengthening brands. Second Edition. UK: Elsevier Ltd.

Heath, Robert L. & Vasquez, Gabriel (2001). Handbook of Public Relations. US: Sage Publications Inc. Chapter
14: Defining the Relationship Between Public Relations and Marketing by Hutton, James G.

L‟Etang, Jacquie (2008). Public Relations - Concepts, Practice and Critique. London: Sage Publications Ltd.

Ryan, Damien & Jones, Calvin (2009). Understanding DIGITAL Marketing – Marketing strategies for engaging
the digital generation. US: Kogan Page Limited. Chapter 8: Online PR and Reputation management.

Additional literature
Anderson, Chris (2008). The Long Tail. New York: Hyperion.

Friedman, Thomas L. (2006). The world is flat. London: Penguin literature Ltd.

Meerman Scott, David (2009). “The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News
Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly”. Second Edition. US: John Wiley &
Sons, Inc.

Safko, Lon & Brake, David K. (2009) The Social Media Bible – Tactics, Tools & Strategies for business success.
New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons Inc.

Shih, Clara (2009). The Facebook Era – Tapping Online Social Networks to build Better Products, Reach New
Audiences, and Sell More Stuff. US: Prentice Hall, Pearson Education.

Other sources
Haugestad, Rune (2009A). e-Marketing strategy. Term paper exam. Oslo: Oslo University College.

Haugestad, Rune (2009B). Social Media strategy. Term paper exam. Oslo: Oslo University College.

Internet sources:
Kaitlyn Wilkins (01.10.07). The Ogilvy PR Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics (Take 2). Located 16.03.10 at
WWW: http://blog.ogilvypr.com/2007/10/the-ogilvy-pr-blogger-outreach-code-of-ethics/

Lexalytics Whitepaper (2010). Sentiment White Paper. Located 03.04.10 at WWW:
http://www.lexalytics.com/solutions/

Phillips, Robert (26.01.10). Trust in the UK. Edelman trust barometer. Located 07.04.10 at WWW:
http://www.edelman.co.uk/trustbarometer/files/edelman-trust-barometer-2010-uk-highlights.pdf

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Appendix A: Survey documentation & answers
Vice President of Corporate Communication - Manager A:

Director of Marketing, Consumer Products – Manager B:

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Survey answers: Manager A:

Online Reputation Management (ORM) educational Bachelor thesis survey

6th term Media & Communication student at Oslo University College.

Purpose: I am writing my Bachelor thesis within ORM, titled; Monitoring the Buzz.

Q1: What is your position/role?

Answer: Vice President of Corporate Communications.

Q2: How many employees are there in your organization?

Answer: There are 12 people in my team, and approximately 760 employees in our
organization.

Q3: Does your organization have an Online Reputation Management (ORM)
strategy/plan?

Answer: Yes, corporate communication/PR department initiated our ORM project with a
strategic and tactical document. We identified and defined our reputation goal, objectives and
KPIs.

Q4: Does your organization monitor online conversations, mentions, buzz etc. about your
organization, products, brands and services?

Answer: Before we monitored from each business unit/department and related to their
respective purposes. Now, with ORM we want to coordinate monitoring our key target
stakeholders and share insights across our departments.

Q5: Does your organization coordinate Market and/or CRM strategy/plans with ORM
strategy/plan?

Answer: No, but we do develop, adjust and coordinate our corporate communication/PR
AND marketing strategies all together across departments.

Q6: Does your organization coordinate Brand strategy/plan (Marketing dep.) with ORM
strategy/plan (Comm./PR dep.) ?

Answer: Yes.

Q7: Does your organization coordinate Social Media strategy with ORM strategy/plan?

Answer: Yes, since many of our stakeholders are distributed around the world, this is
reflected across the global online social sphere.

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Q8: What are your goals with ORM?

Answer: Work smarter, support our business decisions and to get faster and deeper insights
about our stakeholders, to use this to optimize our offline PR and online PR efforts and as a
supplement within online damage control. Monitoring and identifying our influence, reach
and to create more influencers and advocates for our business.

Q9: Does your organization use free monitoring tools to support ORM?

Example of free tools: Google Insights, Google Blog search, HowSociable,
IceRocket, Nielsen BlogPulse , Social Mention, Technorati, twitter search, etc.

Answer: Before: Google free tools such as Google Reader and Trends, SEO tools, twitter
searches, Technorati, Digg, reddit etc.

Now: HowSociable, SocialMention, Alexa and Google Insights.

Q10: Does your organization use paid Memberships & Subscription tools/SaaS
vendors as monitoring tool to support ORM?

Example of tools: Alterian SM2, Brandseye, Nielsen buzzmetrics, SentimentMetrics,
Sysomos, Trackur, Trendrr, Radian6, Visible etc.

Answer: We decided to use Alterian SM2 from Meltwater Norway for a limited pilot period.
(Qualitative and sentiment/tone based)

Q11: Does your organization use several/a mix of tools to assemble reputation status,
statistics, changes etc.?

Answer: Yes, both quantitative (HowSociable) and qualitative and sentiment based tools such
as: SocialMention for ad-hoc searches and Alterian SM2 for trend analyzes over time together
with external Web traffic trends from Alexa and Google compared to converting stats of our
downloading numbers.

Q12: Have your organization identified and defined their wanted ROI & KPIs
regarding ORM efforts?

For example: Quantitative, Qualitative, Sentiment/tone based measurements. KPI = Key
Performance Indicators. ROI= Return On Investment.

Answer: Yes, without defining these measurements, we would be lost in huge amount of
search results and data.

Q13: Does your organization have a Reputation responsible employee? I.e.: Brand
Manager/Reputation Manager etc.

Answer: Today tasks for such a position are divided across multiple departments and
employees.
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Q14: What social media networks are you targeting? (To find your audience,
customers, influencers/advocates, stakeholders etc.)

Answer: All the biggest Social Media platforms across the globe are targets, our stakeholders
are everywhere. Our ORM tools are scanning, tracking and monitoring millions of news sites,
aggregators, corporate sites, blogs and micro blogs.

Q15: What of the following dimensions are most important for you to monitor and
measure?

Answer: Both visibility, reach, influence and sentiment are defined as key areas within our
strategic ORM document and search solutions.

Q16: Does your organization have any Social Media/blog, and/or Online
PR/Sales/marketing outreach guidelines?

Answer: Yes, as a corporation with global reach and markets, we must have this distributed
within our departments and regional offices.

Q17: Does your organization have any internal online damage control guidelines?

Answer: Yes, we have defined routines and dedicated persons who are permitted to work
with damage limitation.

Q18: If your organization has not started with ORM, when do you think is the right
time?

Answer: We have started and have learned a lot from our ORM project.

Q19: How important do you think ORM is for your business today?

Answer: We distribute our software only online, so to manage our stakeholders trust, and to
create more users ORM will be a key tool.

Q20: How important do you think ORM is for your business in the future?

Answer: When the social sphere expands, the need for optimal ORM, online PR, e-
marketing, Web content and community increases as well.

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Survey answers: Manager B:

Q1: What is your position/role?

Answer: Director of Marketing, Consumer Products.

Q2: How many employees are there in your organization?

Answer: 15 people in my team.

Q3: Does your organization have an Online Reputation Management (ORM) strategy/plan?

Answer: It is about to be completed now.

Q4: Does your organization monitor online conversations, mentions, buzz etc. about your
organization, products, brands and services?

Answer: It has been monitored manually by team members with responsibility to follow,
participate and report online conversations.

Q5: Does your organization coordinate Market and/or CRM strategy/plans with ORM
strategy/plan?

Answer: It is part of reporting as a manual task, but it is not clearly defined.

Q6: Does your organization coordinate Brand strategy/plan (Marketing dep.) with ORM
strategy/plan (Comm./PR dep.) ?

Answer: No.

Q7: Does your organization coordinate Social Media strategy with ORM strategy/plan?

Answer: It has not been well coordinated, but the plan is to improve this once we have
implemented new ORM tools into the organization.

Q8: What are your goals with ORM?

Answer: Understand the effect of campaigns and track brand perceptions. The goal is to turn
knowledge into learning and improve out media outreach, marketing, community
communication and brand management.

Q9: Does your organization use free monitoring tools to support ORM?

Example of free tools: Google Insights, Google Blog search, HowSociable, IceRocket,
Nielsen BlogPulse , Social Mention, Technorati, twitter search, etc.

Answer: Only on individual basis. The goal is to have such tools implemented into the
organization.

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Q10: Does your organization use paid Memberships & Subscription tools/SaaS vendors as
monitoring tool to support ORM?

Answer: No.

Q11: Does your organization use several/a mix of tools to assemble reputation status,
statistics, changes etc.?

Answer: No.

Q12: Have your organization identified and defined their wanted ROI & KPIs regarding
ORM efforts?

Answer: Part of the organization has started that job, but it has not been completed and
implemented yet.

Q13: Does your organization have a Reputation responsible employee? I.e.: Brand
Manager/Reputation Manager etc.

Answer: No. We are currently evaluating how to take this further. The solution will most
likely be that an existing team member gets this as extra task.

Q14: What social media networks are you targeting? (To find your audience, customers,
influencers/advocates, stakeholders etc.)

Answer: First priority is our own social media platform, our corporate community blog. Our
goal is to be represented on all major local and global communities such as Facebook and
Twitter. We also have profiles on big local social networks.

Q15: What of the following dimensions are most important for you to monitor and measure?

Answer: We normally look at visibility (number of web sites, blogs etc). It may be more
interesting to look at a combination of reach, influence and sentiments/tone.

Q16: Does your organization have any Social Media/blog and/or Online PR/Sales/marketing
outreach guidelines?

Answer: Employees are encouraged to be online with social media. We follow a mix of
guidelines for media outreach in combination with common sense.

Q17: Does your organization have any internal online damage control guidelines?

Answer: PR team handles damage control and manages communication when needed. All
sensitive questions are forwarded to PR team.

Q18: If your organization has not started with ORM, when do you think is the right time?

Answer: We are currently in a process to complete guidelines, tools and implementation.
Timing is a question of having available resources, but we are getting closer to readiness.
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Q19: How important do you think ORM is for your business today?

Answer: We concentrate most of our marketing through social media, so proper tracking
would help us to improve faster.

Q20: How important do you think ORM is for your business in the future?

Answer: It should become a daily tool for any marketing person, just as google analytics and
other web tracking tools have become natural part of any online marketing organization
today.

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Appendix B: Screenshots from monitoring search tools.

B1: ORM monitoring process cycle:

Source: http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/social-media-monitoring-funnel-
final.png

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B2. HowSociable is a quantitative visibility brand measure tool:

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B3. Twitter analysis tools:

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B4. TwitterAnalyzer:

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B5. SocialMention have a fast search engine and huge amount of data sources.

Test search for toy producer: Mattel:

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