1. Brand Monitoring
Tips & Tricks to Help Manage Your Brand Online
Prepared by: Lauren Candito, Social Media Solutions
Brand Monitoring: Tips & Tricks www.SocialMediaSolutionsLLC.com

2. Brand monitoring has become an essential task for any individual or corporation.
Marketers must understand that conversations are being held on the web with or
without our consent, and when conversations start on the web, like a forest fire, they
travel very fast and wreak havoc along the way; what might start out as a mere tweet,
may turn into a blog post and potentially national news.
Why is this Happening?
Until recently, information was dispersed and controlled by mass media networks of
television, radio and print, where large corporations could control the mass media with
the right combination of public relations and marketing.
Now, however, the Internet has fundamentally transformed the way in which
information is created, distributed and consumed. In additional to marketers losing
much of their control of brand image, they are also facing a larger variety of marketing
channels than ever before.
The modern consumer has developed greater immunity to the constant barrage of
advertising messages. Increasingly, consumers are turning to online communities,
consumer writers and fringe media as trusted sources of input on everything from what
to buy to how to vote.
What Marketers Are Saying
Marketers and brand managers now struggle with challenges such as:
“My brand/product has a lot of negative search results that have
accumulated over time and unlike simple word of mouth, these
comments never seem to go away.”
“We’re launching a new product next quarter and I want to generate
pre-release buzz to build demand and create better brand awareness.
How can this be done without a huge investment in traditional media?”
What Can You Do?
Developing a brand monitoring plan should be one of the most important pieces of a
company’s marketing strategy, not an after thought. All too often I have seen
companies fail because they have not listened to the buzz in the community.
All successful brand monitoring plans have two critical pieces: Listening & Responding.
Listening
Listening is the gathering of online information about your brand. It is simply put,
listening to what is being said about your products/services/brand online. There are a
variety of tools that help marketers “listen,” but here are a few of my favorites:
‣ General Brand Monitoring
• Google Alerts - Google alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google
results based on your choice of query or topic. You can subscribe to each alert
through email and RSS. The alerts track blog posts, news articles, videos and even
Brand Monitoring: Tips & Tricks www.SocialMediaSolutionsLLC.com

3. groups. Set a “comprehensive alert,” which will notify you of stories, as they
happen, for your name, your topic, and even your company.
• Yahoo! Pipes - This is also a good tool for aggregating and combining feeds into
one central repository.
‣ Blog Monitoring
• Technorati - Technorati tracks “blog reactions,” or blogs that link to yours. Search
for your brand on Technorati, and subscribe to RSS alerts so that when someone
blogs about you, you find out.
• Backtype - Backtype is a tool for monitoring blog comments, by allowing you to
find, follow, and share comments from across the web. Use it to remind yourself
where you commented, discover influencers who are commenting on blogs that
you should be reading, and continue conversations that you started previously.
You can even subscribe to these comments using RSS.
‣ Discussion Board Monitoring
• BoardTracker - Along with blogs and
traditional news stories, discussion boards are
another channel where people can gather
in a community and talk about you. Most
people disregard discussion boards until they
see other sites commenting on information
viewed on them. Use boardtracker.com to
get instant alerts from threads citing your
name.
‣ Other Great Social Media Brand Management
Tools
• Yacktrack - This service lets you search for
comments on your content from various
sources, such as Blogger, Digg, FriendFeed, Stumbleupon, and Wordpress blogs.
For instance, if you comment on a blog, you can locate other people who are
commenting on that same blog post and rejoin the conversation. My favorite
feature of this tool is the “Chatter” tab, which allows you to perform keyword
searches on social media sites and then notifies you of instances of your brand
name. Yacktrack’s search page results also gives you an RSS feed for the search
term.
• Twitter Monitoring - Using Twitter search, you can locate any instances of your
name and decide whether you want to tweet back or ignore them. It really
depends on the context and meaning of the tweet. Conduct a search for your
name, your company’s name, or various topics you’re interested in and then
subscribe via RSS. Twilert is another tool you can use to receive email alerts.
• Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated
content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and
microblogging services. It allows you to track mentions of your brand across all of
these areas. The results are aggregated from the top social media sources, such as
Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Delicious, Twitter and more. Like the other services, you can
subscribe to your results by RSS or email. Other social search engines include Serph
and Keotag
Brand Monitoring: Tips & Tricks www.SocialMediaSolutionsLLC.com

4. It’s also a smart idea to listen to conversations about your competitors. For example, if
the Marriott had a Google Alert setup for “Sheraton” they could listen online for
customers who get frustrated with their Sheraton experience enough to blog about it,
and they could engage those frustrated bloggers, and possibly gain new customers.
Talking Back
Once you have set up an effective monitoring plan, and you have listened to what the
community is saying, it is time to talk back. Here are some guidelines for
communicating with online users about your
brand.
‣ Respond quickly to criticism. If you don’t
respond quickly to criticism, you can lose
control of the conversation.
‣ Admit your mistakes. Why is this so difficult for
brands? When you mess up, the only—and I
mean ONLY—acceptable response is to take
full ownership, explain what went wrong, and
share your action plan for fixing the mistake.
‣ Empower your employees to become problem solvers. As a customer, there is nothing
worse than having a full-on collision with bureaucracy. We’ve all been there. “I’m
sorry, ma’am, but I’ll have to check with my supervisor.” Or worse, “I’d like to help, but
we have a policy against that.” Tim Ferriss, author of the bestseller, “The 4-Hour
Workweek”, tells his employees and contractors,
“Keep the customers happy. If it is a problem that takes less than $100 to
fix, use your judgment and fix the problem yourself. This is official written
permission and a request to fix all problems that cost under $100 without
contacting me (p. 105).”
‣ Exceed your customers’ expectations. Every customer problem is an opportunity to
create a new amazing experience. But it’s not enough to meet their expectations,
you have to exceed them. Anything less is merely restitution.
Conclusions
Understanding brand monitoring and its impact on your business is critical. Static
websites are no longer the pinnacle of communication, as today’s consumer seeks
engagement and two-way conversations. As consumers are increasingly empowered
to take control of brands online through user generated content, blogs, forums etc,
marketers must adopt new ways of approaching brand management and marketing
their products/services.
If you would like additional information on Brand Monitoring, Interactive Marketing, or
Social Media, please contact Lauren Candito at Lauren@socialmediasolutionsllc.com
Please visit http://www.SocialMediaSolutionsLLC.com for additional insights into the
interactive realm.
Brand Monitoring: Tips & Tricks www.SocialMediaSolutionsLLC.com

5. About the Author
Lauren Candito is a interactive marketing & social media expert that utilizes her deep
understanding of the interactive realm to develop results driven interactive campaigns
& online marketing strategies for her clients. She understands the importance of
engagement and interaction, and pushes companies to reach outside of traditional
marketing barriers to develop their interactive/online strategies. Lauren is a skilled
strategist who incorporates a variety of social media tools into her strategies, and tailors
each strategic approach to her client’s needs & goals.
Lauren has obtained her MBA degree in International Marketing & Business Strategy,
and has numerous years of experience working for global corporations, intimate
interactive agencies, and small business ventures. Lauren takes an ambitious, self-
directing approach to the social media environment, developing measurable, long-
term online strategies for her clients.
Lauren has an amazingly high level of energy and enthusiasm that is balanced with a
great understanding of business analytics and a detail-oriented management style. She
has a proven passion for learning and naturally exceeds expectations. Her excitement
about interactive marketing resonates in every campaign she develops & implements,
resulting in successful implementation of client strategies, and the development of
cutting-edge marketing techniques.
Twitter: @LaurenCandito
LinkedIn: Lauren Candito
Skype: Lauren Candito
Jabber: Lauren.Candito
Brand Monitoring: Tips & Tricks www.SocialMediaSolutionsLLC.com