WebProNews

Managing your organization's online reputation is no easy feat. It takes a lot of organization and keen eye for strategy. There are lots of people, in-house and out, that are talking. Marketing Pilgrim's Andy Beal has some tips for knowing who's saying what about you.

(Coverage of the SMX West Conference continues at WebProNews Videos. Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Beal was up first at the Reputation Monitoring & Management Through Search track at the SMX West Conference. First order of business: tell them about trackur.com, Beal's online reputation management tool released this week. “The online reputation management space is still in it's infancy," he said.

Beal then got down to stats and pointers. He said 52% of individuals put their trust in what others say about your brand, and 83% of companies will face a reputation crisis that can impact their share value by 20-30%. Besides protecting your company from negative developments, reputation management has other benefits. Monitoring can keep you abreast of industry trends, and can help with new product development.

Andy says there are two very important sources to watch out there on the Web: competitor's blogs and employee blogs. This can be done via trackur, of course, but also with Moreover, Yahoo News and Google News. He says  mainstream news like Google News will give you a good overview of 70-75% of discussions about your business.

Utilize RSS feeds to monitor news buzz and company-related mentions on sites like Digg.com, Technorati, and boardtracker.com for online forums. Keep track of bookmark sites like del.icio.us, search on Flickr, and Google Video.

Monitor tags with keotags.com, and track other social sites like Wikipedia, Amazon reviews. Sign up for Google News alerts with the keywords you want to keep tabs on. Terraminds.com help keep track of Twitters.