Online reputation monitoring tools: I just don’t get it

Why am I finding online reputation monitoring tools so ineffective?

First of all, I expect this post to bring some responses from various people behind the reputation monitoring tools that I’m going to mention.  You wouldn’t expect anything else, right?

I’m posting because I’ve now tried out a few of these tools and I just can’t make sense of them.

Of course, that could all be down to me.  On the other hand, it could be something they’re doing wrong.  I genuinely don’t know which it is.

I started with Reputation HQ.  When I tried it out over a year ago, I quickly ground to a halt. It’s all very bright green, sexy social media. Seems like it’s geared up for a team of people to rate and comment on any references found following a search.  I did a search, got some results… then (if memory serves me) just got confused.  I tried communicating with the the support people – who, to be fair, were trying really hard to be helpful – but I just couldn’t get them to understand what it was I couldn’t understand.  In short, after the first search it just wasn’t clear what you would do next – or why. I wanted to get a sense of what it could do and whether or not there was a package I could use to service my clients (rather than resell to my clients).  After repeated attempts to work out what it could do over several weeks I gave up.  Verdict?  I’ll just do regular searches in Google and use Google Alerts.

Next I tried a Trackur trial. Sign up, type in my keyword search and hit Enter. It returned some results but only a fraction of what a regular Google search would return for the same term.  I was able to rate the things it found (good, neutral, bad) but that was it.  Again, what next?  Trackur tells you that if you save the search term it will search every 30 minutes and implies that over time, it will find more and more.  So I saved the search term.  Week after week I’ve come back to it. No more references found, no idea how or when it will start to do those promised advanced searches.  Do I need to leave my laptop on and the browser window open? And what will I do next?  No idea.  Result?  I’ll just do regular Google searches and use Google Alerts.

I signed up for a lite version of Brands Eye. The guy behind the tool, South African Tim Shier was as helpful as can be.  I put in the search term, hit enter and got a pile of useful results.  This tool was the most intuitive of the three – allowing me to find references and rank them as relevant or irrelevant.  It showed me graphs of mentions per day and pie charts of relevant vs. irrelevant.  But the same problem applies: not only can I find more references by doing a Google search (which is more relevant anyway since that’s the search your average punter would be doing), but the interface logic is completely confusing and leaves me with no idea of what I should do next.

The same applies to a range of other tools: MonitorThis (which returned me a fraction of the references I could find in Google for a particular keyphrase) and uberVU (which looks really interesting with its focus on following conversations but which in fact finds just one reference out of hundreds in Google) for example. EntityCube seems interesting too, but I challenge you to work out what it’s doing.

Now I know that the people behind these tools are explorers in a new world and I know there’s a lot of work and passion gone into these things.  But here I am, working in online reputation management with plenty of off- and online business experience and I’m telling you that I can’t make these things work for me.

As I write this, I’ve a reply to a question from Andy Beal himself at Trackur (via Get Satisfaction) – thanks Andy.  The problem is that the problem itself can’t be described – or answered – in text form.  It needs a conversation.

The first problem is that I can’t get any of these tools to find even half of the references that a Google search will find about the person or business whose reputation I’m evaluating. Since a company’s prospects will themselves do a Google search surely that’s a problem? I don’t know whether these tools are finding everything that’s out there… or everything that’s changed today… or pinged… or …or… I don’t know.

The second problem is that none of these tools tells me clearly what I can use them for – in common-sense language. They all assume I know already.  They similarly don’t tell me what to do with anything they produce in their searches.  I’m sure the designer has plenty of ideas about it, but I don’t.

A third problem is the interface design which follows a logic and uses terms that, again, probably make sense to the designer, but not to me the newcomer.

All of which means that I’m left using Google searches to monitor clients’ reputations which, given all the above, seems to work perfectly well.  The only thing it doesn’t do, of course, is produce the sentiment metrics that the bigger tools try to – sentiment metrics which are assumed to be the key to convincing big business to pay for, er.. reputation management and monitoring.

I can’t help thinking that there must be something wrong if someone in my position can’t get these tools working for me.