Web Reputation Analysis: steps to study who is talking about you online and how

How to conduct an online Web Reputation Analysis in a simple, optimal… And able to save your face!

Online reputation analysis, in English Web Reputation Analysis, is essential so that it can shelter you from reputational crises in your industry and company.

While reading this in-depth study you will know the basic steps to understand who is talking about you online and how they are talking about you (so that you can prevent a reputation crisis as soon as possible)…

But, before I begin, I want to make a brief premise: To conduct amarket analysis based on online reputation, you cannot just do research-perhaps even sporadically-on Twitter or activate Google alerts.

Web Reputation Analysis Online? Banish sloppy analysis, yes to network listening software!

Doing research on Twitter and other social media or using Google’s alert service is not listening to the network.

The reason for this statement is simpler than you might think: the search function of social networks and alert services are not intended to help you fine-tune market research to save your reputation.

In fact, social wants to attract more and more users, make them discover new things, lead them to follow other accounts, and make them spend more and more time on the platform… While alerts are created to make you aware of the release of new articles about your company (or you).

None of them were born to help you grow, improve or save your web reputation, do acompetitor analysis, or any other goal you have.

There are mainly four reasons why you need a truly dedicated tool, namely a social listening tool:

• First, the completeness of the data collected, which collected directly from social networks is far from complete.
• Second, the overview of what is happening online, that is, to get the picture of how the buzz has changed over a defined period of time.
• Third, the ability to pull advanced information out of the data, such as user demographics and seasonality of buzz.
• Fourth, the simplicity with which you can do this, without having to waste hours and hours putting all the data together.

That said, here’s (step by step) how to conduct anonline reputation analysis using the network’s best listening tools!

Read also: The 9 points to consider when choosing the right Web Listening Tools

1) Setup phase and setting up the research to be conducted with the web listening tool.

This step is critical in telling the software what to search for, that is, what information to pull from the Web and/or social networks.

To set up searches, you must first translate what you need into a language that the software can understand. This means that from now on you (or whoever) will have to speak in the Boolean language!

Boolean logic is not very difficult to understand, as it is based on the sets we studied when we were at least 20 years younger than we are now… If we want to be merciful to ourselves.

Uni of the concepts of sets is that if you add two of them you get the total of their elements while if you intersect them you get only the elements in common between them.

For example, if we wanted to intercept information about Coca Cola, we would first have to understand both those who write the brand name with the two words separated from each other (Coca Cola) and those who write the name as if it were a single word (Cocacola).

To know this information, we need to ask the software to sum the two sets using logical operators, which are key words-usually capitalized-that the algorithm can recognize.

The logical operator regarding union is usually “OR,” which means “either this, or that.” We must therefore query the software with this particular formula:

“Coke” OR cocacola

What if we wanted to see who drinks Coke while eating pizza?

Then we need to intersect both conversations about the drink (with the name spelled out in both variants) and conversations about pizza.

Caution though. We don’t have to add them up, because otherwise we would get so many other conversations that we don’t need, for example related to people eating pizza in any way.

The operator in this case is usually AND, because it means “and this, and that.” Our query, called “query,” then becomes the following:

(“Coke” OR cocacola) AND (pizza)

We need the parentheses to tell the software the order in which we want it to do the different operations. In fact, we want you to first find all the words that talk about Coke/ Cocacola, and then choose only those that also talk about pizza!

One last thing: what if we want to exclude those who talk about Pepsi? At this point we should add a negative operator, a “NOT” to tell the software to avoid that specific term:

((“Coke” OR cocacola) AND (pizza)) NOT (pepsi)

This gives you an idea of how social listening software useful for monitoring your company’s reputation works.

Don’t worry if you don’t have a clear picture yet. You are most likely to be supported by the software vendor or support service during this phase.

2) It is time to review and check the data.

Once the setup is in place, the software starts collecting every piece of information you asked it for.

Here it is time to move on to the next stage: reading the results and possible moderation.

This consists of deleting irrelevant results, changing the sentiment if it has not been correctly identified by the software, and so on.

Reviewing and monitoring data is something that needs to be done on an ongoing basis (not like setup) and is the basis for immediately understanding what is going on, avoiding reputational crises as well as seizing important sales opportunities.

To whom can you assign this task? Both to customer service agents and social media managers, whose work will benefit greatly from the data mined by the software.

3) Now you can analyze the results and reports.

The analysis of results and reports needs to be carried out periodically, but less frequently than the data review and control phase. It is usually weekly, monthly or at most quarterly.

During this stage, you analyze the data overall, filtering and analyzing them from different perspectives. Also, find out the information needed by the various business figures so that they can keep an eye on the situation and make wise decisions.

Usually this analysis and reporting phase is the job of the analyst, which is whoever is in charge of collecting all the data to present to management or other business sectors.

4) Review and improvement phase.

This particular stage is a continuous process! Each time the cilenti support team reads the mentions or the analyst collects the results, they should mark potential changes to be made to the setup.

Extra words to be tracked, or words to be excluded because they soil the data, new useful topics etc.

Be careful, though: it’s not like you have to change the setup every single day!

If there is any serious error then yes, otherwise it should be done only after closing one periodic report and before working on the next, so that the graphs and data already collected are consistent and valid.

Read also: The 4 steps to using network listening software

In conclusion

Check, unearth new ideas all the time, improve and try again-these are the principles for always keeping your reputation high, preventing crises, and conducting a Web Reputation Analysis that is truly useful for your company.

As I often say: he who fossilizes is lost!

Feel free to write to us for more information regarding online reputation analysis and ways to save face. We are here to help you!