The public Google Alerts account for Viagra gives us an opportunity to see how reputation monitoring can be done in practice with AlertRank. The first step is getting an overview of how much traffic each of our alerts is receiving. This can be done by clicking the Analytics tab, and scrolling down to the summary table at the bottom of the page. We can order the results by the average number of alerts received each day by clicking the column heading for Average.
One area we want to focus on for reputation monitoring is reports of problems with the product. The search term viagra (”side effect” OR “side effects” OR recall OR reaction OR “lawsuit” OR litigation OR refund) is getting an average of 8 alerts a day. We can review these alerts by clicking this row in the summary table. By default the alerts are listed in date order, but to help us concentrate on the most influential, we can click the AlertRank column to sort the results. AlertRank is a measure of influence that combines Google PageRank with other ranking factors. The higher the value, the more influential the source.
There are a lot of alerts to review here. It might be necessary to share this data with others to get everything done, so we can save the results to a PDF report and share it by email. This is done by clicking the PDF link in the top right corner, which creates this file.
Let’s focus in on one of the sources of these alerts. The Huffington Post has a story that is extremely negative. We should learn more about the stories this source has been writing about the brand. To do this, we click the alert from the Huffington Post, and then click the Additional Source Data link in the top right corner of the page. This gives us a detail page for this source.
We have been ignoring the sentiment rating for the alerts. That’s the first column with the up and down hand icons at the top. This allows you to rate each alert as positive, negative or neutral. You can’t change this unless you are logged into the account. I’ll rate each story for this source, and then you can see what the results would look like.
Well, I wouldn’t describe this as a friendly source. 75% of the stories are downright hostile. I’ve produced a PDF report for this source, so others can review what we’ve found. Maybe some well placed ads on the site are called for.
Reputation monitoring is just the first step in using Google Alerts for brand management. In future posts I’ll look at using the public account to enhance a brand’s reputation.
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