Measuring reputation

Following yesterday's post on the importance of a strong brand and trusted corporate reputation to help customers feel comfortable developing a relationship with your brand, I thought a post on measuring reputation would be helpful.

This article from the Reputation Institute (a slightly dodgy scanned pdf) looks at the dimensions of corporate reputation and describes a method for measuring the Reputation Quotient (SM) for your brand. It suggests that the main elements of brand reputation are: emotional appeal; products and services; vision and leadership; workplace environment; social and environmental responsibility; and financial performance.

It then recommends surveying the widest possible cohort to gain a balanced view of your corporate reputation across all socio-economic groups, geographies etc.

While this is demonstrably statistically sound, this is a rather static measure and will only enable you to measure your reputation at a point in time and not, for example, measure the impact of a particular product launch or news story.

This post covers the ten most useful tools to measure your online reputation. These allow you to measure the visibility and buzz about your brand in real time - although the nature of the tools skews the results towards those cohorts that are actively engaged with Web 2.0 and the internet:
1) Addict-O-Matic - instantly create a custom page with the latest buzz on any topic
2) Boardtracker - track the buzz on any keywords within popular forums
3) Google Alerts - daily or real-time alerts delivered via email for your chosen keywords
4) HowSociable? - measure your brand's visability across the main social platforms
5) Social Mention - another multi-platform visability checker, including alerts
6) Twitter Search - Twitter's only search is great for tracking real-time conversations
7) Wiki Alarm - monitors Wikipedia and notifies when pages are edited
8) Yahoo! Sideline - A desktop application that monitors Twitter in real-time for your brand/keywords (Mark: I personally use this app and highly recommend it)
 
If we have learned anything from the financial crisis, it must be that the single biggest risk to a bank is a loss of reputation - and that reputation is alive and constantly shifting.