10 Online reputation tools worth exploring

ORM and social CRM have become social media buzzwords. They’ve started doing the rounds in boardrooms. Given their proliferation, I decided to look at a few free and paid online reputation management tools that are being used by major global brands.

BrandsEye
Award-winning South African ORM software, BrandsEye currently services about 26 countries. BrandsEye started as a simple ORM tool that has now expanded to include reporting, conversation tracking, automated escalation, reputation scores and data segmentation amongst other in-depth searches. The Brandseye blog also serves as a source of up-to-date local trends, tech updates, articles and insights into the South African social web.

Pricing plans start from US$150 per month for the Lite option and go all the way up to US$2000 per month for the platinum plan. Try out the 2-week trial here.

Radian6
Radian6 (now owned by Salesforce) is the ultimate social “listening post” and engagement tool. The web-based ORM tool allows users to monitor, engage, source leads, analyse brand mentions, manage teams and so much more — all in real time. It covers the social web quite comprehensively, using blogs, RSS feeds, multimedia sites, major social media platforms and news sites. For the workaholic, the company recently released Radian6 Mobile — its new Apple iPhone app, so you can keep working after you’ve left the office.

All this information at one go can be quite daunting for the first time user, it takes some training to make the most of Radian6, but you pay for the sheer volume of information you get to analyse. Pricing is tiered, meaning there are no set packages, you will have to pay by the volume of results and keywords you track. According to its pricing page you can “Monitor up to 10 000 monthly mentions for as little as US$600 a month.” Luckily the company offers a free trial.

Klout
“The standard of influence” — Klout is a free web-based online reputation management tool that is best suited to individuals. Klout analyses your influence and reach within your online social group using profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Blogger, Tumblr, Flickr, Last.fm and Instagram. Klout provides interesting insights into your social network, your “True Reach”: The number of people you influence, and your “Amplification”: How much you influence people by your posts.

On the social side, Klout introduced +K — a way to give points to users who have influenced others on a specific topic.

Social Mention
Social Mention is actually a free real time social media search engine that searches over a hundred networks including Google, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube and Digg. You can track brand sentiment, top users, keywords and popular hashtags on Twitter and export the data easily — making it a worthwhile free resource for creating your own graphs in reports.

Mentions are sorted into four categories: Strength, sentiment, passion and reach. You can search for results going back one month, view results by date or source and refine your search by location, language, source and whole phrases.

saidWot
saidWot launched in 2007 and is another South African reputation management tool. The company has recently expanded into North America. Like most ORM tools, it monitors social bookmarking sites, networks, forums, blogs and news portals. The company also offers a range of ORM and social media classes.

Although saidWot has launched its third version of the ORM tool, the website states that it tracks social bookmarking sites such as Mixx (which has been down since January 2011 after being acquired by UberMedia), Delicious and Digg — a bit limited if you consider all the online chatter happening on Tumblr and Reddit. I was disappointed to see that LinkedIn doesn’t feature on the list of social networks that saidWot tracks.

The standard monthly licencing fee for two user logins starts at US$921 per account and includes unlimited keywords and mentions, as well as a competitor account. Other packages are available and will be customised to the requirements of the brand. You can also choose the smaller saidWot compact package for US$567 per month, full rate card here. You can request a free saidWot demo here.

Other online reputation management tools worthy of exploring:

Samepoint

Lithium

Attentio

Brandwatch

Webtrends