As I am writing the third in a series of articles about online reputation management (feel free to read parts one and two), I am reminded of my constant nagging at my kids.  "You'll remember where you put your shoes/toys/baseball glove/ballet outfit if you gather and keep it all in one place."  It doesn't work well in my house, but it just might be a fit for your online reputation management program.

Just starting might seem a bit daunting at first, but you need to approach your online reputation management program by thinking that you will attempt to gather as much as you can in one place, analyze it and then take a step back for a 40,000 foot view of your issues, stakeholder opinions, and most importantly, how they mutate over time.

One size does not fit all

In my work for agencies over the years, I was (and still am) amazed that companies ask for, and agencies provide "daily clips."  This often involves some poor, lower-level schlub who gets in early, does a Factiva and Google News scan and pastes the clips into a Word document.  Once the "send" button is hit, the job is over. 

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

The only thing that a daily regurgitation of clips gives you is what happened that day in Factiva or Google News.  What's missing is context to go along with the content.  Are today's clips more negative than yesterday's?  Why?  Have stakeholder views changed over time?  Who are the new voices that we should be reaching out to and who are the people whom we will just never win over?  What new opportunities or threats have appeared, and is this different or the same from this point last year?  Reading clips in a Word document every morning is akin to slamming the barn door shut after the horse runs out.  The news is out there, if it's right or wrong or even if you get a retraction, it's forgotten. Game over, dude.

Doing it right

I cannot keep up with all of the monitoring services and feeds out there, but think about the number of online and offline outlets that have the potential to impact your issue, your brand, your organization, or your executives.  It might seem a little overwhelming in the beginning, after you have determined the voices that matter (prior article), find a way to capture what important stakeholders are saying about you - but try to do it in one place. 

My advice?  Build your monitoring program on a firm foundation, just like you would a house.   Make sure that you are gathering information from a variety of sources, not just the big print or trade pubs.  Then you can analyze and code them for tone or favorability and a picture will begin to evolve of what's happening with your issues.  At a bare minimum, your monitoring system should be filtering and then capturing - in one place - the following:

• Print pubs: you can quantify impact through circulation statistics;
  Online-only pubs - These matter too; the Drudge Report doesn't print an online edition.  If you want to quantify impact, you can use paid (like Nielsen Net Ratings) or free (like Alexa) that can give you a sense of the impact of an online source of information;
• Blogs - I firmly believe that blogs drive opinion, which drives news.  Just ask Dan Rather.  I have said it previously and it is imperfect, but the Technorati authority ranking is one of the few consistent sources out there.
• TV and radio - services like TV Eyes or ShadowTV include feeds that provide near real-time access from closed-captioning text.
  

Adding in other elements that matter

I am sure that there are a lot of search, .rss or .xml feeds out there that I am missing, social media outlets are about connecting people and exchanging opinions, so the key is having a monitoring foundation/platform that can incorporate feeds from another service, but present it all in one place.  Examples include:

• Message boards - BoardReader is a quick and easy way to get to the posting you want to read without having to scroll or search for forever
• TweetScan - find out who is tweeting about your issues.
• Attack Web sites - believe it or not, most of the "big" services do not allow users to add little sites that might be little in Google, but are big to their issues.  Ask United Airlines.

The bottom line

You will never, ever, capture every bit of information that is important to you or your organization, so enter into a monitoring and an online reputation management exercise with that philosophy.  But taking holistic approach to including multiple sources of information in your monitoring program will enable you to see the "big picture" and track how your issues change over time.

Knowing where you are and where you have been tees up Part #4 of the Online Reputation Management series:  determining what to do, or if you should react, when something goes "bump" on the 'net.

Mark Story is a part-time, adjunct professor at Georgetown University and a full-time communications professional at a government agency in Washington, D.C. Prior to the government, Mark worked for 11 years in some of the largest online public relations shops in the world.