Monitor Your Reputational Risk Using Blogs

Monitor Your Reputational Risk Using Blogs In every sphere of life – whether it be in business, politics, religion or entertainment –there are influencers. Influencers are people whose opinion holds sway over a large group of followers. How is this important in monitoring your small businesses online reputational risk? It’s important to find out which online bloggers have followers in your target market or your local area, and monitor your reputational risk by monitoring what they are saying about your local business, your competitors or your industry as a whole. If you don’t think bloggers are important, just remember that their glowing review about your local business can literally catapult your business growth while a damning blog post can destroy many years of hard work you have invested in establishing community trust. But, how do you monitor what bloggers are saying? Keep your reputational risk in check by following these reputational risk methods… Monitor Reputational Risk Method #1 - Use Blog Search Engines These are search engines that get results just from blogs or search engines within blogs that aggregate content. Reputational risk blog examples include: • Blogsearch.Google.com – this gives better blog search results than Google Alerts • Bloggdigger – this site has a new “find bloggers in your location” feature • Technorati • keotag.com • Blogpulse.com • Icerocket.com Many of these sites have toolbars that you can upload for ease of use. Monitor Reputational Risk Method #2 - Subscribe To The Blog If you know about a particular blog related to your industry or local city/town area that regularly gives opinions about small businesses such as yours, one way to monitor their content is to become a follower. You can monitor your reputational risk in a number of ways: • Subscribe to their RSS feed. • Follow them on Twitter • Become their fan on Facebook • Subscribe to their YouTube Channel Monitor Reputational Risk Method #3 - Find Blogs Using Search Operators When working to keep reputational risk to a minimum, if you don’t know how to find relevant blogs, you can use search operators in your search engine. Search operators are mathematical functions that help filter your search results much better. For example, if you own a restaurant in Charlotte, NC and want to find all blogs that discuss Charlotte, NC, then you can type the following search operator into Google: inurl:blog “Charlotte nc”. Or if you want to find all blogs that talk about anything related to Italian restaurants, you can use this search operator: inurl:blog “Italian restaurant*” This will find all blogs containing Italian restaurants as the base word, such as Italian restaurant reviews, Italian restaurants in New York, etc. Monitor Reputational Risk Method #4 – Alerts You can also automate the reputational risk process by creating a Google Alert and selecting blogs as the alert source. All these reputational risk discovery methods will give you instant notification about new blog posts, tweets, status updates and videos. Of course, don’t use your business name or personal name when doing this. Instead use a simple alias name to maintain your privacy. Keep your reputational risk factors in check by knowing what is being said about your company!