With your brand being mentioned so many places online, it’s a difficult task to manage how it’s positioned and where it appears –in fact, in many ways, you can’t control the brand, as it’s now ‘owned’ by those who talk about it (or always has been).
Now, if your job is to be the caretaker of your company’s brand, or you’ve been hired to do so as a PR firm, you should keep on eye on how it’s positioned on Wikipedia (and follow these rules on how to update it), if you’re in the social media space, also monitor and manage Tradevibes, Crunchbase, and now Appappeal.
With the recent concerns about brandjacking, or getting your brand punk’d, this helpful tool user name check can quickly scan the popular (and not so popular social networks to find if your company’s name (or personal) has been taken. The service sometimes goes down, so be patient with it.
On a related note, Mukund suggests here’s some targets PR folks should look at when pitching social media companies, I left a comment suggesting a few others, maybe you can help him round it out. Targeting team blogs like centernetworks, or other influentials may yield a better spend on time and effort –I’m nearly tapped out in time reviewing products.
Thanks for noting CN Jeremiah. Mukund’s list is a joke – not saying the blogs on the list are bad/good/great but there’s so much more involved with who to pitch, when and why. Just picking the top 10 of tm won’t cut it. (and it wouldn’t matter if I was on the list)
Allen
Love to understand why / how you think we can improve the list. At the end of the day, I was trying to keep things simple for the entrepreneur who is trying to DIY PR. A PR professional no doubt understands all the nuances, of when to pitch, what, why.
At the end of the day however, I dont think you can call this list of folks a joke.
Based on over 30+ metrics, I have no doubt these guys will end up at the top of any good list of bloggers on social media.
Allen
It’s not a joke, but from his eyes, the folks he wants to reach. But you do have a point, each of those folks on the list has a particular interest.
For example, I’m pretty specific about what I care about:
I primarily care about companies that help interactive marketers at Fortune 5000 companies –these vendors need to be enterprise ready. I don’t care about the next garage startup till they’ve proven they can help large brands.
Mukund
Have you read this piece on PR by me? DIY PR should only be reserved for those who really know what they’re doing –and have the time and resources to do it right.
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/09/09/how-pr-can-help-some-startups-perspective-of-one-industry-analyst/
Jeremiah
Yes, I have read that piece. The thing is though, that most companies that can afford PR and as you say in your piece “have reached maturity” have been around. Most of our customers cannot afford the $10K for a PR agency.
The other set of customers we are seeing are Product Managers within large Fortune 5000 companies whose PR firms cannot give each product the same attention as the companies “brand”.
Jeremiah – have you had a look at the http://usernamecheck.com site since this post? I wonder how much referral traffic you generated! Also a good use of twitter in a crunch….feel bad though because I really wanted to check out this service. Do you think there’s any way the SocialMedia community can pitch in here? The last tweet by @usernamecheck is not encouraging. 🙁
I tried usernamecheck and got an error message that they are moving to a new/bigger site
Ken
They were having issues before I linked to them. Give it a try on off hours, or on weekend
Jeremiah – We at KMP (www.kmp.co.uk) have been using network analysis tools to monitor conversations about brands online for a while now. The staggering thing is that clients don’t believe these conversations actually go on. When you drill down into forums or Blogs and show them their brand being dissed, they are mortified. See http://blog.kmp.co.uk/daily_digital/2008/09/rekindling-the.html#more
Cheers Jon
I found http://startpr.com very usefull to monitor conversations about a brand, the email inbox metaphor makes it pretty straightforward to use, and it offers some basic collaborative features. Simple and effective.
Glad to see that you’ve mentioned TradeVibes in this post. TradeVibes is a great way to get your company noticed, as well as discover competitors!
At the same time, you need to stay on top of your vendors.
We had registered two usernames to explore lifestreaming:
http://friendfeed.com/dncbloggers and
http://friendfeed.com/fantasyfootball
We use these feeds to explore new ways of streaming information, such as http://www.dncbloggers.com
Recently Friendfeed added a ‘0’ to the end of ‘fantasyfootball’, keeping the service intact but changing the URL.
Of course, changing the URL without letting us know has ripple effects for any web services that consume or publish based on Friendfeed.
I tried contacting Friendfeed using the terms@friendfeed.com email address supplied in the Terms of Service; I received an email message back that “…The email account that you tried to reach does not exist.”
A few days ago Jeremiah tweeted about community vendors that were disconnected from their userbase. I am saddened by Friendfeed’s actions, and the inability to follow up with them.
Allen
It's not a joke, but from his eyes, the folks he wants to reach. But you do have a point, each of those folks on the list has a particular interest.
For example, I'm pretty specific about what I care about:
I primarily care about companies that help interactive marketers at Fortune 5000 companies –these vendors need to be enterprise ready. I don't care about the next garage startup till they've proven they can help large brands.