12 December 2008 4 Comments
This review on Trackur will be a little different than others out there. Mostly because those have done a good job, and there’s no sense in duplicating that stuff.
I did approach the idea for this post in order to review Trackur, but found that I liked it a lot right off. Instead, I’ll briefly go over a quick setup, then discuss a few reasons why you would want to use it.
What Is Trackur?
Taken directly from their site:
“Trackur is an online reputation monitoring tool designed to assist you in tracking what is said about you on the internet. Trackur scans hundreds of millions of web pages–including news, blogs, video, images, and forums–and lets you know if it discovers anything that matches the keywords that interest you.”
Basically, Trackur will scan the Interwebs to find any mentions of the keywords you select. This way, you won’t have to rely on Google alerts or basic searching on your own time.
Setup
Once you sign up for your free trial of Trackur, you will be presented a simple form where you will input a keyword, filters, excluded words and excluded domains.
Look, there are much better walkthroughs than what I could provide. I will link to the areas of Trackur’s site at the end of this post, along with some other reviews.
So, let’s look at a quick real-world use.
I’m Wal-Mart. I know that there are a ton of stories out there about the way I treat my employees and suppliers. This negative perception of my business is starting to get a lot of attention, and as a smart company I want to take action to help clear it up.
I’ll look for mentions of my name, and include some filters to look for some related words. I’ll also exclude mentions of these words and names from within my own domain. Like so:
We will be presented a number of results that match my search criteria:
By clicking on one of these results, I can get a snippet of the story, see the date that it was posted and view the original story as needed (this is important, so remember that).
So, let’s say I see a ton of stories relating to a topic that I’ve already taken care of. In this hypothetical case, I see the $54+ million settlement story all over the place (remember this too).
I took care of that and I don’t want to see those stories right now. Also, there are some mentions of positive information that I’m not concerned with on this go-around. Let us now make use of some of the exclusion words.
Running this again, I am now left with just a few negative mentions that I will want to take care of.
Now, let’s save this run so that we can keep up and track trends related to this search.
I named this ‘Personal/Personnel’ because I want to watch any personal blogs/stories out there about personnel (catchy).
Very Interesting Update:
So, along with setting up the saved tracking, you can also setup alerts via email or RSS. Obviously Andy Beal (creator of Trackur) would keep tabs on one of his own products. He notified me via Twitter that he got the alert. It was seriously within 30 minutes of posting this. How’s that for real-time monitoring?
Ok, so that is a quick and dirty setup. You can get a lot more involved and really get some good information about your company or brand and manage your online reputation. Now, let’s talk about some reasons someone like Wal-Mart would want to use this tool.
The Why
Let’s imagine for just a moment that I was really involved in managing my reputation. The example above returned several complaints about employees for my stores using their phones and texting while ringing my customers up.
This was mentioned too many times. Perhaps I would want to initiate a company wide policy that cell phones are prohibited from certain areas or that certain uses would be grounds for disciplinary action (no…not Wal-Mart).
On a grander scale, do you remember all those posts and stories about the $54 million settlement? Of course you do, I asked you to remember. It’s safe to say that those stories give the option for their visitors to leave comments. Those are going to be pretty bad. That’s OK.
Get with legal, tell them to draft a response. Then get with someone with a brain, and tell them to make the response caring and friendly. You can quickly access a ton of those stories through Trackur and leave a nice comment to set things at ease. You may be surprised the impact a simple official response can have on your reputation. It let’s people know that you are at least listening.
Finally, there are still a ton of people that see my company as the “nice, saving you money” kind of place. I would like to keep it that way. A big reason they see this is due to the millions of dollars I put into branding in the form of a simple smiley face. I need to protect that little face thingy.
With this search alone, I would have seen a ton of uses of that face that are very obviously in violation of the law. Some of them I’m not so sure about, but I should at least take a look at it. Actually, instead of looking at it that way, I should probably take part in the making fun of myself. This would help to restore that “hey, we are cool people just like you” perception my company used to have.
So there you have it. I set this up and ran a report in just under 10 minutes. Give me a few hours and just a bit of time every week, and I could really get a detailed look at mentions of my name, brand and reputation online.
Resources
You won’t find any better resources than those available on the Trackur website. Videos and turorials galore:
There are also several reviews online that all say the same thing, mostly. Get Trackur. I can’t wait to really get into it. As a matter of fact, I’m discussing it’s use for all of my clients to enhance the value I give them.
Oh and a disclaimer: I mentioned previously that I was going to gradually monetize this site. I have strong opinions about blindly taking money for reviews, so I won’t do that. Instead, I’ll review things and if I like it enough to warrant a promotion, I’ll do that. If they have an affiliate, I’ll put some links in that manner in there. Warning though, if I don’t like your stuff, not only will I say so, but any links will be nofollowed; so don’t email me with junk….or else.